Embree v2.3.1

• High quality BVH mode improves spatial splits which result in up to 30% performance improvement for some scenes (Xeon).
• Compile time enabled intersection filter functions do not reduce performance if no intersection filter is used in the scene (Xeon and Xeon Phi)
• Improved ray tracing performance for hair geometry by >20% on Xeon Phi. BVH for hair geometry requires 20% less memory
• BVH8 for AVX/AVX2 targets improves performance for single ray tracing on Haswell by up to 12% and by up to 5% for hybrid (Xeon)
• Memory conservative BVH for Xeon Phi now uses BVH node quantization to lower memory footprint (requires half the memory footprint of the default BVH)

Embree v2.3.0

• Support for ray tracing hair geometry (Xeon and Xeon Phi)
• Catching errors through error callback function
• Faster hybrid traversal (Xeon and Xeon Phi)
• New memory conservative BVH for Xeon Phi
• Faster Morton code-based builder on Xeon
• Faster binned-SAH builder on Xeon Phi
• Lots of code cleanups/simplifications/improvements (Xeon and Xeon Phi)

Embree v2.2.0

• Support for motion blur on Xeon Phi
• Support for intersection filter callback functions
• Support for buffer sharing with the application
• Lots of AVX2 optimizations, e.g. ~20% faster 8-wide hybrid traversal
• Experimental support for 8-wide (AVX/AVX2) and 16-wide BVHs (Xeon Phi)

Embree v2.1.0

• New future proof API with a strong focus on supporting dynamic scenes
• Lots of optimizations for 8-wide AVX2 (Haswell architecture)
• Automatic runtime code selection for SSE, AVX, and AVX2
• Support for user-defined geometry
• New and improved BVH builders:
  • Fast adaptive Morton code-based builder (without SAH-based top-level rebuild)
  • Both the SAH and Morton code-based builders got faster (Xeon Phi)
  • New variant of the SAH-based builder using triangle pre-splits (Xeon Phi)

Embree v2.0.0

• Support for the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor platform
• Support for high-performance “packet” kernels on SSE, AVX, and Xeon Phi
• Integration with the Intel® SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC)
• Instantiation and fast BVH reconstruction
• Example photo-realistic rendering engine for both C++ and ISPC

Embree v1.1.0

bugfix in rcp function of affinespace, there was a problem when insta…

…ntiated with quaternions