Intel's Open Image Denoise is the open-source project providing a high performance denoising library for ray-tracing and used by the likes of Blender and other renderers/creative apps for powerful denoising capabilities. Released last week was Open Image Denoise 2.5 with some very nice performance improvements for Intel GPUs.

Open Image Denoise 2.5 delivers better performance and with lower memory usage for Intel Arc graphics with XMX support as well as for Intel CPUs with AMX-FP16 support. Open Image Denoise previously showed off its powerful speed-up leveraging AMX with AMX-BF16 while now there are new optimizations for AMX-FP16 and Intel GPUs with XMX.

Curious about the better performance of Open Image Denoise 2.5 for Intel Arc Graphics, I ran some benchmarks using an Intel Arc Pro B70 BMG-G31 GPU of the new release compared to the older.

The same hardware and software used besides swapping out the Open Image Denoise version:

Indeed some very nice and hearty speed-ups for the Intel Battlemage graphics on the new Open Image Denoiser release, which is good news for Blender users and others relying on the OIDn library.

On the desktop CPU side with Arrow Lake Refresh (Core Ultra 7 270K Plus), no change in performance was observed.

Those wishing to learn more about this useful Intel open-source project for denoising can visit OpenImageDenoise.org.