Open Source Days 2025

In recent years, more and more workloads in the VFX industry started utilizing both CPUs and GPUs or moved entirely to the GPU. Porting CPU code to run efficiently on GPUs of different vendors usually requires writing and supporting multiple backends, where each one is written using vendor-specific and proprietary languages, like CUDA, HIP, or Metal.
SYCL is an open standard initiated by the Khronos group that Intel uses to write cross-vendor GPU code that can run on Intel and on Nvidia or AMD GPUs.
In this talk, we will briefly overview SYCL, its current state, and how it is used to write efficient single-code base and cross-vendor GPU solutions. To demonstrate the usefulness of SYCL in the VFX environment, we present the results of a case study based on Blender’s Cycles renderer and its integrated oneAPI SYCL backend. Our benchmarks show that using the oneAPI SYCL backend on Nvidia or AMD GPUs reaches 96% of the performance of the native CUDA and 84% of the native HIP backend.