At the FMX 2019 graphics conference taking place these days in Stuttgart, Germany, dedicated to animation, effects, games and digital media, Intel made an extremely interesting announcement regarding future graphics accelerators of the Xe family. Intel graphics solutions will include hardware support for ray tracing acceleration, announced Jim Jeffers, chief engineer and leader of Intel's Rendering and Visualization Enhancement team. And although the announcement primarily refers to computing accelerators for data centers, and not consumer models of future GPUs, there is no doubt that hardware support for ray tracing will also appear in Intel gaming video cards, since they will all be based on a single architecture.
Back in March of this year, chief graphics architect David Blythe promised that Intel Xe would strengthen the company's data center offerings by accelerating a wide range of operations, including scalar, vector, matrix and tensor operations, which could be in demand both in a variety of computing tasks and for calculations related to artificial intelligence. Now, another important skill is being added to the list of what the Intel Xe graphics architecture will be capable of: hardware acceleration of ray tracing.
βI am pleased to announce today that the Intel Xe architecture's roadmap for data center rendering capabilities includes support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing through the Intel Rendering Framework API and libraries,β Jim Jeffers on the corporate blog. According to him, adding such functionality in future accelerators will create a more holistic computing and software environment, since the need for physically correct rendering is continuously growing not only in visualization tasks, but also in mathematical modeling.
It is worth noting that the announcement of support for hardware ray tracing is still only of a high-level nature. That is, at the moment we have learned that Intel will definitely implement this technology, but there is no specific information about how and when it will come to the companyβs GPUs. In addition, we are talking only about computing accelerators based on the Intel Xe architecture. And this approach is quite justified, since professionals may be as interested in fast ray tracing as gamers. However, given the declared scalability of the Intel Xe architecture and the promised unification of implementations for different target markets, it is logical to expect that support for ray tracing will sooner or later become an option for future Intel gaming video cards.
Source: 3dnews.ru