Speculation that Intel may implement support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing in its future Intel Xe family of GPUs has been around for a long time. The company then confirmed them, but only for data center GPUs. Now, clear evidence of support for ray tracing in consumer GPUs from Intel has been found in the drivers.
Aliased network source I found in the code of some drivers for Intel GPUs references to structures such as Ray Trace HW Accelerator, DXR_RAYTRACING_INSTANCE_DESC and D3D12_RAYTRACING_GEOMETRY_FLAGS. These three structures indicate that future Intel GPUs may indeed have hardware accelerated ray tracing capability. And probably, this applies not only to GPU accelerators for data centers.
Where exactly these "references" to ray tracing were found, the source does not specify. But they appear to have been found in the code of the Xe Software Development Tool (SDV), which Intel has already begun distributing to various ISVs around the world. With SDV getting more and more developers in the coming months, it may reveal new details about both ray tracing and other features of future Intel GPUs.
It is also worth noting that Intel already has some experience in the field of ray tracing. Back in 2009, on its own developer forum, Intel demonstrated tracing using a video card created as part of the ill-fated project . It is possible that some old developments will be transferred to Xe GPUs.
Recall that in the consumer segment, Xe GPUs will be divided into two categories: Xe-LP with no higher than average performance and Xe-HP with high performance. It is very likely that Xe-HP category chips will receive support for hardware accelerated ray tracing.
Source: 3dnews.ru