Next year, Intel will bring its discrete GPUs to the market and the company has confirmed Ray Tracing hardware in real time for its Xe GPU architecture.
At the moment, Nvidia RTX GPUs are the only GPUs on the market capable of processing Ray Tracing in video games using their RT cores. However, Intel will not compete with Nvidia with the help of its Xe GPU architecture in the gaming sector.
I am pleased to share today that the Intel® Xe architecture roadmap for optimized data center representation includes lightning path hardware acceleration support for the Intel® family of API and library frameworks.
Instead, Intel will compete with the likes of Nvidia Quadro and Tesla GPUs. That is, Intel is targeting the high-performance computing market that includes data centers, artificial intelligence and more.
As for the games, Intel has not revealed any plans to launch GPUs aimed at players, but if it does, I hope that Intel GPUs support Ray Tracing in real time.
Speaking of Ray Tracing, this feature will not remain exclusive for PCs, since Sony has confirmed the PlayStation 5 specifications.
According to Sony, the next PlayStation 5 features a Navi GPU capable of representing the real-time ray tracing. This means that the latest generation videogames will make a great leap in lighting and realistic visual effects.
As for the rest of the specifications, the next-generation PS5 features a custom AMD chip based on 7 nm Zen 2 microarchitecture with 8 physical cores. There is a possibility that Xbox APU is also the same and that it also supports Ray Tracing in real time.
As I mentioned earlier, the Nvidia RTX 20 series GPUs are the only GPUs on the market capable of rendering Ray Tracing. Technically that is not entirely true.
Last month, Nvidia released the driver update that brought Ray Tracing support in real time for the Nvidia GTX 10 and GTX 16 series GPUs. You need at least GTX 1060 to play with Ray Tracing enabled.
However, having this function enabled for the GTX 10 and 16 series GPUs is not worth it since these GPUs are not able to play an acceptable FPS with Ray Tracing. Even GTX 1080 Ti cannot play at more than 20 FPS with Ray Tracing enabled.
The reason why these GPUs cannot do so is that Nvidia RTX GPUs have dedicated RT cores to render ray tracing, while GTX 10 and 16 series GPUs do so at the software level.
Also, if you are experiencing high CPU usage with Nvidia Container, Nvidia has released the Hotfix Driver 430.53 that corrects the high CPU usage.
Source: Intel
The Intel publication confirms real-time ray tracing for its Xe GPU architecture first appeared on SegmentNext.
