Intel Xe graphics accelerators will support hardware radius tracking

At the FMX 2019 graphics conference on animation, effects, games and digital media currently taking place in Stuttgart, Germany, Intel made an extremely interesting announcement about the future graphics accelerators of the X family.^and. As announced by Jim Jeffers, chief engineer and chief of Intel Visualization and Rendering Enhancement team, Intel graphics solutions will deploy hardware support to accelerate lightning tracking. And while the announcement is primarily about data center calculator accelerators, not consumer models of future GPUs, there is no doubt that hardware support for ray tracing will also appear on Intel's graphics cards, since all of them will be based on a single one. architecture.

In March of this year, chief graphic architect David Blythe promised that Intel X^and will be able to strengthen the company's offerings for data centers by accelerating a wide range of operations including scalar, vector, matrix, and tensor operations that may be required for multiple computing tasks as well as calculations related to artificial intelligence. Now for the list of what Intel X graphics architecture will be able to^and, plus an important skill is added – hardware acceleration of ray tracing.

"I am pleased to announce today that the long-term plan for developing the rendering capabilities of the Intel X architecture^and for data centers includes support for hardware acceleration of lightning tracing through the API and the library of the Intel Rendering Framework"- Jim Jeffers wrote on a corporate blog. Adding such functionality to future accelerators will allow for a more integrated computing and software environment as the need for physically correct rendering is continuously increasing not only in visualization tasks but also in mathematical modeling.

It should be noted that the support announcement for hardware radius tracking is only of a high level nature. That is, at the moment we have learned that Intel will definitely introduce this technology, but there is no specific information on how and when it will reach the company GPU. In addition, we are talking only of computing accelerators based on the Intel X architecture.^and. And this approach is totally justified, since professionals may be interested in rapid ray tracing by no less than gamers. However, given the scalability of the Intel X architecture^and and the promised unification of deployments for different target markets, it stands to reason that ray tracing support sooner or later will become an opportunity, including promising Intel graphics games.