Assumptions that Intel may implement hardware accelerated ray tracing support in its future Intel X family GPUse, appeared a long time ago. The company then confirmed them, but only for the GPU for data centers. Now, clear evidence of support for ray tracing in Intel’s consumer GPUs is found in the drivers.
Network source with an alias _rogame I found in the code of certain drivers for Intel GPUs mentioning structures such as Ray Trace HW Accelerator, DXR_RAYTRACING_INSTANCE_DESC and D3D12_RAYTRACING_GEOMETRY_FLAGS. These three structures indicate that hardware-accelerated ray tracing can actually be implemented in future Intel GPUs. And probably this concerns not only GPU accelerators for data centers.
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Where exactly these “references” to ray tracing were found, the source does not specify. But it looks like they were found in the code of the X software development toole (SDV), which Intel has already begun distributing to various third-party software vendors around the world. Considering that more developers will receive SDV in the coming months, new details can be found in it both about ray tracing and about other features of future Intel GPUs.
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It is also worth noting that Intel already has some experience in ray tracing. Back in 2009, at its own forum for developers, Intel demonstrated tracing using a video card created as part of the ill-fated project Larrabee. It is possible that some old developments will be transferred to the GPU Xe.
Recall that in the consumer segment, GPUs Xe will be divided into two categories: Xe-LP with performance not higher than average and Xe-HP with high performance. It is highly likely that they will receive support for hardware acceleration of ray tracing chips of category Xe-HP.
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