Intel has shared a blog post by Jim Jeffers, Sr. Principal Engineer and Sr. Director of Intel’s Advanced Rendering and Visualization team, to coincide with this week’s FMX graphics trade show in Germany that its upcoming Xe graphics architecture will be supporting hardware-based ray tracing acceleration.
The company noted:
“The Intel Xe architecture roadmap for data center optimized rendering includes ray tracing hardware acceleration support for the Intel Rendering Framework family of API’s and libraries.”
Intel seems to be improving its Hydra OSPray plugin integration with major partners like Disney Animation and Pixar and to make further open source code additions to the Intel Open Volume Kernel Library. Jim also shares some details on how Intel’s upcoming Xe graphics architecture will support ray tracing, at least in its data center configuration.
Jeffers’ post reads as:
“We are designing the Intel Xe architecture as a cohesive acceleration companion to our continuing roadmap of Intel Xeon processors… I’m pleased to share today that the Intel Xe architecture roadmap for data center optimized rendering includes ray tracing hardware acceleration support for the Intel Rendering Framework family of API’s and libraries.”
“Your existing investments in graphics and rendering solutions based on Intel Rendering Framework open source products will seamlessly map to the exponential performance benefits of these flexible accelerated platforms. Further, ray tracing as a general computational technique for a variety of simulation computation beyond rendering is rapidly growing. To put it succinctly in my own words ‘Leave no transistor behind’ by creating a holistic software and compute environment ready to maximize your workflow for exponential benefits.”
However, we will have to wait and see, as Intel’s new GPUs are expected to come out in 2020 and it might not be too long before we hear more on exactly how far the chip giant plans to go with ray tracing support.