Intel’s Xe graphics cards will have baked-in support for ray tracing

#1

So - Nvidia’s domination ends!!! :

https://www.techradar.com/news/intels-xe-graphics-cards-will-have-baked-in-support-for-ray-tracing

#2

AMD too said that the next gen (post Navi) hardware will support hardware raytracing. Basically meaning there will be dedicated hardware to speed up the common raytracing tasks such as BVH etc…

So yeah, all three will apparently support it which I personally like as to me it is definitely a step in the direct direction. The problem is, will Intel rely on OpenCL as does AMD?

If so… What do the developers do then? Still develop with CUDA in mind and just ignore 2/3 of the competition?

The biggest downside for GPU rendering to me in the future is trying to keep things open and letting in the competition. Sort of what the x86 licensing is doing for the CPU world.

Tricky :slight_smile:

#4

Raytracing hardware is not expensive to implement.

Nvidia tried to screw consumers by screaming “we did it first” and then overpricing the GPUs massively.

So there is room for Intel, AMD and others.

We may even see dedicated raytrace accelerator boards again - not a GPU, just a board with lots of raytracing cores.