Intel Xe Graphics Cards Will Support Hardware Ray Tracing

Intel Xe Will Have Ray Tracing Hardware

Although we are not expecting any consumer level releases from Intel’s upcoming graphics card releases this year, their data centre specific ‘Xe’ model might pop-up every now and then in the news mill.

While specific details of what Intel plans to release are not yet known, a rather specific feature of the GPU has just been revealed. In a report via DSOGaming, Intel has issued a statement confirming that the Xe will have hardware dedicated ray tracing capabilities.

More Than Meets The Eye

In a formal statement, Intel’s Jim Jeffers has said:

“We are designing the Intel Xe architecture as a cohesive acceleration companion to our continuing roadmap of Intel Xeon processors. We will look forward to sharing more details on the Intel Xe architecture in the months ahead. 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.”

What Does This Mean?

Well, two major factors can be drawn from this confirmation. Firstly, that the Xe GPU will have hardware dedicated to producing ray tracing graphics. In other words, it will not utilise software such as DXR to ‘fake it’. A factor which we can likely expect from AMD’s NaVi range.

There is, however, a much larger implication of this. Namely, that if their early model includes it as a hardware component, then their upcoming consumer level graphics card releases will also likely share this technology.

We are certainly not expecting any consumer level graphic card releases before (late) 2020. This may, however, be a very interesting window into what we can expect from them in the future!

What do you think? Are you looking forward to seeing another GPU manufacturer in the market? – Let us know in the comments!