Intel Xe data center GPUs get hardware ray tracing support

Intel will provide hardware support for ray tracing to its upcoming Xe data center graphics cards. Whether the same will happen with Xe consumer video cards is not yet known.

Intel briefly mentions hardware support for ray tracing in a blog about open source software within the Intel Rendering Framework. Intel specifically talks about functionality that can be used with its rendering software, but it is obvious that the hardware support can also be used for games, like Nvidia does with its RTX video cards.

The blog doesn’t mention anything about consumer graphics cards, but Intel is known to be working on that, and if the Xe architecture has hardware support for ray tracing, it seems likely that it will come to gamer graphics as well. Intel could release different versions, with and without hardware ray tracing support. Nvidia does the same with its Turing video cards.

Sony recently announced that the Navi GPU in the PlayStation 5 also supports ray tracing. It is not yet known whether this concerns hardware support. AMD will release video cards based on the Navi GPU in the third quarter of this year. In any case, they will be cheaper than the Radeon VII and therefore also cheaper than the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti.

Intel Xe GPUs will in any case be used in an American supercomputer, which should be delivered in 2021. Intel already wants to release a video card for consumers, which should happen in 2020. In late 2017, Intel hired Raja Koduri, who left AMD that year. The former CEO of the Radeon department is in charge of the GPU division at Intel.