While NVIDIA may currently hold the crown of being the first to give its GPU customers access to the next-level ray-tracing technology that is path-tracing, it is still a piece of technology that poses challenges to its GPUs. For Intel, the company could be looking into the opposite direction of its development for the technology: making it less labour-intensive in its processing.
This was laid out in newly presented research papers titled “Intel’s Latest Research for Graphics and Generative AI”. the publication comprises a total of seven papers, with some of them referencing Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS), which is the chipmaker’s AI upscaling technology that was introduced with the launch of its ARC series. Specifically, two of those papers talk about a novel and “efficient” method to compute the reflection of a GGX microfacet surface, as well as a faster and more stable method to render glinty surfaces.
“Across the process of path tracing, the research presented in these papers demonstrates improvements in efficiency in path tracing’s main building blocks, namely ray tracing, shading, and sampling. These are important components to make photorealistic rendering with path tracing available on more affordable GPUs, such as Intel Arc GPUs, and a step toward real-time performance on integrated GPUs.”
For the uninitiated, ray tracing is a visual technology that is primarily used and promoted by the major GPU brands NVIDIA and AMD. It was created to simulate the realistic behaviour and characteristics of light, whenever it comes into contact with different surfaces and environments, thus creating more accurate reflections, refractions, and different depths of shadows. Again, while this may enhance the overall environment within a game, it still requires a substantially powerful GPU to render those frames and calculate all those complex computations. Path tracing, then, is the next step after ray tracing, adding an even higher level of detail and realism, and you can actually see it in action in games such as CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077.
