Intel Wants To Bring Path Tracing To Affordable GPUs & Even iGPUs With Real-Time Neural Rendering

Intel has disclosed its plans to bring Path Tracing to everyone and all kinds of GPUs with real-time neural rendering.

According to 80.lv, Intel has been publishing various research papers that talk about real-time neural rendering and its benefits to ray tracing, shading, & sampling. The company believes in bringing neural rendering across its GPU lineup to enable faster and more efficient ray tracing without having to rely on a powerful gaming PC.

Intel is working on several neural tools that can enable real-time path tracing with 70% - 90% of the compression of native path tracing renderers. While doing so, the neural rendering technique can also offer better performance. This was discussed by Intel in the "Path Tracing a Trillion Triangles" session.

"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."

Intel via 80.lv

In the demonstration provided by Intel, the company showcased that these "Efficient" algorithms such as Neural Rendering can enable Path Tracing on lower-powered & more budget-aimed GPUs. Currently, a game such as Cyberpunk 2077 which is the only one to offer real path-traced visuals, requires at least a GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 to run at 4K. For anything lower than that, you have to utilize DLSS algorithms which can in some instances, compromise the visual fidelity of the native image. Intel says that its approach can not only enable real-time Path Tracing on Arc GPUs (budget-aimed) but also integrated GPUs (iGPUs).

The company also talks about making its real-time neural rendering cross-vendor framework open-source which will be great for developers and 3rd party vendors to utilize for their own hardware. It is known that Intel has been very open with its tech approach with the likes of XeSS supported on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware. Meanwhile, NVIDIA is also working to add more Neural rendering technologies within its hardware such as the recently announced Neural Compression tech and the Neural Radiance Caching which was unveiled two years ago at Siggraph 2021.

The company sits right next to NVIDIA in terms of upscaling visual fidelity since they are also relying on AI engines known as XMX which allow for AI-based upscaling which puts it right on par with NVIDIA's DLSS. Intel's ray tracing capabilities are also slightly ahead of NVIDIA's Ampere chips and the company was the first to offer AV1 support on its hardware.

So in a sense, Intel is really making their GPUs future-proof and the recent price cuts on Arc GPUs have made them a stellar deal versus the new launches such as the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060. We can expect Intel to utilize its new neural rendering and real-time path tracing approaches on the future Battlemage GPUs and Xe-LPG iGPUs which will be shipping in Meteor Lake chips later this year.