Intel Lands More Open-Source Vulkan Driver Changes For Ray-Tracing

[smitty3268]

Nothing is being crippled unless you deny support. If people want to try and run it, let them. You might well be surprised that a blanket statement like that is incorrect.

You might as well ask for them to implement 128 bit int and fp support and native support for x86 instructions.

It'd be pointless because no one would use it, you'd have just wasted a bunch of time and money, and probably added a bunch of new bugs into your driver. But hey! You could mark off that marketing checkbox.

And for the crazy people who really want to do raytracing on an Intel chip, they can just do it the old-fashioned way, by implementing a compute shader. Which is the exact same thing the driver team would be doing for them anyway.

[Developer12]

Allowing people to cripple their performance is pointless. Please keep in mind exactly what kind of hardware you are asking them to implement software fallbacks on - this hardware can't run the games which have added raytracing even without the raytracing turned on.

Nothing is being crippled unless you deny support. If people want to try and run it, let them. You might well be surprised that a blanket statement like that is incorrect.

[smitty3268]

Perhaps, but in other drivers we've seen it implemented as a compute shader or similar. Yes, you can have hardware that is specifically tuned for a particular computation, but in the end it's just math. In some cases it's worked just fine stringing other operations together that the hardware already supported.

Allowing people to cripple their performance is pointless. Please keep in mind exactly what kind of hardware you are asking them to implement software fallbacks on - this hardware can't run the games which have added raytracing even without the raytracing turned on.

[Developer12]

The op was specifically discussing already released hardware. The Xe gpus which implement hardware ray tracing haven't been released yet, on either desktop, laptop, or the igpu side.

Perhaps, but in other drivers we've seen it implemented as a compute shader or similar. Yes, you can have hardware that is specifically tuned for a particular computation, but in the end it's just math. In some cases it's worked just fine stringing other operations together that the hardware already supported.

[Developer12]

the igpu rendering ray tracing? I doubt

I'm talking in ANY driver-supported igpu. If the hardware can physically do the math, I don't see a problem with implementing it. Let the user decide if the framerate is high enough.

[smitty3268]

Possible if Intel re-used the discrete Xe IP core in their iGPU.
(However I highly doubt it since iirc discrete Xe manufacturing has been outsourced to TSMC)

The op was specifically discussing already released hardware. The Xe gpus which implement hardware ray tracing haven't been released yet, on either desktop, laptop, or the igpu side.

[zxy_thf]

the igpu rendering ray tracing? I doubt

Possible if Intel re-used the discrete Xe IP core in their iGPU.
(However I highly doubt it since iirc discrete Xe manufacturing has been outsourced to TSMC)

[andre30correia]

Seemingly absent from this article is whether the changes apply to existing intel GPUs.

Are the existing integrated graphics less performant? Yes, but that is irrelevant to the question of API compatibility. If the hardware can render it, let it render it.

the igpu rendering ray tracing? I doubt

[stormcrow]

The current Intel hardware can't render it. I thought that was common knowledge.

Well, it can... but you may be waiting a long time for each frame! CPU rendering! Ouch!

[smitty3268]

Seemingly absent from this article is whether the changes apply to existing intel GPUs.

Are the existing integrated graphics less performant? Yes, but that is irrelevant to the question of API compatibility. If the hardware can render it, let it render it.

The current Intel hardware can't render it. I thought that was common knowledge.