Raja’s New Project, Intel’s Graphics Research Organization

Path Tracing And Xe Super Sampling

Intel announced the creation of a Graphics Research Organization within the company’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, headed by Raja Koduri.  The new GRO will focus on improving graphical quality through a variety of means, including incorporating machine learning in the development process.  The first product we will see is the Xe Super Sampling which Xe desktop cards will support, Intel’s take on image upscaling and in the future they are looking to leverage it to improve the quality of graphics generated in 3D spaces.  If you have seen anything from the metaverse, you know that is badly needed.

They are also looking to steal a march on NVIDIA by developing their own take on path tracing.  Path tracing is a way to improve the look of ray tracing, not the reason your NPCs get stuck on walls when playing an RPG.  An example of path tracing can be found in MINECRAFT RTX and in the recent Quake 2 Vulkan Path Tracing update.  It starts with a ray traced scene and is used to calculate the way light would travel through the scene as well as enabling the game to differentiate types of light sources.  The illumination provided by lava would be very different from sunlight and path tracing would be used to calculate how they would interact in a scene to make it look even more realistic.

It is early days yet, but it will be interesting to see how a third player in the ray tracing game will affect the market.