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

wccftech.com:

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