Intel shared new information about their next-generation Xe GPUs which can be expected for desktop and mobility platforms as early as 2020. Xe GPU architecture is being referred to as Gen 12, and would at least for the mobile parts at the very least double up on performance compared to gen 11.
Intel recently held a Developer Conference 2019 in Tokyo and proclaims that integrated Xe graphics will get could get double faster than an Intel Ice Lake CPU with the 'Gen11' architecture. Some slides indicate and show what intel is referring to, the games shown are e-sport games, and the target clearly is 60 FPS. The games certainly show better perf compared to Ice Lake, doubled up seems a bit far fetched though. The settings used are not yet known.
As it turns out, Intel also has said a few words about Raytracing being hardware supported, which seems to be targeted to data center chips for the time being. But if architecture is supporting it in hardware, obviously the desktop parts will do so as well. The slides originate from mynavi.jp
Update: some information from intel just arrived on the validity of information served. Responding to recent reports, Intel does not confirm that its upcoming Xe graphics card will have ray tracing support, although the company does not deny it either. Recent reports that Intel had confirmed ray tracing support in its Xe graphics cards are wrong, the company said Friday. It looks like machine translation of a Japanese news story covering the Intel presentation created confusion.It looks like machine translation of a Japanese news story covering the Intel presentation created confusion. Intel says the presentation never mentioned ray tracing, nor did it “refer to the Xe graphics architecture found in Tiger Lake processors as ‘Gen 12’,” as some sites reported.:
Japanese site MyNavi.jp recently reported about the IDC presentation given in Tokyo. The slides that were shown at the event were from the Blueprint event that was held a few weeks prior to Computex, so this is not new content or new performance data. We also clarified that our speaker at the event did not mention ray-tracing or refer to the Xe graphics architecture found in Tiger Lake processors as ‘Gen 12’ but the resulting Google translation of this article caused confusion. The mention of the Tekken 7 game adding ray-tracing is a speculation from the Japanese site, and did not come from the Intel speaker. The speaker also did not announce specific FPS targets for next-gen graphics but instead made an assumption based on earlier performance gains that we made.
Jim Jeffers mentioned ray-tracing support in May of this year at the FMX conference in Germany. This was what he covered in his blog - “I’m pleased to share today that the Intel Xe architecture roadmap for data center optimized rendering includes ray tracing hardware acceleration support for the Intel RenderingFramework family of API’s and libraries.” https://itpeernetwork.intel.com/intel-rendering-framework-xe-architecture
Intel is not saying what features Xe will have either.
Intel Does Not Confirm Upcoming Discrete Xe GPUs Will Support Ray Tracing (update)
