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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

> The downside is that it also means that Intel is the only hardware vendor launching a new GPU/architecture in 2020 without support for the next generation of features, which Microsoft & co are codifying as DirectX 12 Ultimate. The consumer-facing trade name for feature level 12_2, DirectX Ultimate incorporates support for variable rate shading tier 2, along with ray tracing, mesh shaders, and sampler feedback. And to be fair to Intel, expecting ray tracing in an integrated part in 2020 was always a bit too much of an ask. But some additional progress would always be nice to see. Plus it puts DG1 in a bit of an odd spot, since it’s a discrete GPU without 12_2 functionality.

Not really on a good starting foot.

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If it supports GVT-g like their integrated graphics then it may still be useful as a cheaper alternative for virtualized systems. Otherwise you either have to buy multiple GPUs or the professional lines of AMD/Nvidia

Not many people are going to be playing high-end games on the integrated graphics anyways, even with 2x performance improvement over the previous generation Intel graphics. At this point, the Xe graphics are going to be just slightly better than the recently released AMD APU integrated graphics. If this limitation is still true on their discrete card targeted for gamers (not the DG1), then that would be a poor showing.

Those buying P5 and XBox Series X games will.

Huh? I wouldn’t call AMDs architecture integrated. It’s a UMA with a discrete GPU.

The most analogous thing is a laptop with a very nice GPU.

meh. Ray tracing is hype. I don't think it's omission is that big of a deal.

Hollywood is of a different point of view.

https://home.otoy.com/

https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyper...

Also a standard feature of PS 5 and XBox Series X.

The price premiums for hardware with ray tracing hardware is still high and only when it becomes common place so as to not command a higher price will your average gamer care. There’s also always the next gen for Intel to add it.

Neither of those are for realtime though. Ray tracing have been used in rendering for animations and movies a lot.

Real-time ray tracing is hype.

And I agree - any arguments that "the next gen consoles have it" is specious at best; they always front load next gen consoles because there's usually a very, very long tail where they're essentially obsolete PCs but companies still have to churn out games for them. The PS4 was released in early 2013 - that's seven years, or almost 5 Moore generations old.

The games released with RTRT right now are not going to be great, but in three years? Probably showing up in AAA titles, and they'll all be designed around the PS5's level of capabilities. But by then Intel will have revved their graphics card to the next generation (as will everyone else), and all of the "hardcore" gamers will be picking up new graphics cards anyways.

That said, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Intel's hardware's capabilities and priorities given how much they're trying to spackle the gap between being a server ML/NN play and a gaming device, their complete and utter management failures towards non-core market hardware (Intel's history is paved in abandoned hardware, up to and including the Xeon Phi) and them having little to no decent experience delivering SPMD programming models for their hardware as is now 100% bog standard in GPU land...

It's in all the next-gen consoles and in most of nvidia's current parts and (afaik) in all of amd and nvidia's future parts. At this point instead of a hyped up vendor-specific feature, it's looking like a feature many games will be using which will leave intel users out in the cold.

On the other hand, nobody presently expects to run modern games on integrated GPUs, so...

Some other 12_2 features are pretty important for VR.

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