Raytracing on Meteor Lake's iGPU

> Why are relatively expensive and large GPUs like in the RTX 3070 commonly called “midrange”

Because the 30xx generation of graphics cards includes the 3050, 3060, 3070, 3080 and 3090. The 3070 is right in the middle of the range. Hence, midrange.

Within the market of discrete gaming GPUs, there has been a hierarchy from "low-" to "high-end" for decades -- since before integrated GPUs even existed. For almost 20 years, things with 192- or 256-bit memory busses have been "mid-range" (vs. 384- or occasionally 512-bit memory busses at the high end, and smaller at the low-end). NVIDIA's "7"-tier GPUs have historically been the top of the mid-range in this world.

Within this world "midrange" has been creeping upward not via big shifts in these fundamental characteristics but via:

1. Prices increasing steadily across the board, due to shortages and market power 2. Power budgets (and corresponding board/cooler sizes) increasing across the board

The fundamentals (memory bus width -- still 256-bit; die size and performance relative to the top of the line) remain "mid-range" in exactly this same sense.

> The meaning of “midrange” seems to be creeping upward.

That has been the case since before I touched my first computer. The first mainframe I touched had 16 megabytes of memory, and my first desktop had 48 kilobytes. Both were midrange in their respective categories (although the mainframe was in the top in memory, it was only average in processing power - the Apple II+ was better than a VIC-20 and performed a little better than a C-64, but was slower than most of the "professional" personal computers).

My work laptop is midrange today and is many, many orders of magnitude more powerful than the supercomputers of that period.

To put things into perspective, my phone runs Unix on a RISC CPU closely coupled with an array processor.

That's Moore's law. It has slowed down a bit, in part from the difficulty of doubling density every couple years, but also from the fact even a 5th generation Intel i3 is vastly more capable than what the average user needs. In GPUs it's a little bit different, with games requiring increasingly ludicrous amounts of compute power, pushing the "good enough" range upwards every year.

If you really like to play Pac-Man, an 8-bit CPU and a simple CRTC should suffice.

For single player games it's probably still desireable. Cyberpunk 2077 with Ray Tracing looks amazing and enhances the gaming experience. Other than framerate issues, there's no drawback to having it on. For single player games, immersion is important.

The better question is if developers want ray tracing; for them, it can represent a massive time and cost savings in terms of lighting games.

For someone who played outside growing up, ray tracing is a nice addition, the baked lighting always drove me crazy in my games. I put it up there when I noticed Physics engines stopped feeling like I was floating through a game.

Do I want global illumination? Yes, absolutely. Will it make games substantially better? Only marginally. The core experience will still be the gameplay.

Still, the visual spectacle of what some of these products can create is a fantastic experience in itself. It can enhance immersion in a drastic way, and especially for story heavy games, that can act as a direct multiplier on an already good story and structure. Bad games will still never go past being just a tech demo.

I think people who kneecap their graphics settings to eek out the last few millis of latency are the vast minority.

From my experience it's the thing gamers enable after getting 120fps "ultra" in rasterization already. Rasterization-based estimations of many of the visual features are very good now, and most people I know tend to have a better end experience with higher frame rate than fixing some of the less-noticeable issues with them.

So it's probably useful if you've got a 4090, but beyond that more try it once, go "Huh, that's neat", and then disable it.

But there's always a chicken and egg problem for every new feature - it may make sense to push support even if it's not particularly useful right now, as once it's ubiquitous there may be more use cases for lower total performance cards - "light" ray tracing may be a better solution than some rasterization tricks for things like GI, or even things like AI line of sight or other non-specifically-graphics tasks.

But as gamedevs have to support the non-RT path anyway, it probably doesn't make sense to develop two separate paths. So it's relegated to "optional" visual features only.

Not every game (or gamer) is of the competitive type.

RT is pretty nice and more and more games are featuring it, problem is at least on consoles they cannot go crazy with it so some games only do reflections for example or just shadows or just global illumination.

Sony is supposedly releasing their Pro model of the PS5 later this year with improved support for RT.

With desktop GPUs I certainly thing there's room to improve framerate and image clarity before considering ray tracing. Maybe if you have a high end GPU and an an otherwise lightweight game it's worth it.

For a mobile GPU, like Meteor Lake? I wouldn't even bother.