Intel Meteor Lake iGPU to feature ray tracing capabilities

By now, it's clear that Meteor Lake will bring many architectural changes over Raptor Lake. Unlike the latter, which is basically a revised version of Alder Lake, Meteor Lake will have new components, including a VPU (Versatile Processing Unit) for AI workloads and likely a new integrated graphics architecture.

Intel has already confirmed the rumours on the VPU, but we have yet to hear anything about the new iGPU architecture. Still, rumours claim the new architecture will be a spin-off of Xe-HPG named Xe-LPG. Not much is known about it yet, but don't expect it to be just a revision of Xe-HPG, as it won't likely support DPAS (Dot Product Accumulate Systolic). Still, it seems some other features will remain.

There's still much to learn about Xe-LPG, but the recent patches introduced to the Intel Graphics Compiler (Via Coelacanth's Dream & VideoCardz) suggest something quite interesting. As Meteor Lake's iGPUs are based on the same architecture used on Arc Alchemist, a good chunk of the driver's code is the same, with slight changes. However, there's no change in the part of the code regarding hardware ray tracing support, suggesting the upcoming integrated graphics unit will have it.

Assuming the iGPU will come with 192 EUs and support for ray tracing, it could end up being a very strong offering. Meteor Lake is currently expected in the second half of 2023.

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KitGuru says: Meteor Lake could feature significant improvements to CPU and iGPU performance. If iGPUs can continue to advance like this, then they may become preferable to a dedicated, entry-level graphics card. 

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