Intel Meteor Lake iGPU might support ray tracing acceleration

Meteor Lake Xe-LPG iGPUs with ray tracing acceleration, but it may lack XMX units

A few weeks ago Intel confirmed their upcoming 14th Gen Core series are to feature “Versatile Processing Unit” for AI and inference. Now Intel development team is revealing some details on the integrated graphics architecture.

Meteor Lake CPUs are to feature Xe-LPG graphics, a derivate from Xe-HPG. There are some changes to the architecture, such as supposedly missing XMG units, or more precisely lack of support for DPAS (Dot Product Accumulate Systolic) function. The GPU configuration is to differ from the DG2/Alchemist series using full-fledge Xe-HPG architecture.

According to the recent patches introduced to Intel Graphics Compiler, Meteor Lake’s iGPU may support ray tracing acceleration. A function returning ray tracing support checks if the architecture is a derivate of DG2 (Alchemist) series, which Meteor Lake is rumored to be. If that’s the case, then Meteor Lake iGPU should support ray tracing as well.

Regarding support for HW ray tracing on Meteor Lake GPUs […] the code that determines his HW ray tracing support it seems that Meteor Lake GPU supports it as well as Alchemist / DG2 and Ponte Vechhio because there is no change.

— Coelacanth’s Dream

One should note, however, that raytracing hardware acceleration is not a new thing for integrated graphics. Earlier this year AMD launches its Ryzen 6000 CPUs featuring RDNA2 architecture with dedicated Ray Accelerator units.

It is still not clear how many Execution Units does Xe-LPG architecture offer. Intel’s own renders (posted above) shows 192 EUs, but rumors suggest this might have changed.

Source: Coelacanth’s Dream