Intel, a new team working on the graphics of the future to make games photorealistic

Intel has founded a new team within the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) division called Graphics Research Organization. The goal of the new unit is to study innovative solutions for the graphic sector, be it algorithms, hardware or other solutions. At the head of this group there is Anton Kaplanyanknown for his experiences in Crytek, Meta e NVIDIA and former vice president and CTO of the AXG division.

The news comes as a quick return from the promotion of Raja Koduri, boss of the AXG division, to executive vice president of Intel. If anyone still had doubts about the commitment of the Santa Clara house in the graphics sector, this news proves that Intel is not only looking at the gaming sector, but at a much broader landscape as stated by Kaplanyan himself in his company blog post.

“Our goal is to create the best possible graphics solutions, but we want to push the whole industry forward, the whole ecosystem. And we can only do it by being open, collaborative and far-sighted “.

In the post, Kaplanyan refers to all the experiences involving graphic processing, from cinema to photography, from video games to “virtual social interactions“This highlights a strong propensity on the part of Intel towards the metaverse which for two years has attracted the interest of an increasing number of companies and end users who are approaching the virtual ecosystem.

Most of the work will be aimed at introducing new technologies that can benefit the entire industry, such as XeSS, NVIDIA’s DLSS-like technology that will also work on competing GPUs.

However, among the most interesting technologies mentioned by Kaplanyan, there is undoubtedly the path tracingwhich is a technique to reproduce the behavior of light based on the physics of a scene, an even more advanced technology than real-time ray tracing.

In the case of path tracing the entire “path” of the individuals is recreated generating a much more realistic physics of lighting. This is a technique currently aimed only at the cinema sector, for offline rendering, rather difficult to insert into video games especially due to the resources necessary for management in real time. This is why it has only been successfully tested in older titles like Quake 2 RTX or graphically simple games like Minecraft RTX.

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NVIDIA itself, a pioneer of ray tracing, argues that the introduction of path tracing still requires a long time and that we are only at the beginning. Kaplanyan has not denied NVIDIA’s words in this sense: she believes that path tracing represents the new frontier of gaming and that the challenges it entails must be faced immediately.

“The graphics industry is evolving rapidly and meeting the demands will be a breathtaking journey. This is why I am so excited about graphics processing. My team is looking for technologies that will change the industry to take them into the future. Graphics. it is taking on a surprisingly important role, ”concluded Kaplanyan.