Intel’s Roger Chandler, VP of Core and Visual Computing Group, has reiterated Intel’s interest in real-time ray tracing – the ‘holy grail’ of graphics technology. While Nvidia staves off RTX nonbelievers, Intel’s Chandler, in a GDC partner interview with the Game Developers Conference, reiterated his belief that we will “eventually” see this graphics tech hit the mainstream.

“Eventually we’ll see tech like real-time ray tracing (which Intel has been working on for many years) finally hit the mainstream,” Chandler says. Intel’s work in the field does indeed go back a long way. Over a decade ago at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel demonstrated real-time ray tracing using a version of Quake Wars. The company also demonstrated ray tracing with an Intel Xeon Nehalem EX chip not long after.

But without dedicated graphics, Intel has been lacking the pure compute power to compete with the likes of Nvidia and AMD in this field. Nvidia has already launched graphics cards intended to drive ray tracing to the fore in the RTX 20-series, but even AMD has expressed interest in ray tracing as of late despite the immediate lack of dedicated hardware.