I don’t know much about coding, much less real-time Ray Tracing….

[Irishman]

…but does this mean that Apple is working on it this year?!?

Rendering reflections in real time using ray tracing | Apple Developer Documentation

Implement realistic real-time lighting by dynamically generating reflection maps by encoding a ray-tracing compute pass.

developer.apple.com

 

[jeanlain]

Apple has been discussing ray tracing since at least WWDC 2019, but I don't think they had discussed ray tracing in the context of a game before this year.
We'll see if the next Apple GPU includes dedicated hardware to compute ray intersections.

 

[diamond.g]

Apple has been discussing ray tracing since at least WWDC 2019, but I don't think they had discussed ray tracing in the context of a game before this year.
We'll see if the next Apple GPU includes dedicated hardware to compute ray intersections.

I wonder why they didn’t include hardware intersection support with A14/M1.

 

[jeanlain]

I wonder why they didn’t include hardware intersection support with A14/M1.

The M1 only has an entry-level GPU based on the A14 GPU core.

 

[JMacHack]

Apple has been discussing ray tracing since at least WWDC 2019, but I don't think they had discussed ray tracing in the context of a game before this year.
We'll see if the next Apple GPU includes dedicated hardware to compute ray intersections.

According to the discussion (albeit with my limited understanding) in the Apple Silicon discussions, the M1’s gpu is theoretically capable of doing ray tracing already, using some of the specialized functions. So a scaled-up ASi gpu could theoretically do ray tracing

 

[diamond.g]

According to the discussion (albeit with my limited understanding) in the Apple Silicon discussions, the M1’s gpu is theoretically capable of doing ray tracing already, using some of the specialized functions. So a scaled-up ASi gpu could theoretically do ray tracing

We just don’t know the performance impact, if any, if true.

 

[diamond.g]

We just don’t know the performance impact, if any, if true.

Follow up, we do know the performance impact of using Ray Queries in Metal. It is slow on an M1. Slow enough to not be able to be realtime. The M1 Max with 32 Cores would be fast enough for a 30fps game assuming the rest of your render pipeline (and everything else) can complete in the remaining time available.