Inside Intel's ray tracing research

Intel will soon be extending its product portfolio into visual computing. And while Nvidia isn’t publicly admitting that Intel is an increasing threat to the company, we know that Intel isn’t aiming for second place. While Larrabee is one of the firm’s key hardware products, Intel is busy developing lots of related technologies in the background as well - including ray-tracing engines. We had a chance to talk to Intel’s Daniel Pohl, a young German engineer who first got our attention when he rewrote the rasterization engines of Quake III Arena and Quake IV into full-blown ray tracing engines. Back then, Daniel used OpenRT API. Today, he is developing API currently known as IntelRT and gave TG Daily editor Theo Valich a fascinating look into his work.