Ray tracing is actively being implemented in modern games. There are also mods that introduce traced rendering to older projects. All this requires a powerful, productive video card. But now there is an alternative option with CPU calculations. A special driver has been released from the Mesa developer, which adapts some tracing functions to the Vulkan API for computing them on the processor.
For now, this is an experiment for the sake of experimentation, since there is no practical sense in such an adaptation. Enthusiast Konstantin Seurer shared performance results for the game Quake 2 RTX when processing rays using the processor – and this is only one frame per second. At the same time, the CPU load is 35%, and the GPU load is zero. There are no technical details regarding the system and processor characteristics.
Interestingly, this is not the first attempt to bring ray tracing to the CPU. In 2008, Intel demonstrated how tracing works on 16-core processors in Quake Wars: Ray Traced. In that demo, the processor was able to deliver 14-29 frames at 720p resolution.
Source:
Videocardz