Delivering a technology futures speech in mid-June, Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner stated that Intel's "aggressive multicore" approach trumps a graphics processor when the cores use ray tracing as opposed to rasterization, according to financial news site Forbes.com.

It's possible that this line of thinking could explain what the company has planned with all of the processor cores it has in its road map for future chips. Rattner affirmed, "Ray tracing is squarely in Intel's future."

A company spokesman added at a recent Intel research briefing that ray tracing goes hand-in-hand with parallel computing, as it is capable of scaling across thousands of cores. Rattner believes that graphics processors are "fundamentally tied" to the raster architecture.

AMD chief technology officer Raja Koduri, however, argued the opposite, that graphics processors are better for ray tracing over a general-purpose multicore processor, as it can be "tuned to the application." Koduri claims that multicore graphics processors, along with accelerator technology found in graphics subsystems, can also be used for ray tracing.

With a wide range of 3D modeling applications ideal for ray tracing, such as engineering and motion picture animation, it's in both companies' interest to produce the chips best suited for ray tracing. But it will be consumers who decide in the end which solution works best.