A former Nvidia scientist behind the GPU maker’s ray-tracing technology is joining rival Intel to help lead the company’s expansion into PC graphics cards.
Anton Kaplanyan is becoming the company’s vice president of graphics research, Intel announced on Tuesday. It’s a significant hire, given that Intel plans on releasing its first PC gaming graphics card in two decades later this year.
In a blog post, Kaplanyan explained what he envisions for the future of the industry. Expect a new era in graphics that’ll include photorealistic games and movies, high-resolution virtual reality headsets, and more immersive remote communication methods.
“Intel is uniquely positioned at the frontier of new hardware technologies and silicon design and has all the technology building blocks in compute architecture, memory, packaging, and interconnect for advanced hardware architectures,” he wrote. “Intel also has a long history in its integrated GPUs, and more recently has put some serious investment in the discrete GPU market.”
In the same blog post, Kaplanyan went over his career in advancing computer graphics. He most recently worked as a research scientist at Facebook, which owns the virtual reality brand Oculus. There, he worked to develop graphics rendering technologies for VR headsets, including using machine learning algorithms to upscale low-resolution images into higher quality.
From 2015 to 2017, he worked at Nvidia as a research scientist to develop the company’s RTX ray-tracing technology, which can generate realistic lighting and shadow effects in PC games. Kaplanyan also previously worked on CryTek’s game engine, CryEngine 3.
To achieve a new era of graphics, Kaplanyan pointed to new tools, such as ray tracing, cloud computing, and VR-focused neural graphics. In addition, today’s computing can scale across multiple devices by leveraging the internet and AI-powered algorithms.
“I believe the new differentiating technologies in graphics and machine learning is the missing cherry on the cake that will allow Intel’s products to become gamers’ and practitioners’ favorite choice,” he added.
