Hi Apple, we have purchased Silicon-based Macs at our studio and intend to use Unreal Engine with it, Epic games said it's left to you to allow this on the hardware, while I also learnt that the M chips allow ray-tracing.
Are you in talks with Epic Games? or should we expect this feature soon? if so, how soon? or will it not be possible on these present Silicon-based Macs?
An answer would really point our company in the right direction.
Thank you very much.
Apple does not comment on future hardware or software plans. Metal already has many ray tracing APIs that take advantage of the GPU (see the documentation and WWDC session videos).
Apple planned to implement hardware ray tracing with the A16 chip in the iPhone 14 Pro, but unfortunately a fatal bug was found in the final design (a quick Google search will lead you to a MacRumors article on this). Unless that occurs a second time, it seems plausible that the A17 and M3 will both have hardware ray tracing. However, this is technically speculation, and is not professional advice or guaranteed to be correct.
The current chips are already quite good at ray tracing. They have a hardware instruction that performs comparison and selection in a single clock cycle, making ray-box intersections faster than other architectures. Although it's not an "RT core", it does shorten the performance gap with recent desktop GPUs. Performance also depends on the workload; Nvidia's RT acceleration sometimes doesn't provide more than a 2x speedup over shader cores. If you're using smaller acceleration structures or non-triangular geometry, that is where Apple chips might excel.