It is likely that 14th-generation Intel chips will support ray tracing - and bring it to a wider audience

As ray tracing becomes more mainstream with Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake processors, a major step forward will be achieved with a tiled-GPU architecture.

By mimicking how light is seen in reality, ray tracing is a rendering process that enhances the lighting of a rendered scene. It seems silly (don't we all see light?) but it takes calculating the intricate physics involved in how light behaves to make an artificial scene look natural, and this is a genuinely difficult computational task.

At present, ray tracing technology can only be used on high-end gaming PCs or laptops with discrete GPUs, which means that it remains confined to highly elite applications.

Intel's bringing the technology to its 'integrated' Intel Xe graphics platform is a major advance in the technology that could make it far more accessible, however.

As Wccftech notes, integrated graphics aren't quite what they used to be. They're actually tiled architectures that are more like a system-on-a-chip than traditional integrations into one CPU die.

As we pointed out in our HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook review, this chip will go into standard laptops such as ultrabooks or even Chromebooks with superior specs.

The Intel Arc desktop graphics cards are already being upscaling with Intel's own graphics upscaling technology, which could make its way into Intel's 14th-generation processors as well. In that case, some of the best cheap laptops would be very capable of 1080p gaming.

Even though Intel Raptor Lake chips aren't even out yet - they'll be out in October this year - the first Intel Meteor Lake chips should be out in late 2023. Then you could play games like Cyberpunk 2077 at a playable frame rate on a Dell XPS 13 with modest settings and some ray tracing.

The best Ultrabooks cannot be turned into true gaming laptops with just one processor. With advances in GPU technology resulting in features such as ray tracing, it's going to have ancillary benefits for performance and – with the right settings tweaks, you won't have trouble playing games like Civilization VI on a basic laptop.

One of the first laptops with AMD processors with integrated RDNA 2 graphics is the Asus ZenBook S 13 OLED review, which we covered previously.

The gaming performance was not impressive, but the fact that Port Royal was even running on an Ultrabook was a major advance. In comparison to a laptop running Intel Meteor Lake, finding the ZenBook S 13 OLED is a frustrating process.