On Wednesday, Intel used its annual labs open house, held this year at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., to push a rendering technique known as "ray tracing", as the eventual replacement for raster graphics, the rectangular grid of color pixels that comprise computer graphics today.

For high-performance graphics rendering in PC games or applications used by creative professionals, today's computers use a separate graphics processing unit, or GPU, from companies like Nvidia and ATI, which is owned by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices. Intel does not make separate graphics cards today. Instead, the chipmaker supports cards from Nvidia and ATI.

Using a separate GPU means the computer's general-purpose CPU can perform other important tasks, so PC performance doesn't suffer. But the way Intel sees it this approach has several flaws. "We believe that new architectures will deliver vastly better visual experiences," Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer, said.

First, a raster graphics image, also called a bitmap, can not produce images of the same quality as ray tracing, which tries to simulate the path that light rays take as they bounce around within the world. The latter is capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflections in objects, depth, and refraction, which is when light passes through transparent objects. Copying this phenomenon makes it possible to display objects as they would look underwater or through a bubble.