Octane, ProRender, and soon I believe Redshift on macOS use the Metal API for GPU based ray tracing. They are generally faster than CPU based ray tracing (well maybe not ProRender, it’s basically abandoned by Maxxon in favor of Redshift). So while the M1 GPU and most AMD GPUs supported by macOS don’t have hardware specific for accelerating ray tracing, they can still be used to accelerate it over using the CPU.
Edit: The article does compare the ray tracing capabilities of the M1 GPU to a RTX 2070. The RTX 2070 obviously crushes it, as the author points out the obviously unfair comparison. The RTX card uses way more power, is much largerx and has hardware acceleration for ray tracing.
I am interested in seeing if Apple adds hardware acceleration for RT to future chips (or if they will support external AMD GPUs).
Edit: The article does compare the ray tracing capabilities of the M1 GPU to a RTX 2070. The RTX 2070 obviously crushes it, as the author points out the obviously unfair comparison. The RTX card uses way more power, is much largerx and has hardware acceleration for ray tracing.
I am interested in seeing if Apple adds hardware acceleration for RT to future chips (or if they will support external AMD GPUs).