The chip maker is creating chips and rewriting games to use ray tracing, which generates accurate images by tracing paths of light and could lead to console-like gaming via the cloud, .

At some point in the future, after a new Intel chip is released, mobile device users will be able to play complex 3D games over the cloud using real-time ray tracing, which demands a lot of computing power, Intel said. Clusters of power servers with multiple CPUs and vector processing units could process tasks in parallel, with accurate images then being delivered to tablets and smartphones.

Tablets and smartphones are mostly used for casual gaming, but increasingly sophisticated hardware is making the devices capable of handling higher-resolution graphics. Apple's iPad 2 tablet, which was announced this week, has improved graphics capabilities compared to its predecessor, while LG's Optimus 2X smartphone can render 1080p video. A tablet using Nvidia's upcoming mobile chip called Kal-El was demonstrated playing an Xbox 360 game at last month's Mobile World Congress show.

Intel has rewritten the first-person shooter game "Wolfenstein," which looks more realistic with ray-tracing technology, said Daniel Pohl, an Intel researcher, in the podcast.

"We have a red car sitting at a courtyard, which has a very shiny reflective surface. That can be rendered very good ... because ray tracing can do very physically [accurate] modeling of reflections," Pohl said.