Larrabee Team Is Focused On Rasterization

Vigile writes "Tom Forsyth, a well respected developer inside Intel's Larrabee project, has spoken to dispel rumors that the Larrabee architecture is ignoring rasterization, and in fact claims that the new GPU will perform very well with current DirectX and OpenGL titles. The recent debate between rasterization and ray tracing in the world of PC games has really been culminating around the pending arrival of Intel's discrete Larrabee GPU technology. Game industry luminaries like John Carmack, Tim Sweeney and Cevat Yerli have chimed in on the discussion saying that ray tracing being accepted as the primary rendering method for games is unlikely in the next five years."

Comments

*Sigh*

[dreamchaser]

Intel has been saying with each and every iteration of graphics hardware that it's created that it would be 'competetive'. None have been except at the very, very low end. I like Intel's CPU's quite a bit, but I have heard the boy who cried wolf too many times from them with regards to GPU's to take them very seriously at this point.

Re:*Sigh*

[QuantumRiff]

One would think that a company that could do a complete turn around after it got its 64bit ass handed to it (thanks AMD) would be able to dedicate just a bit of brain-power to their graphics.

Re:*Sigh*

[Toonol]

...buying ATI put AMD in a very good position (other than that whole "no money to spend on anything" problem).

Funny, that's the same thing that happens when I buy ATI...

Re:*Sigh*

[serviscope_minor]

Intel has been saying with each and every iteration of graphics hardware that it's created that it would be 'competetive'. None have been except at the very, very low end. I like Intel's CPU's quite a bit, but I have heard the boy who cried wolf too many times from them with regards to GPU's to take them very seriously at this point.

Hard to take them seriously? Are you kidding? The very low end is the massive majority of the market, and Intel has that well wrapped up. They are probably the #1 PC GPU manufacturer out there. If you want cheap or low power, you get an Intel GPU. Also, if you want 100% rock solid drivers that are supported out of the box and cream the competition in terms of stability (speaking about Linux here), you buy an Intel GPU.

So yeah, if you discount the market leader in terms of driver stability and volume of sales, and care only about speed then yes, Intel isn't competitive.

In my world, I will continue to take them seriously, since I always aim to but Intel graphics if I can. If they get faster, that's a nice bonus.

Re:*Sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether you take them seriously or not, this is a serious effort to be a major player in the discrete graphics market. (a market not likely to disappear soon as some seem to think)

I happen to know a great many people that work at Intel. And I just happen to also do product testing and marketing focus groups for them. All centered around gaming.

This was a topic that intel did not take seriously 5-10 years ago. They take it deadly serious now.

I spoke with paul otellini on one occasion on the topic of intel gaming. It went more or less like this.

Paul- Which Intel chip do you have in your machine at home?
Me- It's an AMD actually.
Paul- You work for Intel, your family works here and you buy an AMD?
Me- I run what gives me the highest performance in what I do. It also happened to be cheaper, but thats secondary.
Paul- They only beat us in gaming! Our chips are better at EVERYTHING else.
Me- Gaming leads the market.
Paul- No it doesn't.
Me- No one upgrades twice a year to keep up with MS office. We upgrade to keep up with Carmack.
Paul- If I offered to give you a couple of our next gen processors, would you use them?
Me- I'd try them out, but if they can't beat my current machine I won't use them. Even if they are free. Neither will anyone I know. We literally spend a couple thousand dollars a year keeping our machines state of the art so we can squeeze an extra frame per second out of our systems. We aren't going to use anything that isn't the best.

You want me and my market segment to take you seriously? Take us seriously. We make up a small segment, but we are fanatical.

___
A couple years later, I got an email from him.
It was actually sent as a response to several key divisions in intel, because several people had asked why we (intel) care about gamers, they make up less than 5% of the PC market (it's actually closer to 1%).
___
Paul- We care about gamers because gamers grow up. They grow up to work mainly in IT fields. The gamers from 5-10 years ago are now the IT professionals we most want to be on our side. They are the ones making purchasing decisions and recommendations and they do so based on what they know. They know AMD better than us because we ignored them for so long.

Why do we care about games? We don't. We care about the people playing them and we want them to identify with our products.

____

So now you have some insight as to where intel thinks this is all going. It's not that they care about gaming or graphics, because they really don't. They care about the people behind it, and getting them hooked into a brand that "supports" them.
Then there is the really obvious reasons for Intel getting into graphics, VISTA, and other next gen OS's and GUI's are going to use a lot of hardware acceleration. Which means discrete graphics cards aren't for the desktop anymore, they are for the server and the workstation too.
Add to that using the GPU to do certain types of parallel processing at much better thru-put than you can get from a CPU.

The motivation should be obvious.

*Posted AC for my sake. I like my contacts at Intel. I'm hoping Paul doesn't remember talking to a PFY about his companies gaming culture.

Re:*Sigh*

[pavon]

Also, if you want 100% rock solid drivers that are supported out of the box and cream the competition in terms of stability (speaking about Linux here), you buy an Intel GPU. I wouldn't go that far. I've had stability issues with my intel graphics. Some OpenGL screensavers and some games running under Wine will crash or lockup X, regardless of what settings I use in my xorg.conf (XAA vs EXE, Composite on/off). Furthermore, several extentions (like composite) that are fairly stable with NVidia drivers are still buggy as hell with the intel drivers.

I never had any stability issues whatsoever with the last NVidia card I bought. Then again, that card is now useless to me since NVidia stopped releasing accelerated drivers for new kernels, which is why I went with intel last time around.

So yeah, if you discount the market leader in terms of driver stability and volume of sales, and care only about speed then yes, Intel isn't competitive. Which is exactly what dreamchaser said. Intel keeps claiming that the performance of their new chipsets will be competitive and every time it isn't even close. So why should we take what they say seriously? I sure as hell don't.

I don't regret my decision to go with intel, and would do it again if I was buying a computer today. However, the way things are looking, I have more faith in the ATI driver situation improving than in intel ever producing a GPU with good performance.

Duh

[Wesley Felter]

Creating a GPU that won't run existing games well (or at all) never made sense. Some people fantasized about forcing gamers to buy a rasterization GPU and a separate raytracing GPU, but those are probably the same fools who bought PPUs and Killer NICs.

Re:Duh

[frieko]

Creating a GPU that won't run existing games well (or at all) never made sense. Not to Intel, they've been doing exactly that for years!

Re:Uh

[Yvan256]

Colonel Mustard, in the library, with a wrench.

Confidence in the man...

[ravyne]

Tom Forsyth is a lesser-known name in graphics but, having read his blog and exchanging emails with him on a couple occasions, I assure you all that he really knows his stuff. He's been a graphics programmer on early game consoles, software engines, video codecs, and other modern things. The man knows 3D and has mapped it to some low-end and odd-ball hardware. I'm sure he's gotten his head around Larrabee quite nicely.

I hope their GPU gets much, much better

[Yvan256]

As a Mac mini user, I'm forced to use whatever GPU intel comes up with, unless Apple suddenly remembers their own words when they introduced the Mac mini G4:

Lock the Target

Or one 3D game. Go ahead, just try to play Halo on a budget PC. Most say they're good for 2D games only. That's because an âoeintegrated Intel graphicsâ chip steals power from the CPU and siphons off memory from system-level RAM. You'd have to buy an extra card to get the graphics performance of Mac mini, and some cheaper PCs don't even have an open slot to let you add one. - Apple Inc., Mac Mini G4 Graphics

In any case, what I'd really like is yesterday's technology with today's manufacturing capabilities. Imagine an old Radeon or GeForce GPU built at 45nm or lower. Would that result in a 5-10 watts GPU that could still beat whatever intel is making?

Stupid debate

[pclminion]

The whole damn debate is just a bunch of old men whining. Raytracing is obviously a superior rendering method, the question is simply when it will become fast enough. The dinosaurs don't want to let go of their precious scan conversion -- and who can blame them given the massive amount of work put into those algorithms over the last decades -- but the time of scan conversion is coming to an end.

Re:Stupid debate

[pclminion]

Then why did you call these graphic engine experts "old men" as if they are just set in their ways? It sounds to me like they know just what they are talking about.

It's been my experience in the software world that people are incredibly stubborn about dropping old, familiar technology when something better comes along. It's certainly not limited to these folks. But even the smartest people get blinded by the familiarity of their ways.

Re:Stupid debate

[ardor]

WHEN (and only when) the technology is fast enough for real time recursive ray tracing, it will be the end of rasterization in 3D applications. Oh yes, the brute force solution. It will be a very long while until it is fully obsolete. Expect hybrids to stay for a long time. An example: many people claim terrain culling methods to be fully obsolete nowadays. Then they try to render really large terrains...

Also, given that hybrids are a no-brainer, I bet both pure raytracers and rasterizers will be extinct in games.

Cache coherency problems can be fixed by making an enormous cache, or simply making the RAM itself so damn fast it doesn't matter anymore. Ehrm .... got any other wishes?! You do realize that this would be a revolution and might not be possible? One of the reasons why the cache is fast is that the signal propagation delay can be much lower due to the proximity of the cache to the cpu. In other words, there will always be a cache. As for an enormous cache: cache mem is very expensive, is likely to be because cache performance doesnt stand still (read: it will always use more expensive special hardware), and huge caches have issues with cache misses.

Adaptive subdivision of pixels for antialiasing is not exactly a first year student problem but not enormously difficult either. I didn't say its enormously difficult, just not nearly as trivial as with rasterization.

Honestly, I want to see the technology blow right past raytracing and go straight to radiosity 1. Radiosity is not the ultimate. Just try doing specular stuff with radiosity.
2. Algorithmic complexity will always come back to haunt you. O(nÂ) will always be worse than O(n), unless you have small scenes. So you have your geforce19000 and can render ... ONE room with realtime radiosity! Nice! Somebody else fakes it and renders an entire city. Guess what will be chosen for games.
3. You could have said path tracing or photon mapping at least.

Finally, these people don't particularly favor raytracing simply because it does not pay off for games. Games usually don't feature fully shiny scenes, games are expected to run at interactive framerates. In, say, 5 years, entirely new (and demanding) effects are en vogue; if raytracing steals too much time, it will be dropped, its results faked. This is what the "old men" do all the time in their games: fake. In the offline world, things are wildly different, so don't compare them.

No need to take them seriously

[Sycraft-fu]

It isn't as though they are only going to sell to true believers or anything. Just wait until it comes out, then evaluate it. At this point I don't really have an opinion one way or the other. Intel certainly has the know how and the fabrication tech to make a good GPU, but they also have the ability to miss the boat. I'll simply wait until it is real silicon that I can purchase before I concern myself with it. It'll either be competitive or it won't, we won't know until it is out and real tests are done.

Frying Eggs

[dreamchaser]

I miss being able to fry my morning egg on my CPU heatsink. Now I have to go all the way downstairs and use the damn stove.

Keep Vista in mind

[DrYak]

Keep Microsoft Windows Vista in mind and reconsider your last sentence :

A given computer is more likely to be used with Solitaire than with a demanding 3D game. More seriously : Intel has been king in the ultra-low cost segment of GPU because nearly every business desktop (almost any non-high-end Dell machine for example) needs a graphic card, just to draw the desktop, but almost no 3D function. Thus it's hard to find 1 machine which was sold to a corporation and doesn't have an i8x0 or i9x0 embed GPU. (Even if sometimes, it is disabled because the buyer asked for a mid-range nVidia or ATI).

The problem is that now thanks to Vista and its Aero, powerful 3D acceleration starts to matter not only to /.er gamers, but even for the secretary who only runs an OS, a browser, an office suite and the occasional mine-sweeper/solitaire.

Pixels

[Whiteox]

All it is is changing pixels. After all, it's still a 2D screen that displays as a bitmap. Sometimes a step backwards is valuable too.

About this 6200...

[sznupi]

Last Intel offerings (X3100 that is in all laptops here) are actually (finally) definatelly faster...
Yes, it's still nothing spectacular, but as long as I can play (with tweaked settings of course) Orange Box titles, Hellgate: London, Sins of Solar Empire and Mythos, I'm happy.

Larrabee will be awesome ... for everybody!

[Joce640k]

Read the article - Larrabee is designed for general purpose programmability.

If your motherboard has Larrabee you could use it for the physics calculation while your add-in GPU does the graphics.

This makes a whole lot more sense than trying to get a single GPU to do both tasks.