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Larrabee Team Is Focused On Rasterization

Posted by Soulskill on from the one-step-at-a-time dept.

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."

4 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. *Sigh* by dreamchaser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:*Sigh* by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    2. Re:*Sigh* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Re:Duh by frieko · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!