Twilight of the GPU — an Interview With Tim Sweeney

cecom writes to share that Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic Games and the main brain behind the Unreal engine, recently sat down at NVIDIA's NVISION con to share his thoughts on the rise and (what he says is) the impending fall of the GPU: "...a fall that he maintains will also sound the death knell for graphics APIs like Microsoft's DirectX and the venerable, SGI-authored OpenGL. Game engine writers will, Sweeney explains, be faced with a C compiler, a blank text editor, and a stifling array of possibilities for bending a new generation of general-purpose, data-parallel hardware toward the task of putting pixels on a screen."

Comments

Re:I hope not!

[syousef]

I read it differently than both of you. I read that a crystal ball gazing tech evangelist once again decided he could tell the future, no matter how little economic or technical sense his vision of the future actually holds. I also wonder how much funding he's receiving from the general purpose FPU companies.

Enough with this Larrabee fear-mongering

[billcopc]

Every other graphics blog talks about Larrabee like it's going to take your baby away. It won't. It will suck, just like every other Intel graphics chip. The problem isn't that Intel can't make fast chips, it's that they don't have the graphics experience to come close to ATI and NVidia.

Intel is good at cheap, "good enough" graphics for office machines - the freebie that does the bare minimum, which satisfies 95% of all users out there. That's where they should stay. It's a good market for them, an excellent candidate for chipset/CPU integration, and an area the other players don't put too much focus on. Yeah, you can get NVidia/ATI graphics onboard, and they're decent, but it's not their bread and butter.

If anything, I fully expect the GPU to become more important over time, but it would be nice to have 100% complete software fallback, allowing any game or app to run on any hardware. You might get a slideshow with onboard video, but it should still be allowed to run. None of this DirectX hardware versioning - it defeats the point of having a middleware API in the first place! It would also let developers code whatever effects they want, allowing hardware to accelerate them if present, while still being every bit as stunning on software emulation - just slower!

It would mean an end to "DirectX 10 effects", which I think is a damned good thing! If anything, DX10 has shown us its tricks are nothing special, all of them feasible with DX9 primitives, just a little more of them. That sort of artificial feature bloat would be a thing of the past with the adoption of a general-purpose graphics programming language.

Utter nonsense

[gweihir]

Just one example: You use OpenGL so that you a) do not need to implement basic graphics functionality yourself and b) that you have a portable interface to the graphics system. Same for DirectX.

This guy has no clue at all or has been paid off.