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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."
I just browsed the article and it looks like what he's saying is that as GPU's become more like highly parallel cpu's we will begin to see API's go away in favor of writing compiled code for the GPU itself. For example, if I want to generate an explosion, I could write some native GPU code for the explosion, and let the GPU execute this program directly... rather than being limited to the API's capabilities.
So essentially, we will go back to game developers needing to make hardware specific hacks for their games... some games having better support for some cards, etc.
API's are there for a reason... lets keep em and just make them better.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
If we are going back to the "old" days...
Why can't we skip all this OS nonsense, and just boot the game directly?
After all that will make sure that you get the MOST out of your computer.
Except that you like everyone else reads "CPU" in the article to mean the Intel/AMD CPU and not think of it as current gen GPUs that are almost capable of massive parallel execution of general purpose code. With the advent of Shaders, more processing was able to be offloaded to GPUs and over the next couple of GPU generations. So his idea is that we'll see less of the OpenGL/DirectX specific API calls and everything being done in CUDA/Shaders. That way the folks who write graphics engines aren't limited to the current SGI implementation (here's a set of vectors describing my object -- draw it) and we'll see different rendering engines based on Ray Tracing for example (or whatever other methods the engine writers want to do it).
This isn't anything new here -- he's basically saying what Intel has already said... You'll see less OpenGL/DirectX and more CUDA/Shader based implementations for rendering engines.