Every time the Intel Larrabee project has been mentioned, it has been in the context of raytracing. While some reports have mentioned that Larrabee will be compatible with DirectX and OpenGl, it has always seemed liked these have been secondary. They are not. In a recent blog post, Intel developer Tom Forsyth explains that the focus is actually the complete opposite. Intel is not trying to force game developers into raytracing their future games, but merely going to make it an option at will.
Below is an excerpt;
“There’s only one way to render the huge range of DirectX and OpenGL games out there, and that’s the way they were designed to run – the conventional rasterisation pipeline. That has been the goal for the Larrabee team from day one, and it continues to be the primary focus of the hardware and software teams. We take triangles, we rasterise them, we do Z tests, we do pixel shading, we write to a framebuffer. There’s plenty of room within that pipeline for innovation to last us for many years to come. It’s done very nicely for over a quarter of a century, and there’s plenty of life in the old thing yet.
/…/
We are totally focussed on making the existing (and future) DX and OGL pipelines go fast using far more conventional methods. When we talk about the rendering pipeline changing beyond what people currently know, we’re talking about using something a lot less radical than raytracing. Still very exciting for game developers – stuff they’ve been asking for for ages that other IHVs have completely failed to deliver on. There’s some very exciting changes to the existing graphics pipelines coming up if developers choose to enable the extra quality and consistency that Larrabee can offer. But these are incremental changes, and they will remain completely under game developers’ control – if they don’t want to use them, we will look like any other fast video card. We would not and could not change the rendering behaviour of the existingAPIs.”
Check out the entire post here.
