Intel shows off Larrabee graphics chip for first time
SAN FRANCISCO--Heads up, Nvidia. Intel demonstrated its Larrabee graphics chip for the first time Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum.
Larrabee will be Intel's first discrete, or standalone, graphics processor in about 10 years and is expected to compete with graphics chips from Nvidia and AMD's ATI unit. The demo used an early "stepping," or version, of Larrabee, which is expected to come out commercially sometime next year.
Larrabee will be targeted initially at the gaming market. The demonstration was based on the game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from Splash Damage (See video.)
"This is a ray tracing demo," said Intel senior research scientist Bill Mark during the demonstration. "We took the content, the textures, and geometry, pulled it out of that game and put it into our ray tracing engine."
Mark described ray tracing technology as allowing "you to simulate the interaction of light with matter in a way that's accurate and makes it really easy to get effects like light and shadows."
"If you look at the water. That's done with only 10 lines of...code," he said. The demo was written in C++.
Mark said the same thing can be done on a standard multicore Intel processor but with Larrabee there is more parallelism--or the ability to do more things at the same time.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
Secondly PC gaming has a far richer mod community, and multiplayer PC games are far more vast and support more players. I have a console and the games are fun, but the difference goes from fun (console) to enthusiast (PC games). Plus consoles are basically becoming more and more like mini PC's. So essentially your paying for a half baked PC. I'm sure one day consoles will have many more abilities that PC games provide, but there is no way I'd want to play some of those games with a joystick. Until console games offer the optional controls for a keybpard and mouse I could never go console 100%.
The modding commuity is about the only thing the PC gaming has in terms of advantage. Its only a matter of time mods become readily available for the console. If you are talking about watered down. I am sorry I cannot agree with this. Most PC games are now horrible ports which have been ported from consoles. They just have a higher res and just AA that's it.
PC gaming was inherently better. Now its gone to a point of meritocracy.With nonsense such as WOW and the birth of MMORPG(I hate paying subscription based games).
And btw, Most games on consoles have keyboard and mouse support. Hell the PS1 one did too. PC gaming has slowed in progress no doubt about it. But who is to blame for this? Four things.
1. Consoles(Mainly Microsoft)
2. WoW
3.Publishers
4.ATi/nVidia...these morons have done nothing to promote PC gaming.
"PC gaming was inherently better. Now its gone to a point of meritocracy.With nonsense such as WOW and the birth of MMORPG(I hate paying subscription based games)."
Let us know when there's a console game where you can actively be playing with thousands of other people, at the same time, in the same game world, all at once.
FFXI? MMO. EQOA? MMO. Star whatever? MMO. FFXIV? MMO.
Show us any other console games where you can do that?
Oh...wait...you can't.
Incidentally, your prior posts are available for everyone to read. You're clearly not much of a gamer at all, PC or console. You opinions on the matter are irrelevant to everyone.
Old numbers:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6185347.html
Unfortunately, for any other earnings from later time frames, I am having trouble finding financial results that attribute Activision's financials appropriately.
Intel making an announcement like this matters if this chip is offered as a discrete, de facto graphics solution in laptops. The add in card business is not as robust as it once was due to desktops no longer owning PC marketshare, and discrete solutions that are part of the northbridge can further reduce prices and empower more people to play more modern games. This chip, if it is at all competitive, should absolutely scare ATI & Nvidia.
The work today on a desktop 3D chip will lay the groundwork for mobile 3D chips of the future.
More players in this industry is only a win for the consumer.
GameCube, Wii, X360 - ATI Card
XBOX - Nvidia Card
http://downloadablesuicide.com/2009/07/16/pc-gaming-its-problems-stem-from-mistreatment/
here is the state of console gaming yea it?s a joke
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/05/e3-predictions/
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article6628517.ece
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/consoles-could-soon-become-niche-products-playfish
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/06/pachter/
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/video-game-makers-seeing-red/
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/3277020
http://www.edge-online.com/news/japanese-ps3-sales-tumble-ahead-of-slim-launch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsTwgUo9Blw&feature=related
when pc gaming clearly has the must games made for every year.
http://kotaku.com/5037023/more-developers-working-on-pc-xbox-360-titles
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10291692-1.html
http://adrianwerner.wordpress.com/games-of-2009/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7960498.stm
http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/why-the-future-looks-bright-for-pc-gaming-589422
any way that graphics card looks hot for gaming. I am saving up for Larrabee because project offset is coming with that graphics card.
Secondly, to the guy from AMD, are you saying ATi have a chip that can do Ray Tracing (not D3D or OpenGL) at that frame-rate? (I don't know the answer, but it looks pretty impressive to ray-trace that fast to me.)
I have no idea how good it'll be, but it will certainly be interesting finding out.
Rasterisation is great but for effects like shadows and mirrors it is a real mess. Processing requirements also scale linearly hence these ridiculous graphics cards. Rasterisation just lacks the realism of ray tracing. Developers have to do so much work with rasterisation to get all those nice effects and they can't do every surface.
Ray tracing engines will change all this and the developer will simply define transparency, reflectivity etc. rather than having to create them by hand.
Essentially raytracing is a more physics like approach treating the simulation like it is in the real world.
Besides, Intel made no attempt to promote this as a high-end/enthusiast product. So why is there a straight presumption that it will be? It won't. They are aiming for the mainstream market, NOT the top end. (Don't be surprised that ATI and Nvida will own Intel on the performance side in 2010...In fact, I know they will.)
Yes, raytracing. Conceptually simple, bloody slow. Yes scanline is more difficult to program but it has the slight advantage that 1000 lines of code dedicated to straight-through scanline will still run a ton faster than 10 lines of painfully recursive raytracing.
No-one is going to do real-time raytracing when all that power could be used for other more efficient things.
- by Tod Smith September 24, 2009 5:38 PM PDT
- My thoughts on this.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(26 Comments)I feel that if Intel releases a DX11 GPU that can compete with the 275/285 Nvidia and become the new lowend king then Intel will be successful.
I hope they succeed in making lowend high performance mainstream.
If not, it will fail!