The death of graphics APIs such as OpenGL and DirectX?

According to a very recent interview Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic Games and the brains behind every iteration of the widely licensed Unreal series of 3D game engines, claimed that we are soon to see the demise of very popular graphics APIs such as DirectX and even the venerable OpenGL.

At NVIDIA's recent NVISION conference, Sweeney, during a wide-ranging conversation predicted the impending fall of the fixed-function GPU, a fall that he maintains will also sound the death knell for graphics APIs like Microsoft's DirectX and the 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...

All this because "CPU's become so fast and powerful that 3D hardware will be only marginally beneficial for rendering, relative to the limits of the human visual system, therefore 3D chips will likely be deemed a waste of silicon (and more expensive bus plumbing), so the world will transition back to software-driven rendering. And, at this point, there will be a new renaissance in non-traditional architectures such as voxel rendering and REYES-style microfacets, enabled by the generality of CPU's driving the rendering process. If this is a case, then the 3D hardware revolution sparked by 3dfx in 1997 will prove to only be a 10-year hiatus from the natural evolution of CPU-driven rendering".

Sweeney also mentions that "in the next generation we'll write 100 percent of our rendering code in a real programming language—not DirectX, not OpenGL, but a language like C++ or CUDA. A real programming language unconstrained by weird API restrictions. Whether that runs on NVIDIA hardware, Intel hardware or ATI hardware is really an independent question. You could potentially run it on any hardware that's capable of running general-purpose code efficiently."

Another interesting quote is this one; "graphics APIs only make sense in the case where you have some very limited, fixed-function hardware underneath the covers. It made perfect sense back with the 3Dfx Voodoo and the first NVIDIA cards, and the very first GeForces, but now that you have completely programmable shaders, the idea that you divide your scene up into triangles rendered in a certain order to a large framebuffer using fixed-function rasterizer features is really an anachronism. With all that general hardware underneath, why do you want to render scenes that way when you have more interesting possibilities available?"

You can read the rest of this very interesting interview here.