Saturday 30 October 2010

Battle of the graphics giants

Recently the future of games graphics was debated in an interview by the famous games programmer Tim Sweeney of Epic Games (who is predicting the death of GPU, see older posts in this blog on this subject) and compiler expert and game developer Andrew Richards of Codeplay Software-fame. The discussion focused on the use of software renders on programmable architectures like Intel’s now seemingly-abandoned Larrabee over more fixed-function dedicated hardware approaches such as the ones pursued by AMD and Nvidia.

Tim Sweeney, claiming frustratation by the slow and almost stagnating progress of gaming graphics technology that in his opinion has lagged in the last 15 years, favoured the software rendered approach using powerful CPU cores (and not GPUs) while Richards on the other hand defended fixed-function hardware for power consumption reasons.

You can view the complete video of this very engaging debate (the vid above is just one part) which took place at the GDC event in San Francisco at SemiAccurate.com, a must for anyone with interest in graphics hardware, http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/09/22/tim-sweeney-and-andrew-richards-talk-about-future-graphics/.

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