Twilight of the GPU?

[TerranUp16]

Ars Technica Interview with Tim Sweeney on the Future of Graphics

Before you get all up in arms that the gpu isn't dying, it's not particularly meant in that manner. What Sweeney is talking about is not necessarily that processors are going to take-over for gpu's or that Larrabee is going to dominate the graphics market, but rather that graphics cards on the whole are going to shift away from only being able to do graphics. nVidia adopted the unified architecture with its introduction of the GeForce 8 series and ATi did the same with its HD 2xxx series and already from nVidia we have seen CUDA and PhysX (and PhysX itself is enabled through CUDA) emerge to allow GeForce 8 series and above gpu's to perform tasks other than graphics. DirectX11 and OpenCL also seem to be making strides towards allowing more software-style rendering from gpu's. These are, arguably, baby steps in the direction of what will ultimately come, but the point is that Sweeney is not necessarily proposing a phasing out of the giant card you slap in your PCI-E slot or Intel dominance, but rather that nVidia will continue along its "GPGPU" (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) path to compete with Intel's Larrabee and that soon graphics will be programmed in languages such as C++ instead of with API's such as DirectX and OpenGL.

For those fretting about needing to get new hardware, Larrabee isn't even going to hit the market until at least next year and even then it's going to take some time for a uniform standard to fall into place across the differing hardware. Even once both those factors are in place (as far as nVidia/ATi hardware, it sounds like nVidia is planning on offering a competitor to Larrabee and with CUDA and PhysX being marketing centerpieces of their new GTX 2xx products despite GeForce 8 and 9 series hardware being capable of utilizing those as well so nVidia is definitely moving in the gpgpu direction and if they are, well, ATi's parent company is AMD, so...), it's going to take some time for people to get the hardware in their rigs that can take advantage of this new way of handling rendering (though, if nVidia and ATi can manage to open-up their GeForce 8 series and HD 2xxx series respectively to this, that should expedite the process significantly) and so all told it's probably going to be 4-5 years at least before we really start to see games go this route and ditch API's.

Also, Cevat Yerli's comments about Crytek committing itself to the PS4 are rather interesting in the context of Sweeney's predictions. It raises the question of why Yerli has only really mentioned the PS4 and not Microsoft's offering and if perhaps Microsoft will go with a modern architecture as opposed to what Sweeney describes. Of course, since Sweeney himself has noted that UE4 will accompany the release of the next-gen consoles in 2012, Yerli could have other reasons or might be figuring that Sony will release the PS4 later and thus Crytek will have more time to develop CryEngine 3 while still marketing CryEngine 2.

Special Thanks to WG for the Article Link!

[TerranUp16]

Part 2