Larrabee Team Is Focused On Rasterization

Vigile writes "Tom Forsyth, a well respected developer inside Intel's Larrabee project, has spoken to dispel rumors that the Larrabee architecture is ignoring rasterization, and in fact claims that the new GPU will perform very well with current DirectX and OpenGL titles. The recent debate between rasterization and ray tracing in the world of PC games has really been culminating around the pending arrival of Intel's discrete Larrabee GPU technology. Game industry luminaries like John Carmack, Tim Sweeney and Cevat Yerli have chimed in on the discussion saying that ray tracing being accepted as the primary rendering method for games is unlikely in the next five years."

Confidence in the man...

[ravyne]

Tom Forsyth is a lesser-known name in graphics but, having read his blog and exchanging emails with him on a couple occasions, I assure you all that he really knows his stuff. He's been a graphics programmer on early game consoles, software engines, video codecs, and other modern things. The man knows 3D and has mapped it to some low-end and odd-ball hardware. I'm sure he's gotten his head around Larrabee quite nicely.

Re:*Sigh*

[pavon]

Also, if you want 100% rock solid drivers that are supported out of the box and cream the competition in terms of stability (speaking about Linux here), you buy an Intel GPU.

I wouldn't go that far. I've had stability issues with my intel graphics. Some OpenGL screensavers and some games running under Wine will crash or lockup X, regardless of what settings I use in my xorg.conf (XAA vs EXE, Composite on/off). Furthermore, several extentions (like composite) that are fairly stable with NVidia drivers are still buggy as hell with the intel drivers.

I never had any stability issues whatsoever with the last NVidia card I bought. Then again, that card is now useless to me since NVidia stopped releasing accelerated drivers for new kernels, which is why I went with intel last time around.

So yeah, if you discount the market leader in terms of driver stability and volume of sales, and care only about speed then yes, Intel isn't competitive.

Which is exactly what dreamchaser said. Intel keeps claiming that the performance of their new chipsets will be competitive and every time it isn't even close. So why should we take what they say seriously? I sure as hell don't.

I don't regret my decision to go with intel, and would do it again if I was buying a computer today. However, the way things are looking, I have more faith in the ATI driver situation improving than in intel ever producing a GPU with good performance.

About this 6200...

[sznupi]

Last Intel offerings (X3100 that is in all laptops here) are actually (finally) definatelly faster...
Yes, it's still nothing spectacular, but as long as I can play (with tweaked settings of course) Orange Box titles, Hellgate: London, Sins of Solar Empire and Mythos, I'm happy.