Published in Graphics

Intel is not innocent in Nvidia's fight

by on14 April 2008

Image vs Image

Kicking Pat has started


Nvidia versus Intel will be a long developing story that will likely go on for years. Many might believe that it was started by Jensen, Nvidia’s CEO, but it wasn’t. It was started by Intel’s senior vice president, a great speaker that goes by the name Pat Gelsinger.

At IDF 2008 spring that took place in Shanghai he told the cherry-picked audience the flowing. "First, graphics that we have all come to know and love today, I have news for you. It's coming to an end. Our multi-decade old 3D graphics rendering architecture that's based on a rasterization approach is no longer scalable and suitable for the demands of the future," he said.

It was fun to hear Jensen accusing fourteen present top analysts and investors of trusting Intel too much. Jensen was right, as it will take at least a year from today until Intel ships its first Larrabee and this is yet again a best case scenario. We heavily suspect first Larrabees will have huge driver issues.

As I do have a lot of education in computer graphics I can say that ray tracing and ultimately global illumination is the right direction to go, but we can also confirm Nvidia or ATI should be able to follow the market trends. Currently, Nvidia makes market trends especially in game development and Intel has yet to match Nvidia’s "The way it’s meant to be played." This is probably one of the most important parts of Nvidia that will do anything within its power to keep the gaming industry wherever it wants.

Game publishers only care about the money and if Nvidia can convince them that the money is in rasterising over the next five years, they will stay. The long-term problem with transition to ray tracing is that you have to throw away the current games and engines and start development all over again and this would especially affect the console market.

Microsoft has DNA and it can develop the game for PC and XboX almost simultaneously, and Playstation 3 also only supports rasterisation. You would need to wait for the next generation consoles to implement the ray tracing-like chips inside, but this won’t happen by 2010 or later.

If Intel wins Playstation 4 or Xbox 3 with its Larrabee then the market would change, but this is highly questionable. Intel, on the other hand, doesn’t have any other approach other than to kick Nvidia as the stronger of two in the graphics market.

If you beat Nvidia you beat ATI, two flies with one strike, sort of. We are sure that this might be one of the most important fights in the years to come.

Last modified on 14 April 2008
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