3 ms·

I think Larrabee was interesting because it had the potential to go the other way - it could emulate existing rasterization APIs decently but would allow for ne

I think Larrabee was interesting because it had the potential to go the other way - it could emulate existing rasterization APIs decently but would allow for new realtime rendering approaches - like raytracing in to some sparse voxel tree structure for non-animated geometry - maybe do hybrid rendering where you would do deferred shading/rasterization for dynamic scene and then ray trace in to the tree for global illumination with static scene and similar stuff. I'm sure emulating OpenGL on the CPU has it's uses outside of being a reference for drivers and such - but it's not really that exciting, GPUs are already excellent at doing that kind of rendering.

SXX 10y ago
Actually it's was not only possible to use it for ray tracing, but Intel had it working back in 2008. They also sponsored Uber Entertainment implement it into their game and that was ready before Intel cancelled it: http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/3/19/4094472/uber-hail-mary-monday-night-combat http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/3/19/4094472/uber-hail-...
elihu 10y ago
I also wish that had taken off; 3d-graphics via a software ray tracing engine would in a sense be a return to the way things worked in the 90's before hardware rendering, where every game had its own custom engine and developers were always trying crazy new things. In some sense, GPU hardware has gotten flexible enough that we're sort of back in that world again, but writing GPU code isn't quite the same as writing a renderer from scratch. When it comes to ray-tracing in particular, as far as I know there really doesn't exist (except perhaps as research prototypes) any hardware platform that's great at ray tracing. CPUs are okay but they need more parallelism. GPUs are okay but (as far as I understand it) they aren't good with lots of branches and erratic memory accesses. It seems like KNC/KNL ought to be ideal for this kind of thing (and in fact, it appears a fair bit of effort has gone into optimizing Embree for Xeon Phi).
- pjmlp 10y ago
  You can still do that kind of stuff, but on the GPU with geometry/compute shaders. Now with Metal, DX12 and Vulkan GPU languages, maybe that is ever more approachable, specially in cards like Pascal.

SXX 10y ago

Actually it's was not only possible to use it for ray tracing, but Intel had it working back in 2008. They also sponsored Uber Entertainment implement it into their game and that was ready before Intel cancelled it: http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/3/19/4094472/uber-hail-mary-monday-night-combat http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/3/19/4094472/uber-hail-...

elihu 10y ago

I also wish that had taken off; 3d-graphics via a software ray tracing engine would in a sense be a return to the way things worked in the 90's before hardware rendering, where every game had its own custom engine and developers were always trying crazy new things. In some sense, GPU hardware has gotten flexible enough that we're sort of back in that world again, but writing GPU code isn't quite the same as writing a renderer from scratch. When it comes to ray-tracing in particular, as far as I know there really doesn't exist (except perhaps as research prototypes) any hardware platform that's great at ray tracing. CPUs are okay but they need more parallelism. GPUs are okay but (as far as I understand it) they aren't good with lots of branches and erratic memory accesses. It seems like KNC/KNL ought to be ideal for this kind of thing (and in fact, it appears a fair bit of effort has gone into optimizing Embree for Xeon Phi).

pjmlp 10y ago
You can still do that kind of stuff, but on the GPU with geometry/compute shaders. Now with Metal, DX12 and Vulkan GPU languages, maybe that is ever more approachable, specially in cards like Pascal.