Intel: Rasterisation will be seen less in 5-10 years

Posted at: 9:30am 15th August 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Intel’s Daniel Pohl hints at Larrabee’s ray tracing capabilities, and says he believes that rasterisation will be seen less and less over the next five to ten years

Intel may have revealed the theory behind its forthcoming Larrabee graphics architecture, but so far it hasn’t revealed much beyond its DirectX and OpenGL capabilities. However, there’s little doubt that if it catches on, a freely programmable x86 graphics architecture could have massive implications for the future of games. In particular, Intel now says that rasterisation will start dying out over the next five to ten years.

Speaking to Custom PC, Intel’s ray tracing guru Daniel Pohl said that: ‘Looking ahead five to ten years from now, I believe that rasterisation will be used less and less in games, and will instead be used in combination with other algorithms.’

Pohl also hinted at some of the ray tracing capabilities of Larrabee. ‘Besides being a rasteriser with DirectX and OpenGL support,’ explained Pohl, ‘Larrabee will also be a freely programmable x86-architecture, so you’ll be able to do real-time ray tracing.’ However, the more interesting question, according to Pohl, is ‘with what scene complexity, in what resolution, with what kind of light settings and with how many dynamic objects it will be possible to do that.’

Real time ray tracing is the talk of the town at the moment, and not only with regards to Intel. At Siggraph this week, Nvidia also demonstrated real-time ray tracing on GPUs. Of course, shifting the games industry away from rasterisation will be a big job, and one that is likely to take many years, but Intel clearly sees this as the way of the future. Is Intel on the right track here? Is ray tracing going to play a big part in games in the future? As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Look out for a full interview with Daniel Pohl about ray tracing and the future of games next week.