Ray-tracing the way to go for game developers?
Categories: Game Development Tags: 3d graphics programming, api, daniel pohl, directx, game development, gamedev, larrabee, opengl, rasterizering processor, ray tracing
TG Daily has interviewed Daniel Pohl, an engineer who is making some impressive progress in ray-tracing research, about Intel’s ray-tracing efforts.
Q: What is Larrabee from your perspective. What is the underlying architecture and the programming model?
A: Larrabee was primarily built as a rasterizering processor. Therefore you have support for DirectX and OpenGL. But it will also be a freely programmable x86-architecture. That means you could, for example, write your own rasterizer with your own API, a ray tracer, a voxel renderer or combinations of those. You could also use it for non-graphical applications that benefit from parallelization.Q: What API is Intel using to showcase ray tracing demos?
A: We wrote our own API. The shading system uses a HLSL-like syntax that allows you also to shoot new rays within a shader. Using that API the programmer has no need to manually multi-thread the rendering and does not need to optimize the shading with SSE as this is done by the shading compiler automatically.
Read the complete interview here: Intel graphics update: Ray-tracing the way to go for game developers?
More news about Larrabee: Larrabee @ Geeks3D
