… or blogs, anyways.

With so little news coming from the Larrabee team, most of what we know is speculation and marketing.  It is interesting to see the comments from team member Tom Forsyth about rasterisation and Larrabee linked to at The Inquirer.  It has been mentioned several times during our podcasts and in Ryan’s interview with John Carmack that from a game developer’s view, Larrabee is quite worrying.  There are no ray traced games, nor any studios that want to take the plunge into programming one, so I am sure that many game houses are breathing a small sigh of relief to hear this news that rasterisation programming will not be phased out any time soon.

“Larrabee’s tech enables many fascinating possibilities, and we’re excited by all of them…But this current confusion has got a lot of developers worried about us breaking their games and forcing them to change the way they do things. That’s not the case, and I apologise for any panic.

“There’s only one way to render the huge range of DirectX and OpenGL games out there, and that’s the way they were designed to run – the conventional rasterisation pipeline. That has been the goal for the Larrabee team from day one, and it continues to be the primary focus of the hardware and software teams. We take triangles, we rasterise them, we do Z tests, we do pixel shading, we write to a framebuffer. There’s plenty of room within that pipeline for innovation to last us for many years to come. It’s done very nicely for over a quarter of a century, and there’s plenty of life in the old thing yet.”

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