14 DAY TRIAL // As of the spring edition of Intel Developer Forum, the chip manufacturer started touting its raytracing revolution, but it forgot about another important feature of the chip: rasterisation. Just as the industry started to think that rasterisation would be hammered down in the final version of the Larrabee silicon, Intel came up with additional news about the feature.
According to Tom Forsyth, one of Intel's software engineers working on the Larrabee project, the chip will come packed full with rasterization. "I've been trying to keep quiet, but I need to get one thing very clear. Larrabee is going to render DirectX and OpenGL games through rasterisation, not through raytracing," he wrote in a blog post.
Forsyth seems to be aware that Intel kept a low profile about rasterisation and made a little too much hype on the raytracing, but he claims that rasterisation was one of the main goals pursued by the Larrabee team.
However, the feeling that rasterisation features will be axed down has been fueled by Intel's Pat Gelsinger himself, when he stated that the rasterisation approach is no longer scalable for the computer requirements in the short future.
"There's no doubt Larrabee is going to be the world's most awesome raytracer. It's going to be the world's most awesome chip at a lot of heavy computing tasks - that's the joy of total programmability combined with serious number-crunching power," he continued.
The Larrabee GPU will be fully compatible with Microsoft's DirectX 11 engine, that was designed in such a manner to include both raytracing and GPGPU features. In a previous report, Intel claimed that the Larrabee GPU will be extremely suitable for gaming, which means that rasterisation will play a key role in the chip's adoption on the mid-range/high-end markets.
"But that is cool stuff for those that want to play with wacky tech. We're not assuming everybody in the world will do this, we're not forcing anyone to do so, and we certainly can't just do it behind their backs and expect things to work - that would be absurd," Forsyth concluded.