14 DAY TRIAL // Santa Clara, California-based Intel will be present at this year's Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco, California between March 23 and 27. The chip maker is expected to use this opportunity to promote its processors as being capable of rendering sophisticated gaming effects. The company will basically try to make a case for its quad-core processors as alternative solutions to the graphics chips developed by NVIDIA and AMD.
Intel has already put up a page dedicated to the upcoming GDC event, which is where the chip maker also announces some of the topics that it will be discussing at the aforementioned event. “Learn how to easily add real-time 3D smoke, fog and other fluid simulations to your game without using up the GPU.” This is one of the “issues” that Intel will be discussing at the event in an attempt to determine game developers to make better use of the computing power provided by the company's high-performance desktop processors.
Leading the market for computer processors, Intel could also be talking about its upcoming Larrabee chip, which is basically a high-end graphics processor built to include x86 cores. This chip is one of the giant manufacturer's highest-anticipated products to date, as it will allow the company to compete with NVIDIA and AMD in the market for high-end graphics processors. Larrabee is, however, different from the GPUs currently available on the market, which is one of the reasons for the anticipation.
In a session presented by Jeff Freeman, a software engineer at Intel Software and Services Group, the chip maker will be presenting a “source code to a fluid simulator optimized for multi-core CPUs.” Intel claims that this source code “can easily be integrated by game developers into their engines to produce unique 3D effects.”
With the presentations, Intel should provide the answers to some of the questions regarding the differences between CPUs and GPUs when it comes to game development.