IDF 2009: "Sean Maloney Keynote- Larrabee Execution Update"

[197022007]

linux kernel on larrabee using the host machine as somewhat of an IO controller...

[thinkingmanDotCom]

Anyone who’s ever performed any sort of rendering for any purpose, games, advanced engine production, even simple graphic design, knows that conventional “advanved Phong” (which is what I call most modern renderers, because that’s all they really are) are incapable of producing reasonably realistic images in realtime (yarrrrr) so anyway I for one am incredibly pleased we’re finally able to discuss this and look forward to purchasing some Knight’s Corner units for game development!

[Globox822]

this looks like Xbox 1 graphics and this is supposed to be the future? Ok, this seems like joke to me. I am no expert but i just say what i see

[fknyear7s]

its Ray Tracing even the 5970

cant effectively exhibit ray tracing

it lags like balls when it comes to ray tracing

[pornostar100]

SEGA's Model 4 ray tracing capable hardware is currently in development

Further information is to be found at the following address -

fgnonlinedotwebsdotcom

[HQToonz]

That water looks weird. SWIMMING IS OFF LIMITS

[PunkFlavouredDrink]

That was, by far, the nerdiest speech i've ever heard...

[brunocrazymuffins]

i cant wait to burn it x)

[AlexDganger]

i cant wait to overclock trhat xD

[dotasamurai]

3:33 -> 3:34 what sort of reflection is that?

[MonkeyForNothing]

@mygaffer Ah yes, like *you* just did. rofl

[drshields1988]

framerate is only slow because they are ray tracing the entire thing. in the beginning ray tracing will only be used for static background and and most of the animation still rasterized

[Naminator236]

Plus look at the size of that screen!

I imagine you need insane horse power to render something at those resolutions without it looking like crap.

[ProPainGiX]

Wow.... Larrapee in Intel nextgen GMA will change the world... LOL

"Don't believe the Hype"

[MonkeyForNothing]

Lol, sure I do. Can't wait to be one of the characters in a Dilbert comic, rofl.

[mechnotech]

Тормозит! реально тормозит! :)

[MonkeyForNothing]

Good framerates or not, what I wonder is how Intel is going to market this product? Any developers you know of that are developing their titles for Larrabee? (Larrabe has exactly 0% installed user base) it makes no economical sense to develop for it. Larrabee needs a gameconsole to penetrate the market, but the latest rumors say that Microsoft has already signed up ATI for the graphics in the next Xbox.. And wouls Sony with their Cell architecture suddenly switch to Larrabee? I think not...

[mygaffer]

You don't really know what you are talking about. Larrabee is going to support the DX API. Thus, developers just need to develop for DX, not for the specific hardware. That is why DX exists. Did you not know that?

[MonkeyForNothing]

Well, I knew that much but thought that it requires lots of custom code to use its full potential (forcing developers in yet another direction). But generally when I question tech stuff like that I rely on the fact that there are nerds with no life, (like you) that can clearify this shit for me. So, thanx..

[calumknight1984]

@mygaffer actually slightly off a bit the big appeal to this is they dont need to use dx AT ALL, they can skip the overhead involved with using dx/opengl api's and program DIRECTLY to chip. So basically if the programmer thinks they can pull it off they are free to try, whether intel manage or not is another story but the idea is sound

[mygaffer]

@calumknight1984 They can already to do that if they want, you don't need x86 to program to the metal. Now x86 instruction set will make it easier to do obviously but performance will suffer in gpu type applications. Larrabee will never see light of day as a gpu, it will be used for HPC only.

[Lightnixxx]

Well, firstly Larrabee is supposed to supprot OpenGL and DirectX using a traditional rasterisation pipeline. I did hear that Unreal Engine 4 is supposed to support a Larrabee-based rendering pipeline along with DirectX, etc. and Intel does have a lot of clout (I mean they've convinced multiple developers to support their GMA chips!)

[mdentari]

Looks like around 7-11 Frames Per Second max. Intel has alot of work cut out for them. Most of the critics about real time ray tracing are right. The tech is not there yet. I want it to happen but lets be realistic it not there yet.

[chinmaykai]

From what I heard, it was the Ax silicon not the B0 one. Ax silicon has a host of bugs so it can't run anywhere near its full performance. I expect framerates to be MUCH better on the final product. Seems like this thing actually will live up to the hype.

[TopSystemsLTD]

This Demo looks ugly.

There are just raytraced reflections, direct light and shadows. And even now FPS is very low.

But what about indirect illumination? I don't think CPU (even Larrabee) can handle it in realtime.

[lexwalker2]

News! "Real time"(!?) ray tracing on (NVIDIA) GPU..

"Nvidia's ray tracing demonstration ran even more slowly than Larrabee, taking around 15 seconds to fully render a high-resolution image of a sports car using reflective and translucent textures with global illumination."

15 seconds! The PS3 ray trace demo (you can find here on Youtube) beats that by light years ahead! LOL!

Again, I reiterate.. current GPU architecture are not suited for ray tracing.

[katalysis]

Oh how I long for the day when video cards can run Crysis at 1920x1200 @ 125 fps with 8xAA and 16AF... probably won't happen until at least 2015.

[lucaspepa]

more like 2011

[mygaffer]

Don't worry, the DX11 refresh cards will do it. Not the first gen mind you, but ATI will have a refresh out in 2010.

[newFaction64]

This is a bunch of BS considering the code is written in C++ and not even DirectX or OpenGL. Real accomplishment.

[lexwalker2]

DirectX and OpenGL are APIs, thus you'll still need to use C/C++ to make use of them. The difference is that the amount of code required to achieve the same effect.

[ktxed]

Do you even know what DirectX or OpenGL are ? C++ is a programming language, those 2 are APIs, you can't write "in" them, you can USE them with many programming languages, if provided with the binding libraries.

[mrchen1211]

Can it run Crysis at 1920x1080 ultra high setting with 16 ANTI-aliasing & 16AF?

[DeadFredVideo]

This is horrible, I don't see Larrabee being the next big thing in graphics.

I'd rather take a "real" GPU over this any day, it's just a suped-up Core 2.

My understanding of this technology is basic, but wouldn't the highly parallel 2.72 TeraFLOPS 5870 be much better suited for ray tracing? :)

[lexwalker2]

Traditional GPUs are not suited to full blown ray tracing. That's because of the way the shader hardware is designed and execute (simplistic DSP-like) instructions which works better with rasterization. Some stuff are much better with a more flexible execution core like a CPU. That's why render farms still exists..

Example, look at Guru3D's 5870 review on video transcoding.. 2.72 TFLOPs card was hardly faster than a 4C/8T Core i7 @ 3.75GHz with so much less FLOPs..

[lexwalker2]

Anyway it would be interesting to see how flexible the new Direct Compute cores (for DX11) on the 5870 (supposedly more flexible and better than usual shader cores).

[DeadFredVideo]

Thanks for filling me in, interesting topic :) Whatever happens with larrabee, the next few years seem pretty exciting in the GPU world :)

[SparklesofUnity]

Take a look at this:

watch?v=oLte5f34ya8

[theguzmans]

I'm sorry but with exception to the water, these graphics look like they could have been done on an old DX8 class graphics card. With exception to shiny surfaces, I still yet to see a demo where ray tracing blows me away. The Canyon Flight test from 3DMark 2006 looks a heck of a lot better than this demo.

[SparklesofUnity]

afaik, this demo is done in real time ray-tracing, which requires tremendous amounts of computing power.

[lexwalker2]

Those 3DMark "ray tracing" use light and environment / reflection mapping tricks (thus usually requires more lines of code). A real ray tracer handles this automatically, no need for "tricks" (thus less lines of code).

[JunkerJames]

Well, they could have been faked on that stuff, sure. Most of computer graphics is basically just clever hacks.

This tech is doing that stuff in a far more consistent way. And fwiw, this demo didn't look like it was given a parse by an artist... just straight re-used assets which may not have been perfectly appropriate for the demonstration. It's not really supposed to make you buy a game. It's of more interest to developers, who could potentially make this tech sing.

[smiththers2]

i personally cant wait to see intel make it big with this. it will def keep the prices of AMD and NV down, and make everyone work harder to make a better card. Kuddos Intel!

[YukonTrooper]

Sorry, Intel, I'd rather not play at 10.5FPS.

[SparklesofUnity]

Its done in real time ray-tracing, thatswhy is moving so slow, check out this video:

watch?v=oLte5f34ya8

[channelintel]

We appreciate all the comments and dialogue. Just keep it clean pls.

[sweYoda]

Is it only me or did that real time rendering lag really bad and did not look good at all?

[Ashiman]

. It's great for computing (GPGPU/CL). > an nv9800 derivative isnt?

[t0rakka2007]

Until you give random memory access, no, it isn't. Sorry. I didn't mean CL through OpenCL / CUDA -like interfaces, but parallel programming in general.

Performance wise the first iterations will suck. But great news for developers, have to start from somewhere, right?

The pros: extremely flexible compared to GPGPU.

The cons: bloated cores, so it's more expensive to put more of them in the same die. GPU will be superior in performance for "simple" workloads. Think of nv9800 if you want

[Ashiman]

i have papers of how they do massive parallel audio processing " digital waveguide mesh" on 8800gt . The guy seemed happy.

[riDDimann]

You mean the demo that packed dynamic lighting with a high poly-count into 64k whereas, say, Doom 3, that came on a DVD had dynamic lighting and the poly-count of Quake 2?

Raytracing may not be ready yet, but at some point rasterization becomes just too inefficient to further invest any effort into it.

[t0rakka2007]

Rasterization always had problems with translucency for reasons that are obvious to anyone who done any programming in the field. Raytracing scales better with number of primitives, it just has a high overhead / initial cost. It is more expensive to do visibility queries in raytracer than rasterizer but the space is too limited in youtube comments to digress in more detail. =)

[riDDimann]

Rasterization means putting fakes on fakes on fakes ... while dealing with sideeffects in the process. But there's just so much you can fake instead of doing it properly.

[warty4ev3r]

Well, i guess they should have shown crysis at super high settings... or they could have done a side-by-side comparison of larabee to the nvidia 200 series ._.

I have to agree with you =)

[tipoomaster]

Its great that you agree. Its nice that the people who rated us down explained why :/

Ah, negative thumbs. The lowest form of criticism.

[vicj0r]

Real time raytracing is hot but this video is not a good way to show it off. Should have just used the ole spheres and glasses.

[brt5470]

Did anyone realize this is the sxephil music intro? Um... is it a song?

[sweYoda]

Indeed, and I feel a little bit embarrassed to admit it! ^^

[DeadFredVideo]

Intel have used the music that comes with the iLife suite for OS X, you hear those free to use tracks everywhere :)

[storiestold]

Yes! Free tracks! It's all good!

[riDDimann]

Intel doesn't do things to impress your average Youtube commenter. Realtime raytracing with pre-release software on pre-release hardware IS impressive. If you don't get why, then go play Crysis and STFU.

[JumpingJack6]

Completely agree, this is certinaly impressive -- raytraced realtime -- on early silicon, even this alpha platform, comptuationally would play today's game with good frame rates. I am interested to see fully debugged, released HW.

[tal91]

Probably due to ray tracing

[MTd2]

That's horrible. What a waste of money.

[xrhstoskzn]

This is highly dissapointing. They should have made it to competitive rasterized 3D graphics acceleration by now. Instead, we get raytracing demos, which for all intents and purposes are useless in today's commercial console and computer games. Intel should get over themselves and get their act together. No programmer is going to switch over to raytracing graphics in order to accommodate their bizzaro-world "x86 GPU" hybrid.

[BrodyPianist]

ray tracing is the future, this is very exciting. Real time ray tracing is incredible.

[riDDimann]

Um, you can write your own software-rasterizer to run on Larrabee. Carmack used to do that before 3D-hardware was available.

[cardboardsnail]

Looks nice. If the price and driver support is right, I can see myself wanting one of these.