John Carmack Interview: GPU Race, Intel Graphics, Ray Tracing and Voxels and more! - PC Perspective

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/John-Carmack-Interview-GPU-Race-Intel-...

Last week we were in Dallas, Texas covering Quakecon 2011 as well as hosting our very own PC Perspective Hardware Workshop. While we had over 1100 attendees at the event and had a blast judging the case mod contest, one of the highlights of the event is always getting to sit down with John Carmack and pick his brain about topics of interest. We got about 30 minutes of John's time over the weekend and pestered him with questions about the GPU hardware race, how Intel's intergrated graphics (and AMD Fusion) fit in the future of PCs, the continuing debate about ray tracing, rasterization, voxels and infinite detail engines, key technologies for PC gamers like multi-display engines and a lot more!

One of our most read articles of all time was our previous interview with Carmack that focused a lot more on the ray tracing and rasterization debate. If you never read that, much of it is still very relevant today and is worth reading over.

This year though John has come full circle on several things including ray tracing, GPGPU workloads and even the advantages that console hardware has over PC gaming hardware.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• john
• carmack
• interview
• quakecon
• amd
• nvidia
• intel
• gpu
• voxel
• infinite
• detail
• euclideon
• ray
• tracing

[MooMan5k]

Leave the interviewer alone, if God himself came down to explain the nature of the universe, wouldn't you be nervous and confused.

[eriphoor]

I could listen to John all day long. Very interesting on his inside opinions of hardware, software and the balance of creativity.

[ezjohny1]

Very well said John Carmack, Sony,Microsoft and Intel should watch this video so they could have a understanding what a " Game Developer" gos through when he is making a video game!!!

[nougatbitz]

Multisampled nerdgasms raytracing their way through my pants right now.

[Enderu666]

@bernverdnardo1 Both "vertexes" and "vertices" are correct.

[Naroon201]

I want that Quake 2 shirt so badly.

[ford460v8]

lol you can tell the interviewer is trying to hurry him up

[EquinoxIV]

Ask not what Skyrim can do for you, ask what you can do for Skyrim (or the next Bethesda game and the engine it runs on).

[stewox1]

@MooMan5k And im an ethusiast and understand these terms, so it's not really that hard for me what carmack means, maybe stuff with raytracing is something i didn't yet researched, but i totally understand what he's saying about API low level issues on PC ... just imagine if PC GPU hardware allowed direct access.

[stewox1]

@MooMan5k This interviewer is just fine, he obviously doesn't know everything but he's trying to understand, he's not a big media whore such as geoff keighley and all that mainstream shit.

[TheDoomerBlox]

"itsoftware", aaaa.

"I-Dee" Software. D:

[akabersi]

Dear John, may I have some NZT-48 too, please?