Games VP hammers Intel

Keynote speaker Mark Rein, Epic Games Vice President, has spoken out against Intel's integrated graphics chipset business and also on the push towards episodic game content.

Speaking yesterday, Rein proclaimed: "Intel is evil, we need to kick its ass."

"The difference in price in offering better graphics chips is negligible. You couldn't buy a meal for that price. We're talking five to eight bucks," he said. "Intel is killing PC gaming."

Rein suggested that 80 per cent of laptops and 55 per cent of desktops feature integrated graphics. At the end of 2005 Intel had a 32 per cent share of the integrated graphics market, higher than both ATI and Nvidia.

Combining Rein's stats and ours, it means that approximately only a quarter of PCs have Intel integrated graphics. Not quite the doom and gloom the Epic VP has declared. Our statistics come from market analyst Jon Peddie Research, Mark failed to state where his appeared from.

Although we agree with Rein's sentiments that Intel's integrated graphics aren't up to the standards necessary for modern games, surely any self-respecting gamer will stay well-clear of any on-board graphics if they're serious about gaming. Cheap integrated graphics have their role; business PCs and SoHo computers do not need 32 pixel rendering pipelines and 512mb of the latest GDDR4 graphics memory.

Regarding episodic content, such as the recent Half Life 2 episode franchise from Valve, Rein said, "I've heard a lot of insane talk about episodic content. Very little of it makes any actual sense. It's a broken business." Interesting, as Valve seem to be on a pretty little earner with Half Life in its current guise.

The crowd didn't appear too fond of Rein's rants on episodic content, reacting by calling him a 'dinosaur' and similar jibes - but then this type of segmented content wouldn't serve well for a company promoting product such as the latest Unreal engine, all of which are based on the standard full-pricing models.

Let's hope the other conference speakers are of a similar thought-provoking standard. µ