Tim Sweeney talks Larrabee performance
AS PROMISED, HERE WE bring you part two of our GDC interview with Tim Sweeney. This one gets a lot more technical, looking at the intricacies of Intel's Larrabee CGPU.
Same picture as before, just horribly cropped
If you didn't read Part 1, you missed out a lot, so go back and take the time to not just read, but soak in the wisdom imparted in the other half before you go on, we would not want to lose you. That said, on with the technical minutia.
The Inquirer: Just like sportscars, do you you think Larrabee would be faster if it came on a red PCB?
Tim Sweeney: I'm a big fan of metallic orange.
There you have it, fixing the architecture with a seemingly minor change. No wonder the Unreal Engine has such a broad range of usable configurations, things like metallic orange bits and love go into the code.
Next year, we will try to get his opinion of making point-to-point CPU connections faster with vinyl tape and unpainted plastic trim bits. Stay tuned. µ
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ORSM!!
Can't wait to see what the spare plastic trim might bring.... think I have some old Airfix sprue hanging around. good times a comin'!
Cool beans, cool beans.
And yes, that photo is horribly (or 'really arty-like' - if you meant it that way!) cropped.
This was as life-changing as the last interview, a bit too much depth for me but informative nonetheless.
Can't wait untill you interview Jen-Hsun Huang... :D
You wasted my time, goodbye. :(
Seriously? Thats it? Nothing? You give us nothing? WTF good sir? WTF?
Oh, great! A late april fools joke. Yea, I'm sorry, I grew out of that when I was 15.
Its that look of quiet resignation that gets me, as if to say, "OMG its t'Inq, which way up are they going to crucify me today".
Or did you just catch him pointing at the door and photoshop the card in?
...is what other questions were really asked, and that the answers were so much more incredibly unuseful that they wern't even worth showing.
I'll believe in an Intel GPU that doesn't suck balls when I see it. (And I still probably won't believe it!)
Well worth the wait.
From the lack of additional talk, I read from it that Mr Sweeney suspects that Larrrabee in its first incarnation will be a power hungry poorly performing architecture too.
Still, it will keep the "must have it" fanbois happy until it becomes what it sets out to be. If it ever does.
Wow, Holding theREDCARD, What Masterful Gamesmenship. This commentos is how XP Software has come back to life on Windows 7. Remember how XP Software would blow your Vista Ultimate Build to heaven, Now with Updates, especially on 7, adding older software is breeze. Everyone is doing it. Coin Sweeny to arcade Rescue, I Say: Save Our Cities. drashek
Was on April 1 in case you missed it...
None-the-less, humour is humour :-D
L'inq n' badges
I gather Tim is on record snarking at Intel onboard graphics for screwing up the games industry.
Its an interesting perspective and you have to wonder where he was coming from but if you try to see it from his point of view it kind of makes sense.
If every mom & pop soho PC was also a hot gaming rig you would expect a lot more games sales to the various parties permitted to use it on weekends if not to mom and pop themselves. Though mom is more likely to have been a Will Wright fan in this alternative timeline, playing Sims, unless they were both WoW players of course... but I digress.
While considering the various unrealities that might have been I cannot avoid the conclusion that if you make games with engines that Intel chips can play, then you could sell them to far more people now than you could say 5 years ago, slump or no slump. In any case, complaining is the customer's job.
What I don't think is a realistic expectation is the idea Larrabee could be such a graphical miracle it will somehow fix the issue that you cant play an advanced 3D DX10.1 game designed for $200 graphics accelerators on a $15 integrated motherboard graphics chip.
But that shouldn't worry Tim, since unreal is now geared for XBox and even a modest PC card will out perform XBox. So it has to be pretty well optimised on the lucrative side of the min spec issue.
ATI still wins the bang for buck contest in the graphics department, for now. I cant see non-integrated Larrabee taking that crown in one generation nor any integrated Intel spinoffs making add in cards redundant just yet. Add on cards are far too lucrative for that.
2c
/deletes The Inq from bookmarks
Transparent MBs are the future.
You guys blame the wrong person. The INQ made excellent questions. It's Tim who gave stupid answeres. Metallic orange?! Everbody knows blue is cooler!!