Intel Demonstrates Larrabee Graphics Processor in Action

From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp. has demonstrated its highly-anticipated code-named Larrabee graphics processing unit at Intel Developer Forum 2009. The device was rendering well-known Enemy Territory: Quake Wars ray-tracing demo in real-time. The demo was not interactive, so, it was impossible to say anything about performance of Larrabee. Moreover, the company remained tight-lipped on Larrabee time-to-market schedule, but promised to integrate this GPU into its processors in the future.

“What we are showing you here is an application that demonstrates some of the flexibility of Larrabee. It is running on the Larrabee Software Development Vehicle, so this is the early silicon. And it's also got some other Intel goodness in it. It's got an Intel Gulftown CPU,” said Bill Mark, senior research scientist at Intel labs advanced graphics research.

This is the first time when Intel shows off working Larrabee graphics processors. The company claims that the main advantage of Larrabee is its ability to program the whole rendering pipeline, something, which is not possible even on latest DirectX 11 graphics processing units. Perhaps, this is why Intel has chosen to show off a rather outdated ray-tracing demo during the first public showcase of Larrabee, but not a modern video-game that takes advantage of DirectX 10.1/11.

“What makes Larrabee unique is you get a fully programmable rendering pipeline. So this lets you, in addition to standard DirectX, OpenGL, you can also implement customized rasterization pipelines and, maybe even more interestingly, things like voxel rendering and ray tracing,” said Mr. Mark.

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