2006-7: CPU's become so fast and powerful that 3D hardware will be only marginally beneficial for rendering, relative to the limits of the human visual system, therefore 3D chips will likely be deemed a waste of silicon (and more expensive bus plumbing), so the world will transition back to software-driven rendering. And, at this point, there will be a new renaissance in non-traditional architectures such as voxel rendering and REYES-style microfacets, enabled by the generality of CPU's driving the rendering process. If this is a case, then the 3D hardware revolution sparked by 3dfx in 1997 will prove to only be a 10-year hiatus from the natural evolution of CPU-driven rendering.
This would change direct x and open gl a lot wouldnt it?
At NVIDIA's recent NVISION conference, Sweeney sat down with me for a wide-ranging conversation about the rise and impending fall of the fixed-function GPU, a fall that he maintains will also sound the death knell for graphics APIs like Microsoft's DirectX and the venerable, SGI-authored OpenGL. Game engine writers will, Sweeney explains, be faced with a C compiler, a blank text editor, and a stifling array of possibilities for bending a new generation of general-purpose, data-parallel hardware toward the task of putting pixels on a screen.
I think not only that, but it will allow a lot of more esoteric programming languages to build game engines also. For example, I always thought about building a game engine with
euphoria but was limited because of not understanding the COM model I would have to use c++ for direct x or open gl, so it would provide a shorter path to the machine. As mentioned when he said:
A real programming language unconstrained by weird API restrictions
Therefore I support the change 100%
Also by removing direct x we remove the need for microsoft, which is GREAT!
Thanks.