I found some note on the furture changes of game engine what
Tim Sweeney mentioned as the following:
"But realistically, I think that DirectX 10 is the last DirectX graphics API that is truly relevant to developers. In the future, developers will tend to write their own renderers that will use both the CPU and the GPU - using graphics processor programming language rather than DirectX. I think we're going to get there pretty quickly.
I expect that by the time of the release of the next generation of consoles, around 2012 when Microsoft comes out with the successor of the Xbox 360 and Sony comes out with the successor of the PlayStation 3, games will be running 100% on based software pipelines. Yes, some developers will still use DirectX, but at some point, DirectX just becomes a software library on top of ... you know."
- Epic Games, Tim Sweeney
As
Teze said about the above, there are a trend (or movement) which consolidates chips on the board. And with that change, the number of cores of the chip are increased as time passes. Those will make changes on many things concerned about the game engineering side such as game engine even mostly on its renderer part. Saying first the conclusion, what Tim pointed it out is that there will happen common using of software renderer again instead of hardware supported renderer like the present due to the increasing number of the core.
Most of the things are make sense. Also he(
Teze) pointed out different thing of renderer among of Unreal Engines for an example. All prevously released Unreal Engiens have
Pixomatic, a famous software renderer of
RADGameTools.Inc. except Unreal3. So Unreal Engine 3 will be the only one which does not include software renderer. What the point he emphasized is that any changes of hardware trend will not much affect on the
Epic guys.but for other ones? The time for preparing of *BIG* changes may come.
Also there is other evidence which put the truth on the above thing. There was a rumor on the secret, not anymore it is, called '
Larrabee'. Check it and it will make it more clear and then you also can imagine that it will affect on the existing game framework and infrastructure as what
Tom Forsyth mentioned on
his blog.(find it with the keyword, Larrabee)
Lastly, it might be good to mention about
Nebula3's architecture on multithreaded system which can be avaialable on the
link.
ps1.
Not too much passed time as mentioned above, if you have any interest on changes on renderers within two or three years, it might be helpful to see what Wolfgang Engel mentioned on
his blog.
ps 2.
Pixomatic slides can be obtained via this
link. Also there is Dr.Dobbs Journal articles on Pixomatic are available:
part1,
part2,
part3.
