Tim Sweeny, the founder of Epic Games and architect of the Unreal Engine series, looks into the future and says that by 2020, developers will be performing 100% software rendering on the CPU instead of using graphics hardware. In all fairness, he notes that the CPU and GPU of today are getting progressively closer, therefore what we might call a CPU or GPU today may not be the CPU/GPU of the future.
He makes the assumption that in 2012, a 4 Teraflop processor would execute 16,000 operations per pixel at 1920×1080 @ 60 Hz, all the while assuming that 50% of the CPU is reserved for gameplay and 50% for software rendering. This will require massive memory bandwidth. Four Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second (4 TFLOPS) of computing power demands4 Trillion Bytes Per Second of effective memory bandwidth. It is interesting that he uses the 4 TFLOPS system as a benchmark throughout his presentation, for one can buy a 4 TFLOPS system now using four of the latest GPUs from NVidia. Of course, neither the memory bandwidth, nor the programming model, and most certainly not the price, is anywhere near the realm of where it needs to be.
The 74 page presentation includes his opinion of using raytracing, the REYES Rendering Model, and using volumetric rendering in games.
