John Carmack, the man behind Doom, Doom 2, a few other Doom's, a few game engines, and many other projects went ahead and had a lengthy interview with PC Perspective. Just what did they talk about? A number of things that ran the gambit from ray tracing, consoles, his latest game engine, PhysX, the usage of multiple GPU's in a machine, and advances in mobile gaming graphics.
PCPER: Do you think moving physics to a GPU is a benefit?This interview is actually split up into two different versions. We have the "normal" version here and a more technical, "expert" version. Go ahead and pick your poison.
CARMACK: Right now, to offload tasks like that you have to be able to go ahead and stick them in a pretty deep pipeline so it doesn’t fit the way people do physics modeling in their games very well right now. But as people choose to either change their architecture to allow a frame of latency in the reports of collision detection in physics or we get much finer grain parallelization where you don’t have this really long latency and you can kind of force an immediate mode call to GPU operations, then we start using that just the way we do SSE instructions or something in our current code base. Then, yeah, we definitely will wind up using compute resources for things like that or collision detection physics.