Interview: Intel’s Richard Huddy

Although the PC gaming market is still huge, over recent years it’s been hit hard by piracy problems, while the desktop PC, with its powerful graphics cards, has suffered from a lack of cutting-edge software to justify it; meanwhile the market has moved towards towards mobile and free-to-play software.

To find out what’s going on, we talked to Richard Huddy, European Gaming Enablement Manager at Intel to find out how the PC graphics market has changed, Intel’s plans for on-chip GPU and if the PC has had its day as a games platform. With a career in PC graphics starting with 3DLabs in 1996 and encompassing big roles at Nvidia and ATI, Huddy has been at the forefront of this every-changing industry.

THE EVER-PRESENT PC

The games market has changed a lot over the years, with the PC often getting a console conversion of a title, rather than its own version. It’s this combined with some high-profile prophecies of the PC’s doom that have led to speculation that the traditional computer isn’t a force to be recognised with. Look at the figures and talk to the experts, though, and it becomes clear that this simply isn’t true.

“I remember reading an interview with Tim Sweeney from Epic from around 12 years ago, where he predicts the death of the PC graphics card in five years,” said Huddy. “Now, Tim’s a smart guy, but he managed to get this one wrong.”

It’s now estimated that the PC gaming market is larger, by revenue, than the console market, showing that it’s strong and healthy still. The reason that the PC has managed to thrive for so long is down to its ability to adapt and change. It’s this ability that Huddy believes will mean the continuation of the platform’s success.

“The PC has plenty of legs and there’s a lot of creativity in the business, making it a compelling platform,” he said.

PIRACY

One of the biggest issues with the PC as a gaming platform has been the free-and-easy piracy of titles. With developers spending ever-more on the big-name titles (some games have Hollywood-sized budgets), piracy has been a big issue for them. It’s also something that Huddy believes the PC market has dealt with extremely well, to the point where piracy is no longer the issue it once was.

“Games developers dealt with piracy by going for online validation, and the environment is quite similar to consoles with a closed ecosystem,” Huddy told us. “Going to games developers, the major concern used to be piracy, now it’s lower down the list. Piracy is no longer the killer.”

BIG SCREEN

Where consoles have an advantage is that they’re designed to sit in the living room, using your big-screen TV for gaming. Traditionally the humble computer hasn’t fared well in the living room with Microsoft unable to persuade people that they should have a PC underneath their TV. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the PC hasn’t made it into the living room.

“It’s not obvious to me that Microsoft tried and failed,” Huddy said. “It took the technology from the PC and made the Xbox and Xbox 360.”

While the architecture of PC made it to the living room, it’s fair to say that the standard computer is not a common fixture. That doesn’t mean that it won’t be and there are new approaches to make this happen. Most recently, it’s something that Steam wants to do with its Big Picture mode. This is a brand-new interface that makes Steam easier to use on a TV. It’s something that Huddy believes can potentially change the PC’s perception and its use, although not necessarily with Windows.

“Steam has been outspoken about Windows 8 and the interface changes Microsoft has made, although you’d have to talk to them about that,” said Huddy. “It’s also looking at getting developers to write for Linux.

“With the delivery platform [Steam’s] offering, they’re approaching the PC as an open/closed environment – open in that Linux is open source, but closed in that they can lock the system down.”

The PC has a big future as a gaming platform and Steam’s Big Picture mode could put it in the living room

THE GRAPHICS CARD MARKET

Over recent years the graphics card market has been flooded with endless models from both AMD and Nvidia, with a huge gulf in performance between the top and the bottom. It’s something that Huddy believes makes things complicated for consumers and Intel’s goal is to “make the low-end discrete graphics cards pretty close to obsolete”.

Intel’s method of doing this is to integrate the graphics onto the CPU, providing decent gaming in one package. It’s something the company is completely focussed on, having ditched plans to try anything else.

“At one point we were looking at a discrete card, but now we’re putting a lot of effort going down the alternate GPU route [an integrated GPU on the CPU] and the discrete card has gone away as an aim now,” said Huddy. “This year it really doesn’t make sense for a $50 or $60 card, as the graphics are so powerful in Ivy Bridge.”

INTEGRATION

It’s the integration of graphics and CPU that plays to Intel’s strengths, but the company also believes that this combination gives it a competitive advantage.

“Sharing memory bus and cache gives an advantage that discrete cards can’t give. CPU to GPU transfers here are very fast, and you may only get 10 per cent of that with discrete cards,” said Huddy. “There’s no doubt that our CPUs are best in the world, tightly coupling that with quality GPU is really a big step forwards.”

Intel has, in recent times, also changed its approach to integrated graphics, making them more important, as Huddy explained: “We used to take a small amount of die space for the GPU, we’re now asking how much die space does the GPU need?”

Intel has put more effort and emphasis on graphics, giving the GPU more space on the die

A GPU isn’t just important for games and its architecture makes it useful for other tasks, such as video editing, where certain tasks can be offloaded from the processor. Using the GPU for other tasks is something that Intel is very keen on.

“It’s a big deal to us, and Intel has Quick Sync Video [hardware and video decoding technology],” said Huddy. “We’ve moved away from the idea that pure x86 is best for everything. Video processing has special needs that don’t fit with this view.”

This change in view about the x86 architecture is an important one for Intel, as it opens the company up to new ideas and can make tasks faster. Huddy explains that sometimes the old way of doing things, such as increasing clock speed to get a faster processor, can cause problems: “Sometimes just pushing clock speed actually reduces performance, as you’re just heating up the PC.”

FIXED FUNCTIONS

Creating technology such as QuickSync for hardware video encoding and decoding is called fixed-function technology, as it’s designed to do one job. Adding more fixed function technology to its chips is something that Intel is looking at more and more.

“We fit in more fixed-function hardware to run specific tasks at high speed,” said Huddy. “We’re looking at integrating more and more fixed function hardware.”

This kind of fixed-function technology has become more and more important, culminating in Intel’s new tablet processors, which have more integration than ever seen before.

“We have chips so that everything Microsoft wants exposed on Windows 8 is exposed,” said Huddy.

Huddy was also keen to point out the advantages of its processors on Windows 8 tablets, as they’ll let “all x86 applications” run. By contrast, as Huddy explained, “It’s rather different from the ARM version, where it’s not clear what will run.”

POWER UP

It’s not just about making its processors faster, but Intel’s tight integration also helps with power consumption, which Huddy called the “number one consideration at Intel”. Power consumption has become more and more important, particularly with the uptake of mobile devices, which are battery powered and need to last for a day’s worth of use away from the mains.

“It turns out that when you have two chips communicating across a wire, about 50 per cent of power is just about the physical interface [PHY], so it’s quite inefficient to have lots of different chips,” says Huddy. “More and more integration helps this. Being efficient in the power a CPU uses and being efficient per watt is key to Intel.”

IMPORTANT TODAY

All of this change in the market means that there’s more to choosing a graphics card than pure frame rates, as Huddy explained: “Typically leadership has been about the highest frame rate on the latest API. Now, all manufacturers have the same API and support DirectX 11. Now, it’s about the gaming experience, whether it’s on a gaming console with high quality graphics, or on a phone where you don’t want it to take 10 minutes to load.

“Leadership shifts from the fastest frame rate – the difference from 200fps to 210fps is meaningless, as your monitor will only display 60fps – to robust gaming and an instant-on experience, which we’ve been promoting with Ultrabook.”

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High performance with low power requirements is something that’s incredibly important to Intel, particularly with Ultrabooks

That’s not to say that frame rates and high quality graphics aren’t an important factor when it comes to PC games. In this regard, Intel’s on-chip graphics can’t compete with the latest hardware from Nvidia or AMD, so we asked Huddy where he thought Intel would be in the future.

“The graphics chips that we’re building are more and more potent year-on-year. There’s a curve that comes out of the fab process on CPUs, with Moore’s law saying that the complexity of a chip doubles every two years, which basically leads to a doubling of performance,” said Huddy. “However, it happens that the GPU side can grow that faster.

“We’ll be able to produce higher resolutions and higher quality graphics. We’ll continue to move up. We can cut into the gaming process and more people will see us and choose us. Intel cares about graphics.”