Intel Thinks Future Gaming will be in the Cloud and Mobile with Knights Ferry

Intel is betting that gamers want awesome portable graphics and so is working on some cloud-based ray tracing techniques that would offload the processing power for graphics to the cloud and simply stream down the data for display.

It sounds bandwidth intensive as well as unlikely to be the end-all be-all of mobile gaming, especially when we already have Tegra 2 coming into focus with some pretty incredible graphics in its own right. Additionally, you would have to have always on mobile data in order to attach to the cloud and you would have to have great connection speed so that the graphics didn’t lag everything. Color me skeptical.

I read an article over at PC World that called ray tracing a new technology and that made me laugh. We all know it’s been around forever, or at least since 1979 anyway. Other than that there was some pretty cool technical info in the article which is here.

They talk about Intel’’s codename Knights Ferry which is an MIC (many integrated core) with 32 cores and 512-vector processing units. It’s made to do big graphics but again, it will be in the cloud meaning that the bottleneck will be the connection between. Perhaps this will help services like OnLive and perhaps not. I can’t see paying for a service that simply does graphics processing for games via ray tracing anytime soon. It could allow for some far better looking MMO games though.

However, I am still skeptical. I don’t know that 3G speeds are great enough to even allow for that to happen in real-time. I wonder if they mean they are going to do something more like OnLive where the game runs in the cloud and they literally stream video of it down to your device and stream your input back to it. Again, it needs fairly fast connection speeds. Even on Wi-Fi I have seen very poor performance at OnLive so I can’t see this gaining loads of traction.

Then again, it is Intel and they tend to do things decently. But they have never been all that great at graphics and their integrated graphics are still the worst around. Anything that’s going to be graphically intensive I think needs to be done locally via either NVIDIA or AMD and that’s that.