Intel's upcoming 'Haswell' chip primed for gaming

On future Haswell chips, more realistic rendering is enabled (R).

(Credit: Anandtech)

Intel wants to make its future "Haswell" chip better than past generations of silicon at gaming and announced tools to make this happen at the Game Developers Conference today.

The world's largest chipmaker announced tools, known as extensions, for software developers that allow Intel's 4th generation Intel Core, aka Haswell, to process demanding special effects.

The first of these extensions, called PixelSync, allows programmers to more realistically render smoke, hair, windows, foliage, fences, and other complex geometry and natural phenomena, according to Intel.

"The artists working on Grid2 have been requesting this type of effect for years, and prior to this, it wasn't possible to achieve it at a reasonable cost," Clive Moody, senior executive producer at Codemasters Racing, the game's developer, said in a statement.

The expected widespread adoption of Haswell on tens of millions of PCs "is very exciting to us," he added.

PixelSync enables a feature called Order Independent Transparency (OIT). "Given that Haswell...will be more limited on memory and memory bandwidth than the highest end discrete [graphics processing units], it makes sense that Intel is motivated to find a smaller footprint and more bandwidth efficient way t... [Read more]