Nvidia aren’t known for their demure and shy antics, so I wasn’t surprised at a press briefing a few weeks ago when they launched an attack on what some quarters - namely Intel with their new Larrabee GPU - who have identified ray-tracing as the future of graphics.

They spent a great deal of time assuring the assembled members of the IT press that it was a waste of time - every game since before the turn of the Millennium (indeed, since the demise of voxels) because every game is made using polygons and that developers wouldn’t want to alter their techniques and systems around a new, somewhat experimental technology.

So, why have Nvidia gone and bought a ray-tracing company?

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So, after finding out that Intel were planning to release its own graphics card - the mysterious and, at the moment, practically mythical Larrabee - the Nvidia boardroom must have been a fun place to be. The GPU market is, after all, where the Californian company has ruled the roost for the past few years thanks to the strength of the 8000-series and, now, the emergence of some decent 9000 series cards like the 9600 GT and 9800 GTX.

Evidently, it’s decided to come out on the offensive: Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang recently lambasted Intel’s integrated graphics, which have long been a staple of PCs that don’t need to play games and edit demanding videos, as ‘a joke’. He also boasted of his plans to ‘open a can of whoop-ass’ onto Intel, which must be quaking in its boots - after all, its CPUs haven’t done that well, and they certainly not market leaders with no real competitors. Ahem.

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