http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/...graphics_api_/

Tim Sweeney, member of Microsoft's advisory board

In the future, developers will tend to write their own renderers that will use both the CPU and the GPU - using graphics processor programming language rather than DirectX. I think we're going to get there pretty quickly.

I expect that by the time of the release of the next generation of consoles, around 2012 when Microsoft comes out with the successor of the Xbox 360 and Sony comes out with the successor of the PlayStation 3, games will be running 100% on based software pipelines [= no directx].

It is hard to say at what point we are going to see graphics hardware being able to understand C++ code. But data will be processed right on the GPU. Then, you are going to get the GPU's computational functionality to a point where you can - not that this is useful, but it will be a very important experiment - recompile the kernel for a GPU and actually run the Linux kernel off the GPU - running entirely by itself. Then, the boundary between the CPU and the GPU will become just a matter of performance trade-offs.


http://www.radgametools.com/pixowhy.htm