As you have read in one of my previous posts, there'll be a huge war between CPU and GPU regarding Physics in games. But that's not all.

As CPUs get more and more cores and become more efficient in Ray Tracing, they will try to overthrow GPUs out of the market.
On the other hand, GPUs are becoming more and more General Purpose (GPGPU) and things like CUDA (on nVIdia GeForce 8 or later) are already challenging CPU. Nvidia launched the APX2500, a system-on-a-chip product that uses an ARM11 core for CPU-type computing and an ULP GeForce for the rest of the system.


Now-a-days, Ray Tracing is really getting some attention due to Intel's Larrabee. Recently, nVidia commented on Ray Tracing. They believe that rasterization will not be overthrown by ray tracing and that it will always be preferred cause of its speed advantage. However, they also believe ray tracing will make its place in time and a combination rendering is the way to go and their GPGPUs will be able to handle both (ray tracing through CUDA).


"Software Rendering!" Rings any bells? Remember how once upon a time, we used to play many newer games using this? Hold you breath. This might make a comeback! A direct comment from the Tim Sweeney (Unreal creator and a member of MS DirectX Advisory Board):

Rendering can be done on the CPU. As soon as we have enough CPU cores and better vector support, these schemes might get more practical for games. And: As GPUs become more general, you will have the possibility of writing a rendering engine that runs directly on the GPU and bypasses DirectX as well as the graphics pipeline. For example, you can write a render in CUDA and run it on Nvidia hardware, bypassing all of their rasterization and everything else.
All a software renderer really does is input some scene data, your position of objects, texture maps and things like that - while the output is just a rectangular grid of pixels. You can use different techniques to generate this grid. You don’t have to use the GPU rasterizer to achieve this goal.