Concept art for Intel’s Larrabee launch title released

Exclusive – In February of this year, Intel acquired game developer Offset Software and its game engine technology with the obvious goal to deliver a game that can show off the capabilities of its upcoming discrete graphics card, code-named Larrabee. Late Friday we got our hands on new concept art, revealing some of the work that has been done over the past six months and received word that Offset will also be launching a new community to collect feedback from gamers on Monday.

It is a bit early to get excited about Intel’s Larrabee graphics chip and even if you are a PC enthusiast, you may want to be thinking about purchasing another “regular” graphics card, before you can get a better idea of at what Intel’s “many-x86 core” graphics card may be capable of. But Intel is aiming high and we don’t expect Intel to throw out anything that can’t compete with the best there is once Larrabee will be available in 2009 and 2010.

To demonstrate its horsepower, Intel will have to have at least one compelling launch title – and to make sure that it will exploit everything Larrabee has to offer, the company purchased Offset Software in early 2008. There have been a few screens available so far and today we received two more that showcase the direction Offset is thinking. Still images can’t tell the whole story and we are careful voicing any opinion how capable Project Offset will be. Instead, click into our gallery below and see for yourself.

The other piece of news Offset and Intel will announce on Monday is the relaunch of Offset’s community forum at 10 AM PST. We hear the Offset team is “excited” to be back online and touch base with users again. That is, of course, because Offset hopes to get user feedback on the game title it is developing.

Project Offset, developed as a first person shooter based on the Offset engine, has been a little known effort until a video leaked to the web in July 2007. The visuals received praise, but the company almost disappeared from the surface of the earth when Intel announced that it had acquired the studio. No further information about Project Offset has been provided since then and as far as the game engine is concerned, we only know that it has been licensed by Red5 Studios. Project Offset was rumored to be a PC only game before the Intel acquisition and now we are certain that this in fact will be the case. Intel would not pour money into a game that may look better on a game console than on a PC.

That said, keep in mind that video gaming is Intel’s strategy to drive mass-market adoption of Larrabee. The technology is foremost a many-core x86 product that is being built to do much more than render games, but is spearheading Intel’s visual computing strategy, which will also include floating point acceleration. If Intel’s strategy works out and it can sell enough Larrabee products to convince software developers not to write highly threaded code for Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, it may be able to keep programmers on the x86 track and may decide the many-core technology race for the CPU and against the GPU.