Twilight of the GPU- an epic interview with Tim Sweeney on Ars Technica talks with the Epic Games CEO and chief architect about the future of graphics programming. Tim predicts the next generation will see the death of the API, saying, "I expect that in the next generation we'll write 100 percent of our rendering code in a real programming language—not DirectX, not OpenGL, but a language like C++ or CUDA." He also discusses the demise of the discrete GPU, though this is less dire: "So I think you'll see some degree of fixed-function hardware in everybody's architectures for the foreseeable future, and it doesn't matter. And as long as the hardware is sufficiently programmable, we're fine with that." He also makes interesting comments about DirectX, saying DX9 "was the last graphics API that really mattered" and that "DirectX 10 takes DirectX 9 and adds some weird fixed-function components on top of it, which fit in a very particular place in the pipeline, and are hard to use."