ATI FirePro driver v8.702 boosts CAD application performance up to 20% - adds blue-line stereo 3D

Over the past year many CAD and 3D sites have noted how the FirePro team has made significant strides in price/performance for the FirePro professional graphics accelerators.

A few years back the limiting factor was the software drivers. The FirePro team got the message loud and clear and have been focused heavily on producing robust, stable high-performance drivers for their FirePro line.

The latest v8.702 driver release is the culmination of much of this effort. The new driver announced today boosts application performance across the board with some notable standouts: CATIA by more than 25% and 3ds Max & PTC Pro/Engineer by more than 20%!

I got my hands on some unofficial side-by-side SPECviewperf tests comparing the FirePro V7750 on the old and new drivers. You can see the results below.

The new drivers are not only boost application performance but also feature:

• Blue-line stereo 3D - In addition to current support of numerous active, passive and autostereoscopic displays, the new driver provides blue-line stereo support for synchronizing 3D glasses. This new mode enables stereo on any ATI FirePro graphics accelerator, without the need for the stereo synchronization connector currently available on select accelerators.
• 10-bit color for PhotoShop - Photoshop users now have the ability to render images with 10-bit per component color, ensuring an exact representation of colors between Photoshop CS4 and their 10-bit display, as well as the ability to maintain an end-to-end 10-bit color workflow in real-time.
• DisplayPort audio - Support for 5.1 Dolby Digital and 5.1 DTS surround sound as well as 8-channel and 2-channel uncompressed audio over the display port connector

ATI FirePro V8750 on Intel’s new Gulftown - the fastest of them all

3DProfessor reviews the new Intel Gulftown desktop CPU (Core i7- 980 Extreme Edition 3.33GHz) with an ATI FirePro V8750 as the graphics accelerator.  The CPU/GPU combination shows some ground breaking scores on several benchmarks. Two word summary: Extremely Fast!

OpenGL 3.3 & 4.0 breathe new life into existing graphics hardware and pave the way for next gen GPUs

Khronos and the OpenGL ARB have made an unprecedented move by releasing two new versions of OpenGL along with two new versions of the OpenGL Shading language all simultaneously. The specs are available here - OpenGL 3.3 , GLSL 3.3, OpenGL 4.0 and GLSL 4.0. This release announced at GDC breathes new life into existing graphics hardware and also paves the way for the next generations of GPUs.

Why two core specs and two language specs at once? OpenGL 4.0 and GLSL 4.0 enables access to new hardware such as the AMD HD5000 series cards which have been shipping for 5 months. OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 3.3 provide new features that will be accessible on a much larger current installed base. You may have noticed that the GLSL revision went from 1.5 to 3.3 and 4.0. To make things easier on developers, the Shading Language versions now match the core OpenGL versions.

OpenGL 3.3

OpenGL 3.3 adds numerous updates to OpenGL functionality to make it more usable. Occlusion queries get a new boolean mode which tells you if any samples passed. Texture lookups can be swizzled before reaching shaders. Instanced arrays allow instanced rendering to reuse attribute data on multiple vertices based on a divisor. Also new is timer functionality that allows applications to find out how long geometry takes to render.

Applications that use many textures or switch texture state frequently will be able to take advantage of the new sampler objects in OpenGL 3.3. These new objects can encapsulate traditional texture state, allowing an application to use the same texture sample state on multiple texture images or multiple sample states on the same texture image. This makes texture setup much faster and easier for applications to track.

OpenGL 4.0

OpenGL 4.0 includes all of OpenGL 3.3 plus a slew of new stuff including enhanced blending, indexed drawing from buffer objects and enhanced transform feedback functionality. It also provides access to double precision floating point data types in shaders, key for compute, design, and digital content creation where precision is critical. New texture functionality allows for advanced texture gather fetches, new texture buffer formats and cube map array textures.

OpenGL 4.0 tessellation for worskation applications

One of the biggest additions to OpenGL 4.0 is tessellation. This new feature allows an application to amplify geometry, generating tessellated geometry based on incoming vertices. Tessellation can help applications take a rough object defined by only a few vertices and generate new vertices to smooth out the object and provide more detail. Check the Stumbling Ahead blog for more info. Using tessellation can be a huge win for many workstation applications which tend to be vertex and bandwidth limited.

GL Shading Language

The GL Shading Language has also been updated with the ability to dynamically assign subroutine usage at runtime. This means you can create a GLSL program that has many different subroutines and then pick which ones are used to alter lighting, material, or other effects as each piece of geometry is rendered. This makes program management much easier and introduces previously unattainable runtime flexibility.

OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 continue to progress 3D API standards, increasing flexibility and usability for applications. Just as important, Khronos and the OpenGL ARB continue to work on bringing you the latest and greatest access to 3D hardware.

AMD Open Physics adds Pixelux Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) and updated Bullet Physics

AMD announced that their Open Physics Initiative now offers game developers the free Bullet Physics as the default rigid body physics system combined with Pixelux’s DMM2 ( Digital Molecular Matter) material physics engine.  Developers can now design and interact with rigid body systems familiar to them and easily add DMM objects incrementally enabling them to bend and break based on real physical properties.

The Free PC version of DMM2 has no license fee for development or production deployment and includes all the features of the premium version including GPU acceleration. Free PC DMM2 is expected to be made available shortly to interested developers.  All of the Bullet Physics implementations described above can be run on any OpenCL- or DirectCompute-capable platform

AMD launches contest giving away an $8,100 Magny Cours 48 core setup

The AMD ”What would you do with 48 cores?” contest asks you to write an essay/blog or video describing what you would do with a 48 core system to make the world a better place. The winner receives an $8,100 setup including a TYAN 4S board and four 12-core Opteron Magny Cours processors.

Hopefully, there will be some interesting entries and the winner will be someone who can really take advantage of what is essentially a supercomputer setup.  In particular I was thinking that some OpenCL-savvy developer would describe a compelling new solution since OpenCL can take advantage of all 48 CPU cores (as well as the more traditional GPU cores).

The actual prize is:

• Four new AMD Opteron processors Model 6174, 12-core (2.2 GHz)
• TYAN S8812 motherboard: the motherboard is a Tyan S8812 that features 4 processor sockets with the capacity for you to install up to 8 DIMMs per socket
• one copy of Windows Server 2008

Rumor: Apple to adopt Radeon HD 5750 for next-gen iMacs

I typically try to avoid propagating rumors of unannounced/unconfirmed products but since I have an iMac here on my desk, in need of a replacement, I was excited to read a rumor on BSN that Apple will be incorporating ATI Radeon HD 5750’s into an upcoming iMac refresh (the current Core i5/i7 iMacs use ATI Radeon HD 4850s).

What makes this particularly interesting:  screaming OpenGL 3.2 support, screaming DirectX 11 support when running as a PC (or under virtualization?), and a great engine for OpenCL which is an integral part of the Mac OS.

Will digital signage be the “breakthrough” market for Stereo 3D?

“Avatar” and all of the hype about stereo 3D-enabled TVs aside, I still don’t get the impression that stereo 3D has really found it’s breakthrough application.  CG generated films have a definite niche.  But 3D micro-shutter glasses for you and your friends/family in your living room (fragile, costly and headache inducing)?  I don’t think so.

3D visualization for CAD, design, architecture and mapping is a real market (check out the Infinite Z immersive, real-time virtual-holographic display, and Zebra Imaging plastic holograms for mapping and architectural design.).  But it is still very limited in terms of market penetration and the ultimate value to most CAD/Design users is still untested.

But when it comes to something that is more pervasive and mainstream, I am wondering if it will be 3D digital signage that ends up the big breakthrough application. Last week was the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas and I noticed several press releases about companies planning to release auto-stereoscopic (no glasses needed) 3D digital signage that will be “popular with companies looking to reach consumers that have become desensitized to traditional media.”

As I wrote about previously, the upcoming Catalyst 10.3 driver for Radeons will introduce 3D stereo driver hooks - enabling third-party vendors to take advantage of more 3D stereoscopic options.

Barco releases graphics controller optimized for mammography & radiology 3D based on FirePro GPU

Barco has introduced a new graphics display controller, the MXRT-7300, specifically designed to speed up 3D imaging and digital mammography applications in radiology departments. It is powered by a FirePro workstation GPU with 1 GB memory. It supports 10-bit (1,024 simultaneous levels of gray and over 1 billion colors) display of up to 3,280 x 2,048 pixel images. This level of shading gradation and resolution is critical for accurate visual diagnosis using digital images,.

“With the brand-new MXRT-7300 graphics processor, our customers will enjoy an immediate performance improvement when manipulating large datasets in mammography, as well as an acceleration of OpenGL and DirectX functions increasingly common in high-end PACS (picture archiving and communication systems) environments”

Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 - driving 6 HD displays from one GPU

AMD announced the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 Edition, which lets you drive six monitors from a single extreme GPU for a maximum resolution of 6 X 2560 X 1600 pixels, powered by a single extreme GPU.  It provides six Mini DisplayPort connectors to directly drive the display or through adapters for single-link DVI and HDMI. Essentially the Radeon 5870 E6 is a 2GB version of the Radeon 5870 equipped with 6 mini-DisplayPorts for its output and 2GB of GDDR5 memory to accommodate the extremely large frame buffer needed by six HD displays.

No performance or pricing information has been set. Also no mention specifically of a CrossFireX option to offer additional power to drive the 6 displays without lag.

Since this is a Radeon card, everyone is talking about the 6 displays in terms of game play by the enthusiast.  But where I see this as really relevant will be in productivity (multiple apps on multiple screens) and of course as it moves into professional CAD and VizSim for things like virtual prototyping and design. 

gDEBugger OpenGL debugger and profiler adds AMD GPU specific tools

gDEBugger is an OpenGL debugger and profiler which runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The new v5.5 release adds AMD GPU Performance Counters integration, displaying AMD (ATI) graphic hardware and driver performance counters inside gDEBugger’s Performance Graph and Performance Dashboard Views, allowing developers to optimize OpenGL application performance on ATI FirePro and Radeon graphics hardware.