30-bits really IS visually impressive - Report from SIGGRAPH

Wednesday - In my previous overview of Pat's and my tour of the AMD/ATI booth, I mentioned that the new DreamColor monitor was being specially displayed as being compatible with the new FirePro line. After visiting the HP booth and reading an article on it in the August '08 Computer Graphics World magazine, (CGW) I wanted to explain a bit more about the DreamColor display.

The DreamColor was created through collaboration between HP and DreamWorks Animation after DreamWorks saw the need for an affordable alternative to expensive LCD displays for their productions. They already were in a technology partnership with HP, and it eventually became the HP DreamColor Technology initiative. Their new display, the LP2480zx, adheres to industry standards for color spaces and "customers can [even] control color nuances such as gamut, gamma, white-point, black levels and luminence."

HP is advertising the LP2480zx to be marketed worldwide starting at $3,499. In my opinion, it's a great price, considering the value and capabilities. I had the chance to see DreamColor in action, and I must say it's visually impressive. I'd definitely be looking into purchasing one, if student loans weren't an issue!

On another note, I got the chance to sit in on a session called OpenGL: What's Coming Down the Graphics Pipeline. The class was hosted by Dave Shreiner (ARM), Ed Angel, (University of New Mexico ARTS Lab) Bill Licea-Kane (AMD), and Evan Hart. (NVIDIA) For the most part, it covered the basics and history of the OpenGL pipeline. Even though I've studied the basics in texts before, I find there's something special to be gained from having it repeated in-person.

They started us off with flowcharts and a full overview of the pipeline, covering vertex and fragment shaders, and how they fit into the big picture. We then got to hear about the underlying mathematics and theory behind working in OpenGL. Bill Licea-Kane covered the specific shader coding principles, with many examples of functions in present and previous versions of GLSL. These principles were reinforced through a few sample shaders and examples. Finally, the entire session wrapped with a look ahead to what's coming for OpenGL. On Monday, they had announced OpenGL 3.0, and they went on to cite some of its new features including sRGB framebuffer mode, API support of texture lookup for OpenGL Shading Language 1.30, conditional rendering, and floating-point color and depth formats for textures and renderbuffers.

All-in-all, this sounds very exciting! I'm very anxious to see how well this runs in conjunction with the FirePro line this fall!