AMD Booth Tour - real-time lighting, dynamic tessalation, stereo 3D output - report from Siggraph

Tuesday was the AMD/ATI booth tour!  As soon as we got their we met up with Bill Shane, official title is “business development executive”.  Bill tooks us around to the different displays withing the AMD/ATI booth and explained to Tim and I what was going on in each display.  This very first thing he showed us was a workstation running one of the top-end FireGL and was demonstrating a car demo put together by Works Zebra of Tokyo that allowed you to customize a car any way you want.  The interesting this about this demo was that the software was using the GPU to compute real-time lighting for the car. So no reflection maps on surfaces or lights.  There’s no need.  The FireGL was able to compute the lighting on the fly!  Another big thing was they had announced today the FirePro line of graphics cards. Bill confirmed that the low end card would in fact be $99!  I couldn’t get a price for the midrange FirePro the FirePro V5700.  But I do know that the low end FirePro V3700 has 256mb graphics memory, 2 dual link enabled DVI outputs, and “next generation GPU with 40 unified shader proccessors” The midrange FirePro V5700 has next generation GPU with 320 unified shader proccessors, 512 mb memory, 2 Display Ports and one dual link DVI, and HDR rendering with 8-bit, 10-bit, and 16-bit per RGB color component!  Those two cards are said to be coming in the fall.

Starting with the FireGL V7600 the cards all have HD component video out, at least 512 of memory, and Stereoscopic support!  Along with that, the top of the line FireGL V8650 comes with 2GB of memory!

Going back to the booth now Bill showed us a station where they were demonstrating their GPGPU’s which are GPU’s without outputs.  Which means you basically have the added bonus of two graphics cards without the second card doing anything beside computations.  And the last thing I’m going to talk about here is when we watched a demo that was running the top of the line consumer Radeon card.  It was an AI demo with “Froblins” a mix between a goblin and a frog.  The demo showed the little guys mining gold and bringing it back to the center of town, it showed collision detection so that the Froblins won’t collide with one another and it show dynamic tesselation.  Yes.  They showed us an example as in the farther you zoomed out from the landscape the less triangles are in the scene, hence less detail.  But the further you zoomed in then the more triangles where in the scene and you characters raising the level of detail the closer you got.  That, my friends, was an amazing demonstration.  Truthfully it was a bit overwhelming at the booth.  There was so much that AMD/ATI is doing now that its hard to keep up with.  To me those were the most interesting, and the ones I understood the most.  I want to thank Bill Shane and AMD for doing this for us and being very nice and professional the whole time, even though he knew he was dealing with students.  and newbie interviewers.  It was very informative and he even left himself available, by phone or email, for more information if we had more questions.