AMD FirePro SDI-Link enables live GPU-accelerated Video FX using industry-standard SDI I/O cards

At IBC 2011 AMD announced the FirePro SDI-Link for system integrators and ISVs to design fully featured SDI- and GPU-based solutions with ultra-low latency between AMD professional graphics cards and industry-standard third party SDI input/output cards (e.g. AJA, Bluefish444, Blackmagic Design, DELTACAST, DVS and Matrox).

SDI - Serial Digital Interface - is the primary digital format connection standard in the professional broadcast industry for uncompressed digital video for live feed productions (such as a live TV show), as well as for editing and monitoring video at the highest possible quality. It carries everything (video, audio, and time code) over one cable, with a bandwidth of nearly 1.5 gigabits per second (i.e. you're getting raw HD output before any compression is applied.)

Using the SDI-Link technology and the new FirePro V7900 SDI card, you get incredibly low-latency, high throughput GPU acceleration of real-time video and broadcast FX pipelines. The uncompressed digital video streams come in over an industry-standard SDI input card. The data is transferred to the GPU for real-time OpenGL/DX11/OpenCL processing (visual effects, color grading, encoding, editorial, graphics etc). Then again with virtually zero latency the processed video is passed back to the SDI card for output.

The four key components of the FirePro SDI-Link solution are:

• AMD DirectGMA technology (PCI‐Express ‘peer‐to‐peer' transfers that completely bypasses any need to traverse the host's main memory or utilize the CPU)
• Support from 3rd-party SDI I/O vendors
• The SDI-Link SDK for ISVs to develop custom solutions for end-users
• Supported FirePro video cards beginning with the V7900 SDI

Below is a quick overview from Bluefish444 of how they are using their SDI I/O PCI card with their new Lightspeed driver for the AMD FirePro SDI-link running Virtual Spectator software for real-time graphics on uncompressed video