AMD’s newly released Maya Tessellator Plug-in allows users of Autodesk’s Maya to take advantage of FirePro Graphics GPU tessellation hardware. The readme.doc file in the package describes how to install and use the plug-in. Binaries are included for Windows XP 32 and Windows XP 64 operating systems Unfortunately you must create a free AMD developer account to download the plug-in.
AMD and announced a joint development agreement as part of the AMD effort to greatly expand the use of real-time physics with graphics through the open source Bullet Physics engine using OpenCL and/or DirectCompute in DirectX 11.
A great quote from the release: “Proprietary physics solutions divide consumers and ISVs, while stifling true innovation; our competitors even develop code that they themselves admit will not work on hardware other than theirs”
I’ve been waiting for this video from Siggraph 2009! Rick Bergman (Senior VP and General Manager of AMD), discusses how computer graphics technology can enhance Hollywood productions. The video is naturally about the power of the GPU and in particular how it enables real time creativity. There are some great clips of MachStudio Pro including hardware tesselation for displacement mapping.
I can’t believe I was out of town for AMD’s big Sept 10 event. They announce their Eyefinity multi-display technology (driving up to six monitors simultaneously at resolutions up to 2,560x1,600 pixels each), and they demod Crysis, the standard gaming benchmark for high-end 3D hardware, running on an iPhone. Huh?
At the event, AMD unveiled its next-generation GPU architecture with 2.5 teraFLOPS of floating-point power (over twice current high-end cards!). To show off how this could translate to applications, they showed OTOY’s software, running on AMD servers and new GPUs, delivering 3D games in real-time over the Internet to the iPhone. The report from Ars Technica is impressive and worth the read.
ZDNet also gives some details in the discussion about “cloud computing vs game consoles”
VentureBeat also has a good description of the Eyefinity and how it applies to different markets.
MacResearch has posted two video tutorials on OpenCL - what is it and how to code with it. While the examples are for given for the Mac OS, OpenCL is a cross platform standard and will run on any modern CPU or GPU (or both) with drivers. AMD and Nvidia will have OpenCL drivers for their GPUs under Windows and Linux. AMD and Intel will support OpenCL on their CPUs. AMD has already shipped its first OpenCL implementation for its Athlon and Opteron processors as a free download as part of the ATI Stream SDK v2.0 Beta Program.
I’ve seen the Froblins demo before with 3000 creatures scurrying around the screen. But always thought this was primarily a hardware tesselation and rendering demos. Turns out it is also about concurrently running interactive Artificial Intelligence code on entirely on the GPU. The full story is parallel artificial intelligence computation for dynamic pathfinding and local avoidance on the GPU, massive crowd rendering with LOD management with high-end rendering capabilities such as GPU tessellation for high-quality close-ups and stable performance, terrain system, cascaded shadows for large-range environments, and an advanced global illumination system.
Yesterday I posted a video showing OpenCL scaling across 24 CPU cores. The same demo was actually being shown at SIGGRAPH scaling across 12 CPU cores. We got a capture of the demo, but the most important thing about it is the section where the presenter explains about why OpenCL is is so significant and why AMD is showing it running on the CPU and not just talking about running it on the GPU (like everyone else). OpenCL lets you write data-parallel algorithms data-parallel processing (for scientific computations, video and image processing, game AI and physics, etc.) that spread themselves automatically across available resources, be they CPU or GPU.
See the video below, but here is the transcript:
“The important thing to note about OpenCL, is that it is not simply about running on the GPU. OpenCL is about running on heterogeneous systems - ALL the processors in your system. With AMD’s OpenCL implementation, you will be able to take one source code base and re-target it to your CPUs or GPUs - it will run on both - and take advantage of your entire platform. ”.
My comment: Now that (in addition to the whole open standards thing) is why I am such a big champion of OpenCL.
AMD is offering a free OpenCL for CPU beta download as part of the ATI Stream SDK v2.0 Beta Program. The Stream SDK allows you to take advantage of GPGPU computing and develop your applications in a high-level language - OpenCL. It allows you to divide software workloads between different hardware elements such as multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs.
Below is a video of a 4P six-core AMD Opteron processor-based system (24 total cores) running an OpenCL-based, fluid/particle simulation. The demo runs through enabling progressively more CPU cores and you see the performance scaling. Impressive.
Normally you think of just the GPU for this kind of computational processing. But reality is you need both the GPU and CPU for optimal performance and OpenCL provides this. I stole the quote form an AMD blog:
“Of course no application runs entirely on the GPU. Beyond the obvious need for CPUs to drive execution, most mainstream applications are heterogeneous in nature. They have some functions that accelerate well on multicore CPUs, and others that are perfectly suited for a GPU’s data parallel architecture. A good development platform needs to take that into account - this is the difference between GPGPU as a niche accelerator and GPGPU as a new baseline feature, ready for tomorrow’s systems and applications.”
So now I am not the only one dazzled by the MachStudio Pro/FirePro package. The Develop3D blog just posted their initial impressions of MachStudio Pro. A quote from the article says it all: Now I’m no rendering expert, but I have to say I was gobsmacked with the speed and quality of renders, and the control you have over scenes with near instant feedback is simply astounding. Moving rendering to the GPU is an extremely exciting development and the potential to revolutionize the design visualisation workflow is huge.
I’ve got to add one thing. If you see the product, you get this immediately, but if you are just reading about it, most people think: “ah - GPU-accelerated final renders - seems logical and we expect to see more of this trend.” But reality is, this is a lot more then accelerated final rendering. Just a fast final render means you still do setup and compositing in the same way. You setup, adjust, then render then try again until you get it right or run out of patience or budget. But the way MSP uses the GPU is that it accelerates all steps of the process, not just the final render. The creative component is the same as the rendering and viewing component. It becomes a non-linear workflow. So just saying renders of 500-900 times faster, doesn’t really cover how big of a change this really is.
Not sure my explanation makes it any clearer so I encourage you to take a look at MachStudio Pro in the AMD booth #2417 at SIGGRAPH. From what I have read, they are going to be showing some snazzy use of one of ATI’s unique strong suits: hardware-accelerated tessellation. According to the StudioGPU events page the SIGGRAPH demos will show “support for displacement mapping with hardware tessellation and the ability to process more than a billion polygons in real-time. Other new features being demonstrated will include the ability to create full motion blur with velocity maps, stereoscopic camera support, configurable anti-aliasing algorithms (Box, Gaussian, Mitchell) and many more.”
About a month ago, AMD announced a new beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 that uses the GPU to significantly accelerate video encoding performance.The plug-in enabled encoding an H.264, 1440x1080i 29.97 frames-per-second, High Quality file in 47.3s. Without the plug-in, Adobe Premiere Pro encoded the same file in 372.5s . That’s an 8-fold faster encode time!
But I was waiting to get confirmation that this was across both Radeon and FirePro lines.
Seems that is the case.
As noted previously, FirePro drivers automatically accelerate many functions in PhotoShop CS4 including image rotation, zooming, panning, anti-aliased compositing of both 2D and 3D content, brush resizing and brushstroke preview, 3D movement, high-dynamic- range tone mapping, and color conversion.
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