Less than 20 days to the launch of DX1 and Windows 7, and another video from Siggraph 2009 is now online:
AMD’s Rick Bergman discusses Eye-Definition Computing and future of digital graphics at SIGGRAPH 2009 showing Shader 5.0.
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.
Video demos we have include:
- CrossFire Pro on two FirePro V5700s running in Maya
- Hardware tessellation in Maya
- MachStudio Pro v1.2 on a FirePro V8750
- Fast video encoding in Premiere Pro on a FirePro V7750
- Synchronization across 6 workstations running V8750s using the FirePro S400 framelock/genlock card
- The Froblins demo of AI running on the GPU
The SIGGRAPH 2009: Beyond Programmable Shading course notes and PDF slide presentations are now now available. “Beyond Programmable Shading I” topics include: parallel graphics architectures, parallel programming models for graphics, and game-developer investigations of the use of these new capabilities in future rendering engines. “Beyond Programmable Shading II” topics include volumetric and hair lighting, alternate rendering pipelines including ray tracing and micropolygon rendering, in-frame data structure construction, and complex image processing.
Intel and AMD were the course organizers. The course presenters were all experts on advanced rendering, graphics hardware, and parallel computing for graphics from academia and industry
Janet Matsuda from AMD provides an overview of ATI’s new high-end graphics card as well as Dell’s decision to use the company’s cards in its new mobile workstation.
Computer Graphics World mag captured a video interview with Vincent Fung of AMD , giving a brief tour of the new FirePro professional graphics cards introduced at SIGGRAPH.
I have a second, more complete video demo of MachStudio Pro from SIGGRAPH 2009 at the AMD booth. This demo runs through manipulating the ambient occlusion, HDR environment lights, point lights, (her eyes glow) & projected lights (amazing to watch moving these in real-time and watching the shadow), shader manipulation and displacement maps using hardware tessellation in a complex animation scene.
These are not pre-baked passes. Everything happens in real-time, on-the-fly in MachStudio Pro using the FirePro V8750 GPU and the built-in hardware tesselation.
Also one big point to make - this is not just faster final rendering. Faster final rendering doesn’t really address the issue of the 3D creative lighting and rendering workflow being a linear process. As a lighter or TD, you would still have to go through a multi-step process where creative flow is broken down into set-up time, render time and review time.
With MachStudio Pro, the workflow is changed into a non-linear one where you see the full render quality as you manipulate lights, shadows, fog, depth of field, ambient occlusion, etc. The creative component is one and the same as the rendering and review component. As you add a light, and adjust it, you see the shadows, glows, reflections, etc, as you are working, exactly as it will appear in a final render. When you scrub the timeline and watch your camera moves, you can adjust lighting and effects without having to re-render.
It is a complete change in the creative workflow. This is why everyone who sees this product gets so excited and why there really is nothing else like it (at Siggraph or in the market).
Demo of manipulating the ambient occlusion (AO) in a complex animation scene in real-time. These are not pre-baked passes. It is AO (as well as HDR cameras, shadows, Depth of Field, etc) calculated in real-time in MachStudio Pro using the FirePro V8750 GPU.
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.
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