Froblins and dynamically-generated LOD - report from Siggraph

Tuesday, the full Expo opened, and what a sight it was!  Pat and I went over to the AMD/ATI booth and met with Bill Shane, AMD’s Senior Business Development Rep.  We were given the full rundown of ATI’s new FirePro line, being demonstrated at SIGGRAPH this year.  The line, set for release this fall, offers many new additions including DisplayPort technology, Firestream (GPGPU) solutions, multi-display support, and extremely stable Vista and Linux drivers.  One of the demonstration pieces, “Froblins”, using the Radeon 4000 series, boasted dynamically-generated level-of-detail, over 30,000 agents in a crowd simulation, and real-time ambient occlusion.  Finally, we were also given a peek at the result of AMD’s partnership with HP and Dreamworks: the new HP DreamColor display.  All in all, it was a very informative and exciting.  I’ll give y’all some more information after I talk with HP more about the DreamColors tomorrow.