Demos of DirectX 11 on the new Radeon HD 5800 series

AMD Developer Central has some new demos which show off the Radeon HD 5800 series cards and DirectX 11. 

The Mecha demo shows the results of a new approach to rendering semi-transparent objects without pre-sorting, known as order-independent transparency (OIT).  Blending is an order-dependent operation that requires sorting objects before rendering them. Atomic operations and append buffers make it possible to construct per-pixel fragment lists and sort them on the GPU. The results are a significant increase in speed and accuracy over those possible with traditional techniques.

The Ladybug demo shows the results of a new approach to simulating lens-accurate depth-of-field effects based on real-world parameters of focal length and focus distance using Direct Compute 11. Depth-of-field is used in feature films by cinematographers to subtly guide a viewer’s attention through a shot or to heighten the emotion of a scene. This technique finally provides developers with a way to achieve the same effects and bring new levels of cinematic realism to their games. This approach is enabled by features such as atomic operations and shared memory.

AMD’s senior manager of developer relations explains GPU leadership is with AMD

How could you not love this story!  Essentially AMD, developer relations manager, noted how Nvidia seems to be “abandoning the gaming market” (implied is professional CAD and DCC), primarily because of their lack of work on DX11 support and their extreme focus on proprietary standards like CUDA.  It’s a good read and there are some good points.

FirePro Maya Tessellator Plugin

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.

Icrontic clearly states the case for workstation GPUs vs game GPUs for production studios

This review on Icrontic is a great explanation of why a workstation GPU is needed for serious production work, and how a gaming GPU just doesn’t cut it.

“To understand why it’s beneficial to use a workstation GPU, you first need to understand how they differ from their desktop cousins: It’s all in the presentation. In gaming, many effects and techniques are “cheated.” A desktop card may skip the rendering of certain shaders or textures if they are not critical to the player’s eye, and they may even approximate output in some conditions. This is done because high framerates and performance are preferred when playing a game. Workstation graphics cards use different firmware and drivers which assure that nothing is cheated; rendering operations are complete and thorough. This difference improves rendering quality at the expense of speed. When working in a 3D application, this trade greatly improves productivity and performance.”

The blog post gives the author’s real-world experience using the FirePro V8750 in a production environment.

First beta release of ATI Stream SDK with OpenCL GPU and CPU support

The new ATI Stream SDK v2.0 - beta 4 adds OpenCL GPU support as well as CPU support. This is a big milestone.

OpenCL is about accelerating applications on heterogeneous systems - ALL the processors in your system. With AMD’s beta 4 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. This means better balanced platforms capable of running demanding graphics, physics and general computing tasks faster and more scalably.

What is OpenCL?
OpenCL is the first truly open and royalty-free programming standard for general-purpose computations on heterogeneous systems. The AMD implementation allows programmers to easily target both multi-core CPUs and modern GPUs for acceleration.

Rumor updates: 5870 selling like hotcakes, Nvidia halts chip development & leaving consumer market

Lots of news, speculation and rumors this week regarding the latest in the GPU world.

• ATI has sold hundreds of thousands of Radeon HD 5870 DirectX 11 cards, with no impact or slowdown from the Nvdia Fermi announcement - Fudzilla
• Reports are circulating that NVIDIA will kill off the GTX 260, GTX 275, and GTX 285 and exit the high-end and mid-range graphics card market, focusing instead on the scientific community. DirectX 11 Fermi-based entry level cards won't arrive until 2010 - ZDNet and Fudzilla
• Nvidia has put all CPU-bound chipset development work on hold, pending resolution of a legal dispute with Intel - VizWorld

Obviously I have no inside knowledge of what is true or just partially true, but it is definitely interesting reading.

Video of Rick Bergman discussion of DX11 from SIGGRAPH 2009

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.

AMD announces open physics initiative built around OpenCL or DirectCompute and Bullet Physics

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”

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850 - more affordable and economical version of 5870

A week after the introduction of the ultra-powerful, DirectX 11-ready Radeon HD 5870 ($379), several sites are reporting on its more affordable (at $259) , lower-power-consumption, cousin, the Radeon HD 5850.  The reviews are again pretty rave. It shares the same basic features as the Radeon HD 5870 including DirectX 11 support, Eyefinity multi-display technology, and new anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering modes. The new card has fewer stream units (1440 vs 1600), fewer texture units, and lower clock speed.

How does it perform?  To quote Hexus.net “What AMD/ATI has accomplished with the Radeon HD 5850 GPU is the distillation of the range-topping goodness in an eminently sensible fashion”

Dell T1500 entry-level workstation with FirePro card specifically designed & certified for AutoCAD

Dell today announced the Precision T1500. It is the cheapest workstation in the Dell lineup (with a starting price of $949) and was built from the ground up and certified for AutoCAD.  It ships with a choice of AMD’s ATI FirePro V3750 or Nvidia’s Quadro FX 580.  What makes this an especially interesting workstation though is that it is based on the new Intel Core i5 (or i7) processors (as opposed to Xeon).  This could be particularly interesting when DirectX 11 is out.

News useful for this announcement is the recent review of the Intel Core i5 and i7 systems by 3DProfessor.  He also covers performance with the ATI FirePro v5700 and Quadro FX1800.