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Vision different from reality in new graphics cards

June 16, 2008 8:30pm
by Chris Nuttall

AMD photorealismAMD and Nvidia unveiled next-generation graphics chips today, with both claiming their uses would reach well beyond the traditional gaming audience.

AMD aimed high and fell short with its Cinema 2.0 event. It claimed its technology was responsible for a defining moment in graphics when films would extend seamlessly into interactive gaming experiences and games and their characters would achieve true photo-realism.

Video of movie industry figures including Robert Rodriguez, director of Sin City, talking about Cinema 2.0 was shown, along with the filmed opinions of gamers and top developers about when photorealism would make characters in games lose their “uncanny valley” appearance.

The estimates ranged from three to 10 years, but presenters at the Cinema 2.0 event said it was only months away with the new technology. However, a demo supposedly updating the AMD demonstration model Ruby to photorealism fell flat when she appeared in an earlier unlifelike incarnation superimposed on a photorealistic street scene.

“We’re still in the process of updating her,” was the rather lame explanation.

I was more impressed when a presenter delivered “a teraflop for 200 bucks” line -  the price the basic ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card will go on sale for in about a week’s time.

This is more likely to appeal to the mass-market consumer – a trillion floating operations  per second made possible by a chip around a centimeter square. Twelve years ago, a whole roomful of computers fitted with 10,000 Intel Pentium Pro processors were needed to create the world’s first teraflop supercomputer.

Nvidia  announced its graphics had evolved “beyond gaming”  but more sensibly talked about how this level of computing power would simplify day-to-day tasks, like running Windows Vista or converting movies to show on an iPod. Instead of taking five hours, movies could be transcoded in 35 minutes, it said.

Its  new GeForce GTX 260 and 280 cards are priced at $399 and $649.

Both companies also see scientific and industrial applications for the increased parallel processing powers of their graphics processing units (GPUs).

In games, it seems certain that these newer chips will allow PCs to regain a graphics edge over the fixed-specification next-generation consoles, but proclaiming them as an advance equivalent to the introduction of sound in movies is a little far-fetched.

June 16, 2008 8:30pm in Games, Hardware | Comment

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