Random Accesses

If the resurgence of 3D glasses at local cinemas are any indication, we all want a bit more, ahem, depth to our cinematic experience. Unfortunately, the stylish glasses don't exactly lend themselves to an immersive experience. What would be really cool would be animated holograms.

While holograms aren't the easiest things in the world to make, it is possible to take a 3D computer model and compute the data necessary to generate a hologram that can be used to project a 3D image from a screen. Given that animation is largely computer generated now anyway, where are my holographic animated movies?

One of the problems turns out to be efficient rendering. A recent paper in Optics Express, although it presents a huge speed-up in holographic rendering, demonstrates just how difficult the problem is. The basic animation is now well within the reach of modern rendering farms—unfortunately, that doesn't leave any power left to put into important things like shading, lighting, and shadows (much less character and plot).

Source: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/08/holographic-gpu-renders-at-near-real-time-speeds.ars

Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday released a line of graphics cards capable of performing a trillion calculations per second, which is double the computing power of the company's previous generation of high-end cards.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870, both generally available, represent the biggest generational increase in power for ATI products in six years, AMD said. The chipmaker acquired ATI, a maker of graphics processors, in 2006.

In a couple of months, AMD plans to ship a third card, code-named the R700, that will have two HD 4870 GPUs and will deliver the highest performance of any AMD ATI card. The R700 is expected to fall in the $500 pricing range.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208800881

Today (November 20, 2007) NVIDIA launched the GeForce 8800M GTX and GeForce 8800M GTS, two GPUs that do quite a bit to close the next-gen GPU gap between desktops and notebooks by bringing the architecture behind the just-released, top-of-the-benchmark-heap G92 GPU to the portable space. NVIDIA claims that these new GPUs will let you play Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 on your laptops, and the company's press release features a quote from Epic's Mark Rein, who claims that "these next-gen machines run Unreal Tournament 3 fantastically even at HD resolutions of 1920x1200." But at what quality settings, one wonders?

The answer, at least in the case of UT3, is likely to be, "high quality," given the amount of hardware that NVIDIA was able to pack into the mobile GPU using the same 65nm process on which the GeForce 8800GT is made, but just don't expect the game to run at the kinds of 100+ frames-per-second that gamers love to see in benchmark roundups.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071120-nvidia-launches-mobile-version-of-next-gen-g92-gpu.html