Zatni Arbi , Contributor, Jakarta | Mon, 06/30/2008 10:50 AM | Sci-Tech
The computer first entered the creative world of Hollywood when Toy Story was created by Pixar back in 1995. However, the production of this computer animation-based movie involved a horrendous amount of work.
"Just to edit one frame might take up to 30 hours," recounted Paul Auscough, director of advanced marketing at AMD Graphics Group.
"To create a natural movement of an object on the screen, we need between 25 to 30 frames every second. It should give you some idea of how many man hours were required. It was an extraordinary accomplishment at that time, but the result looked more like a cartoon rather than a real movie," Paul added.
The power of the Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU, has grown tremendously since Toy Story. AMD, which acquired the computer graphics components maker ATI two years ago, feels confident enough to try to entice movie producers and directors, including George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, to work on full-featured movies only using the computer.
AMD calls the marriage between the computer with powerful graphics capability for gaming and the ultra-realistic and interactive visual computing required by movie production "Cinema 2.0.".
AMD claims it will be made possible by an upcoming GPU code-named RV770. This chip will be the first terraflops (one terra floating point operations per second) processor.
Why are terraflops so important? A GPU performs floating point calculations. In 3-D graphics, the objects that are distant from us do not have to have the same detail as those in the foreground. These objects are created using triangles and polygons like a wireframe covered with a sheet of cloth.
A good GPU makes the polygons appear or disappear quickly as we move it toward or away from us, and this process requires heavy-duty calculations. A GPU capable of completing more operations per second will make the rendering of the 3-D objects faster and the visual experience more realistic.
Thus, graphic processors are essential to the production and consumption of 3-D graphics content.
Paul is a devoted computer graphics evangelist. He and his colleague Terry Makedon worked for ATI before the company was acquired by AMD. When AMD acquired the graphics chip and card company, they were part of the package.
I met these gentlemen when AMD invited a group of journalists from the region to attend the launch of the latest generation of its graphics cards, the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series, in Bangkok last week.
Both ATI and AMD were very well established in their respective areas. I still remember buying an ATI Wonder graphics card back in mid 1990s for one of the PCs I put together. That graphics card allowed me to achieve a resolution higher than the then-standard 640x480 VGA, which would have been too low for my 20-inch Sony CRT monitor.
On the other hand, AMD is a CPU company. It has been a competitor that Intel Corporation has been trying kill but without success, as it would result in a market monopoly.
ATI's biggest competitor in the computer graphics market today is Nvidia. Both companies provide GPUs for graphics card makers, including ASUS, Leadtek and MSI. Many of their GPUs are also used in notebook computers. If you have a notebook, you will notice that the hardware is provided either by ATI or Nvidia.
Expensive graphics cards are normally associated with hardcore gamers. Most of them never think twice about spending hundreds of U.S. dollars on the graphics cards alone.
"Teenagers came into our store and bought the best graphics card that we had without any hesitation," my friend Keket at Asus' outlet in Ratu Plaza once told me. As always, within just a couple of months there was a new graphics card featuring a new and more powerful graphics processor. "The same teenagers would come and buy it," Keket added.
However, in reality, a powerful GPU is great for more than just playing complex and highly demanding 3-D games.
"We can use the powerful GPUs for other purposes, too," said Terry during the welcoming dinner. With the influx of High Definition videos, for example, a good GPU will help make the scenes more realistic or make the video fill up the entire screen.
In his presentation, Terry also showed a short movie clip which was so detailed and so realistic that we thought it was straight from a movie camera. It was not. It was completely computer generated.
Most of us information workers may not even be aware of the GPU's existence inside our computers. Unlike hardcore gamers, we usually choose to have the best CPU that we can afford. It is the right decision for us, because for tasks such as number crunching and word processing we will not need the power of the GPU.
But, if we work with programs such as Adobe Photoshop, we can finish our tasks much faster with the help of a more expensive GPU.
"With a good graphics card, we can manipulate a photo in real time," said Terry, who is responsible for the GPUs' software. A good GPU will also make transcoding videos from one format to another much quicker, he added.
What are the main features of the new ATI Radeon 4800 Series? First, they have 800 cores, which enable it to work faster. Second, they are the first cards to be equipped with the new Graphics Double Data Rate Version 5.0 (GDDR5) memory technology, which helps increase the performance further. Third, it is pretty small in size, which helps reduce power consumption and heat.
If you often browse around in a computer shopping center and look at the graphics cards showcased in the stores, you might have noticed that some of them are so big that they take up a lot of space on the motherboard. They also come with one or two large and noisy fans. The ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series, pictured, is a pretty compact add-on card.
Besides, according to Paul, the smaller the chip, the more chips can be cut from the same silicon wafer and ultimately the cheaper the cost will be for end users.
Now that ATI is owned by AMD, we might be tempted to ask whether there are features that work best only with AMD CPUs? I asked Paul during the one-on-one interview after his presentation.
"Our graphics processors are all processor-agnostic. Whether you use an AMD, an Intel, a Via or a CPU from any other chip maker, it will work equally well," he promised.
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