AMD's Cinema 2.0 demo: "you won't just play movies, you'll play in them"
By Thomas Ricker 
posted June 17th 2008 1:45AM
posted June 17th 2008 1:45AM
That's a bold promise AMD. Nevertheless, a cinema-realistic gaming experience is exactly what they demonstrated yesterday in San Francisco. Cinema 2.0, according to AMD, is "a milestone achievement in ultra-realistic and interactive visual computing." Perhaps, but then the marketing-speak launches into unnecessary hyperbole with AMD calling its new teraFLOPS chip at the heart of the demo -- the RV770 GPU -- "more powerful than every generation of game console every brought to market combined." Really AMD? Last we counted there were about 13 million Cell processors scattered across the PS3 terra firma. But we'll assume that you're referring to a mythical mashup of a singular PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PS2, etc. with a little Magnavox Odyssey sprinkled on top. Still, you might find the hype warranted when you realize that the demonstration was powered by a single PC loaded with a pair of (future) consumer-grade AMD RV770 graphics cards, Phenom X4 9850 processor, and 790FX chipset. Take a look for yourself in the video after the break.
Haha, this made me laugh.
Even the flash movie ran too slow for my computer.
The real deal behind this technology is in how they use the power. Traditional style rasterized 3D graphics is what everyone and their mother does today, but it doesn't really scale up that well when you add more objects and more detailed textures over more GPU chips with more effects.
What AMD has done with this tech demo is, they've taken advantage of the massive FPU capacity of the new chip and turned the rendering paradigm around. They're not using a rasterizer, they're using a ray tracer.
Rasterizers are pretty efficient when it comes to scaling in display resolution, but tracers are very very efficient when it comes to pushing more polygons to the screen and calculating realistic reflections and refractions and shadows. They can literally handle hundreds of millions of them at once because of the more efficient algorithms involved and the better parallerization. Each pixel can be calculated in a separate thread on a separate GPU or CPU. The graphics designer can add a gobsmacking amount of detail to a scene with very little performance loss. The only real hit is when you up the display resolution to show more pixels, because then the GPU has to open up more threads to process them. (this affects anti-aliasing as well)
So technically, this chip isn't all the pants in the world when it comes to pushing traditional games graphics, but it beats the pants off of everyone else when it comes to movie style ray tracing graphics that nobody else is doing at the moment.
"The graphics designer can add a gobsmacking amount of detail to a scene with very little performance loss. "
That's not entirely true, a raytracer has to calculate reflections/light of objects and the more objects the harder it gets, and then there's the surface of the objects, the more complex the slower it gets, and the number of lights is also important, anybody that ever used a raytracer knows that the more stuff you put in the slower the render becomes, all depending on how often you allow the virtual light to bounce too of course.
Incidentally I hear that ATI's 'tessalation engine' helps with the process of raytracing and nvidia doesn't have one of those.
@Wwhat:
I feel sorry for the game designers. Their paycheck must be going up to like a bajillion dollars.
This is like a tech demo.. i mean it looks absolutely stunning.. but its a LONG LONG way before we see actual games like this because as far as PC gaming goes we're just getting console ports and 3 polygon Blizzard games (which by the way are awesome lol).
That thing looks like the Acer Predator.
Gamer meets Movie Theater = I-MAX VIDEO GAMES! :D
why is half-life 2's dog in the screenshot?
Graphics in the video look OK (it might just be the crappy compression) but not much better then current PC games or even those on the PS3 or Xbox360 (have you seen the FFVII or FFXII techdemos?)
of course the photoshopped still shot looks tons better.
The charater animation in this tech demo is horrible. and seriously, i would be more impressive with vector graphic wireframes move and interacting naturally then i would do with texture/polygon graphics.
in the world of CGI prerendered animation, anyone can be taught to make a realistic model, however to make a realistic and life-like animation is where the real talent (and money) is. It's a shame that gaming doesn't follow this trend, everyone just wants GRAPHICS, whatever the hell that term means, people are OK with charters sliding around, poor and predictable AI, and to this day you still get clipping issues.
seriously i would trade all the graphics in the world for a game that was actually "REALISTIC" in true terms.
If my games start pulling a Cloverfield I am SO done with Gaming altogether **shudder** That camera movement and blurring effect was way over the top.
Is it just me, or does that cinema-realistic robot look like Dog?
@ majortom
Ad? What ad?
Firefox + Adblock Plus FTW.