At a Monday press conference, in San Francisco, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD ( News - Alert)), a company working in developing processing solutions for computer, and consumer electronics markets, has demonstrated its forthcoming teraFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second) graphics chip, codenamed “RV770,” which enables ultra-realistic and interactive visual computing.
As of now, the content developers could not afford to deploy both visual realism and interactivity together simultaneously within a solution. Either they had to opt for cinematic realism rendered offline and do away with the experience offered by interactivity, or an interactive experience, without full ultra-realism.
AMD has termed the experience offered by this new chip as “Cinema 2.0 experience,” and has claimed that it devotes substantial efforts in breaking the sensory barrier that separates today’s visionary content creators and the interactive experiences they desire to create for audiences around the world. The Cinema 2.0 demo showed the combination of dynamic real-time interactivity and cinematic digital effects giving an illusion of real places and things captured on video were displayed in this Cinema 2.0 demo by AMD.
With this AMD advancement in processing technology, the artistic passion of well-known movie directors can go hand-in-hand with the technical wizardry offered by visual effects companies and game developers globally, and can offer new and engaging entertainment experiences, never attempted before.
Charlie Boswell, director, digital media and entertainment, AMD, said that with Cinema 2.0 the users won’t just play movies, they’ll play in them. They will be able to look around the environments in a sci-fi movie, put themselves in the driver’s seat in a race scene, duck behind things and pop up to see what’s going on in an intense firefight, all of these things being possible with Cinema 2.0. Charlie noted that the challenge for any director has always been taking a wonderful vision in the canvas of the mind and translating that to film for the audience to see, but Cinema 2.0 breaks down the time and cost barriers of getting a scene or shot that’s ‘just right,’ and even allows audiences to dive deeper into the experience to explore every part of that director’s vision.
Richard Huddy, worldwide developer relations manager, AMD Graphics Product Group, said the demonstration of Cinema 2.0 by AMD represented a sip from the multi-billion dollar gaming industry’s Holy Grail, while presenting a new quest to digital filmmakers.
Jules Urbach, founder and CEO, Jules World LLC, OTOY, said the Cinema 2.0 milestone is comparable to other major evolutions of film, such as sound, color, cinemascope, 70mm, THX, stereoscopic 3D, IMAX, etc. Jules added that Cinema 2.0 means truly interactive cinema, where the experience of watching a film is bridged perfectly with real-time rendering for a potentially dynamic and engaging experience. The cornerstone of this is not limiting the artistic process, and AMD innovation now makes that possible.
Highly-complex and realistic graphics, traditionally being the exclusive domain of blockbuster films are blended with the dynamic 3D interactivity of popular video games to produce Cinema 2.0 experience. Until now, a typical computer-generated scene could take up to 30 hours to render each frame on CPUs. But the smooth interactivity seen in today’s games needs a rendering speed of 25 to 30 frames-per-second at least. Hence, the game developers and expert computer graphics artists used to estimate that a technical advancement like Cinema 2.0 might still take at least 10 years to be attained.
Advanced Micro Devices ( News - Alert) is a leading global provider of innovative processing solutions in the computing, graphics and consumer electronics markets. AMD is dedicated to driving open innovation, choice and industry growth by delivering superior customer-centric solutions that empower consumers and businesses worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.
Arvind Arora is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Arvind’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
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