June 24, 2008

AMD Demonstrates Cinema 2.0 Experience

San Francisco - AMD demonstrated a milestone achievement in ultra-realistic and interactive visual computing through the processing power of its forthcoming teraFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second) graphics chip, codenamed RV770.
Until today, content developers had to choose between cinematic realism rendered offline and absent the rewarding sensory experience of interactivity, or an interactive experience without full ultra-realism. 
 
The demonstration of what AMD terms the "Cinema 2.0 experience" punches a sizeable hole in 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 fusion of dynamic real-time interactivity with convincing cinematic digital effects that appear to be real places and things captured on video.    
 
This AMD advancement in processing technology can now begin combining with the artistic passion of top movie directors, visual effects companies, and game developers worldwide to open the door for engaging entertainment experiences.  
 
"With Cinema 2.0 you won¹t just play movies, you'll play in them. Imagine the ability to look around the environments in a sci-fi movie, put yourself 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 are possible with Cinema 2.0," says Charlie Boswell, director, Digital Media & Entertainment, AMD.  
 
Cinema 2.0 blends complex and realistic graphics that traditionally are the exclusive domain of blockbuster films, with the 3D interactivity of popular video games. Before now, a typical computer-generated scene could take up to 30 hours to render each frame on CPUs. To achieve the smooth interactivity seen in today's games, a minimum of 25 to 30 frames per second of rendering speed is needed. Based on these numbers, conventional wisdom among prominent game developers and expert computer graphics artists estimated a Cinema 2.0-like technological milestone to be up to 10 years away.  
AMD plans this summer to introduce the highest performing graphics processor --­ a chip more powerful than every generation of video game console ever brought to market combined, with one full teraFLOPS of processing power per chip. This technology will soon be available as ATI Radeon HD-branded graphics cards.  
 
To bring Cinema 2.0 to life as a mainstream phenomenon, AMD is collaborating with movie directors and game developers, as well as software developers who make tools needed to harness many teraFLOPS of real-time visual computing power.  
 
The Cinema 2.0 demo system in San Francisco featured two RV770 codenamed graphics cards rated at one teraFLOPS each, driven by an AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processor and AMD 790 FX chipset.