Event Coverage

Technology Highlights from SIGGRAPH Asia 2008

By Vijay Anand - 14 Dec 2008

ATI and Sapphire Showcase Professional Visualization Solutions

ATI and Sapphire Showcase Professional Visualization Solutions

Over on ATI's corner, one of the gold supporters of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 event, they had their own professional solutions on display. So here are some cool stuff we found on their booth:-

ATI had several varied highlights on display at their booth.

Most prominent up-front was a huge 56-inch Quad Full HD display from Sapphire that's being driven by a single ATI FireGL V8650 graphics card in addition to showcasing its processing prowess with real-time rendering on that same screen. Impressive.

Just when Full HD is getting into gear of mainstream, the industry is already pushing that to Quad Full HD - a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels that's capable of displaying close to 9 megapixels in 1:1 ratio. More resolution equates to getting more work done as you can squeeze more out of the same display area. To fulfill the high requirement needs, Sapphire, one of ATI's most loyal partners that also handle professional solutions offers its clients a 56-inch Quad Full HD LCD solution that comes bundled with an ATI FireGL V8650 professional graphics card that uses its dual-link DVI outputs to power the display. While not the newest, it is the only card from ATI with a 2GB frame buffer for processing the huge workload sizes that comes with such high resolution requirements.

Some of the other FireGL professional graphics card solutions available from ATI.

ATI is also very focused on enabling stream processing for the masses and calls its technology ATI Stream. Its full potential is released when paired with the Radeon HD 4000 consumer series or with the AMD FireStream 9000 professional series as they utilize the latest GPU series. The ATI Stream SDK in combination with their Brook+ compiler enables easy high-level programming to unleash the GPU's full processing prowess for GP-GPU processing. Like NVIDIA, ATI too supports the OpenCL API and is probably an even stronger supporter of it. OpenCL is still in its early days and while there hasn't yet been a demo or program to showcase an OpenCL application running off the GPU, AMD/ATI is the first to showcase a demo running off the CPU and was displayed at their SIGGRAPH Asia booth:-

According to ATI, this is the first demo showcasing OpenCL in action even though it's running of the CPU currently. It shouldn't be long before a GPU port over is made as the OpenCL standard was only just ratified.

This isn't an OpenCL demo, but a demo simulating how a FireStream enabled platform helps simulate oil and gas exploration. The demo simulates seismic charges set off and sensors feeding back to the system on the seismic wave propagation.

However ATI Stream isn't just for the professional market; it's just as apt in the consumer realm as well. ATI is working with several video player/creation application vendors to help accelerate video encoding, transcoding, up-scaling and more. On demo at the show floor was ArcSoft TotalMedia Theater with SimHD DVD up-scaling technology (up to 1080p) that's enabled by ATI Stream technology:-

Here's the ArcSoft TotalMedia Theater software demo with an ATI Stream enabled SimHD DVD up-scaling technology at work. On the left is a standard definition MPEG2 clip while on the right is the up-scaler enabled showing better details and clarity with very low CPU utilization.

Well, that's it for the SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 and hopefully we'll be there in the 2009 conference to catch next year's updates in this field in Yokohama, Japan. See you then!

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