Rage3D Breaking the Sensory Barrier With Cinema 2.0 Rage3D Breaking the Sensory Barrier With Cinema 2.0
What is Cinema 2.0?
AMD’s vision for Cinema 2.0 binds three key areas into a framework which will deliver Cinema 2.0: Film, Games, and Hardware:
Cinema 2.0 embraces the Movie industry, working with production and development studios, and the industries that surround them, to bring real-time visualization to directors and FX teams. It is assisting in the development of tools and techologies to help the studios reach their audiences quicker and across more platforms, with more interactivity to maximize their impact.
The software and gaming industries are the second vital area in AMD's Cinema 2.0 vision, with AMD working with software and game developers to get the most out of new graphics technologies just becoming available. Cinema 2.0 provides tools that support the developers with the goal of bringing the fidelity of movies to the interactive worlds available in games. Cinema 2.0 also brings that power to graphics software and embracing GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) applications which can reach new heights with the new generation of graphics that are coming.
The final piece in the Cinema 2.0 puzzle is to deliver processing hardware with incredible power, flexibility, and scalability to solve computing problems across industries. Whether that be bringing interactivity to films, more fidelity to games, or impressive computing power to software.
AMD is clearly excited about what living in a Cinema 2.0 world will be like for creators and audiences alike. Lets get the ball rolling with a look at how AMD and the Film Industry envisions taking advantage of Cinema 2.0.
AMD’s Cinema 2.0 vision embraces the Movie industry, continuing and expanding their focus on bringing tools and support to leverage the graphics power now available. This new generation of power has applications to movie directors, content creators, FX and more. As presented by Rick Bergman (AMD Sr. VP and General Manager - Graphics Products Group) at the Cinema 2.0 launch, AMD has made it a top corporate objective to “create the ultimate visual experience”, and is working with Film and Game experts to bring this Cinema 2.0 vision to reality.
Working with Directors and FX studios for years to understand their creative process, AMD is determined to help the Artists realize their vision and is committed to improving how people use technology for that creative process. The goal is to remove the technology barriers between the director’s mind and the consumer and allow them to more quickly realize their artistic vision.
Robert Rodriguez, artist and director of Sin City, spoke of what Cinema 2.0 means to him. He reinforced the idea that, as a director and artist, he wants technology that allows him to work "at the speed of thought". With Cinema 2.0, he sees this vision coming to fruition, bringing an immediacy to visualization in the digital world that hasn't been there before - incorporating digital effects, digital cameras.
Pre-Visualization With Cinema 2.0
From a pre-visualization perspective, this new generation of technology and tools allows studios to use high-quality assets to bring rapid digital representations of scenes to directors as they work in the new digital world of movie making. In another video, Daniel Gregoire of Halon Studios spoke of what this technology has brought to his work doing pre-visualization for many prominent movie studios.
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Cinema 2.0 brings the ability to speed the process of the art of pre-visualization, bringing higher quality representations of the desired scenes to the production faster than ever before. It allows them to deliver a "more seamless process, in a shorter amount of time, with a better result, with many more iterative possibilities ..." to let them get to "... what is in their head."
Bringing Real-Time Rendering To The Masses
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Jules Urbach, founder and CEO of JulesWorld LLC, spoke on using the power of today's graphics to render incredibly realistic scenes in real-time. This fidelity in real-time graphics comes from Jules' history working with ATI hardware executing the RenderMan (R) pipeline. He did his first experiments with this on the ATI 1900 video card and has been working on improving the accuracy and capabilities on newer generations of video cards ever since. His company released several commercials for the TransFormers film, which were not only rendered in real-time, but they were directed in real-time as well. They can now take the actual movie assets, for TransFormers from ILM, and render them in real-time with today's 4xxx series GPUs. They were able to do this as well with the SpiderMan assets from Sony Entertainments SpiderMan3 movie. They used advanced functionality of the GPU, such as the tessilator unit, to render the fine bits of the costume beveling and, impressively, were able to do the rendering in real time. Jules sees this moving into the time where GPUs are powerful enough that ray-tracing and other highly calculation intensive rendering methods can be run in real-time with the power of this new generation of graphics.
It was fascinating to see what these people are doing every day with this technology. The previsualization of digital movie scenes presented by Halon was absolutely fascinating, and I can see how as a director who is working to put together their ideas for a scene, to be able to have higher fidelity previews of various scenarious, could really improve and accelerate that process. In watching Jules present, he clearly is deeply involved with and interested in the cutting edge technologies being offered by graphics hardware and it was easy to absorb his excitement when talking about what they are working on.
AMD spoke with several game development companies to speak to what Cinema 2.0 means to them. These developers included Splash Damage, Crytek, Rebellion, Frontier Development, and Remedy. Each person spoke to the ability to bring film-quality graphics to games, and the hardware that will enable this new level of visual fidelity. Each spoke to being years away from real video or photo-realistic graphics, in each case they viewed 3-5 years out, or perhaps a bit more, that games would be where movies are today. You can view this video at AMD's website at http://www.amd.com/visual. Watch the 2nd video in the list ".. the quest for Cinema 2.0 in the game industry".
As we've seen over time, movie tie-in games are are often hard to release at the same time as movies hit the theater, and they are often of varying quality. AMD views Cinema 2.0 and this new power of graphics technology as bringing new ways to streamline development, including using actual movie assets instead of needing to create separate assets, and help speed to market games that tie-in with movies. This will allow entertainment companies to have their audience carry the movie home with them to interact with the movies after the show is over.
Professional Gamers Speak Out
AMD spoke with professional gamers about what they thought of Cinema 2.0 and this new visual fidelity. Each of them talked about wanting more, prettier, faster graphics always bringing them a better gaming experience. In addition to this they spoke about wanting to have their cake and to eat it too – they want the ultimate graphics experience, but they want it at an affordable price. With AMD introducing their Radeon HD 4850 at just $199, with twice the performance of their previous generation of video technology, their goal is to bring this next level of performance to gamers at an incredible value.
While it can be argued as to whether faster, prettier graphics always brings a better gaming experience, none of us could dispute that we were excited by what possibilities were discussed in this segment. Jules came back to the stage at this point to show an impressive interactive demo, which is the showpiece of AMD's Cinema 2.0 vision. You can view a short clip at AMD's website at http://www.amd.com/visual. Click the first Featured Video titled 'ATI icon "Ruby" stars in the first ever Cinema 2.0 experience'.
The core enabling technology behind Cinema 2.0 is the powerful new graphics generation from AMD, the Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards. AMD designed this new generation of GPUs with a laser focus on efficiency and scalability, and views their design process for this generation as a turning point in GPU design. In their view, no more will monolithic mega-chips be the focus of GPU design, but instead focus on designing highly scalable, efficient chips that can scale up or down to meet all market segments.
Traditional GPU design meant first focusing on a large high-end chip, and only after that are techniques used to reduce the size and power of the chip to meet enthusiast and entry level markets.
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AMD has taken another tack this time around. Focusing first on enthusiast level performance, but built to scale up and down efficiently and quickly to meet all market segments from the ultra-enthusiast, to the embedded processor. AMD's goal with this scalable GPU is to build the "perfect gaming solution for $200-300", allowing gamers to play at any resolution and IQ and delivering "... the best performance at every price".
How is AMD meeting this lofty goal? With the introduction of the Radeon HD 4850 at $199 and its big brother board, the Radeon HD 4870, at $299. Available in stores on June 25th, AMD will be selling the first Teraflop GPU, capable of over one trillion floating point operations per second. As AMD likes to say, that is more computational power than all consoles through the XBox360 put together.
Clear Leadership in Performance/Watt and Performance/$
We will soon see if these claims bare out in practice, but on paper the HD4000 series is certainly dressed to impress. Equally impressive is the incredible enthusiasm that everyone at AMD has shown for these new products, with engineers clearly proud of their achievements and AMD's marketing department fired up.
It is always fun to hear game developers talk about what they see new technologies bringing to the work they do. It sometimes seems like it is a never-ending chorus of five to seven years before we'll see "realistic" graphics, but what we're about to see brings us much closer to that then we had ever thought we would be at this point. AMD's renewed commitment to working with game developers, to assist in developing the tools and skills to get the most out of the new generation of GPUs that are now coming to market, will only help to get us to that new level of visual fidelity in gaming that Cinema 2.0 represents.
Stay tuned to Rage3D in the coming days. We will be digging deep into the Radeon 4xxx series, starting with the HD4850, bringing coverage of the technologies, the performance, the image quality, and application of this powerful new generation of AMD graphics chips. We hope you're looking forward to reading them as much as we're enjoying discovering the wonderful new world that is the Radeon 4xxx series.