i7 CPU and X58 Mainboard from Intel - The overall performance of the mainboard has been superb, and has many options for upgrades at a later date. But for now its more than adequate for most. The new triple channel memory controller most certainly has the required bang needed. The unequivocal evidence shown within proves just how much raw performance is hidden under the hood. Therefore for those of you wishing a merry Christmas with a new build - then look no further as Intel has done the job.
ATI FirePro V8700 - The performance shown today has been well worth its wait. The results shown within have been extra-ordinary to say the least. SPECviewperf 10 scores have never been so high from a single socket CPU. This card most certainly has overtaken its predecessor in many ways, faster memory, the aid of 800 unified shaders - this will help many in complex drawings. Life in the professional graphics card market has just shifted up an a incredible gear. Today’s outing has been the tip of the iceberg. Cost and availability of the ATI FirePro V8700, currently the card fires in at an MSRP of approximately $1499 this is a very respectable price bracket for something which performs so well in all areas.
This video compares shaded model performance in SolidWorks 2007 and SolidWorks 2009 running on a FirePro v7700. The primary boost that you see in performance for SolidWorks 2009 is due to support for OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects (VBO) and the optimized FirePro driver.
The numbers from the video for rotating the shaded aircraft engine model 500 times:
SolidWorks 2007 (w/o VBO): Time: 13.36 sec at 37.50 FPS
SolidWorks 2009 (w/ VBO): Time: 7.83 at 64.00 FPS
HPC has a blog post on the fast track release of OpenCL (Open Computing Language), a way to extract computing performance out of GPUs and multicore CPUs in an architecture-independent way. OpenCL is designed to address more than GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units). It is really a way to enable a broad range of parallel architectures that includes GPUs, multicore CPUs, Larrabee, and even DSPs. Both AMD (with Stream Computing) and Nvidia (with CUDA) strongly support the OpenCL move.
Version 1.0 of OpenCL is on a fast track release schedule for early December at SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 in Singapore. OpenCL is a low level API that should be applicable to high-end workstations, desktop computers, handhelds and embedded devices.
Greg Corke and Martyn Day of Develop 3D magazine recently supervised a series of side-by-side performance benchmarks in CATIA comparing the FirePro V5700 and the Quadro FX 1700. The models were all high-polygon, high complexity (i.e. requiring lots of culling in shaded view) from CATBench. Both cards include 512 MB RAM and both are running on identical HP xw6600 workstations. The AMD folks were on hand with a digital camcorder to capture the results.
The test runs through three models (1.5 million, 3.9 million, and 3 million polygons) and has each rotate, tilt, and zoom in shaded, shaded plus outline, and outline-only views.
Interesting notes: For low-polygon, low-complexity models, the Quadro FX performed as well as or better than the V5700. But as model complexity increased, the v5700 really outpaced it. I am guessing that this is due to the optimized OpenGL VBO support on the FirePro line which enables the graphics card to store the geometry on the card and even update it without having to push the geometry back down the bus to the CPU.
There are a lot of good legal options to protect big ideas that can make you a lot of money in the long run. But it is the small, quickly implemented innovations that most companies run on that are hard to protect. And these ideas are the most apt to be stolen because of their small barriers to entry. But there are things that you can do that can deter people from taking your ideas, or have some recourse if they do.
Some copying is unavoidable, and there is some forgiveness built into the intellectual property law. But it is the intentionality of the person that copies that is important to establish. In other words, you want to be able to show that someone was aware of your design at a date before they started to implement it without you. So there is two elements that you are going to need in your renderings or sketches: 1) Something relates the design to you and 2) the date. Here are some ideas on how to do that:
Put your rendering on a consistently used board. Do not give someone just a raw rendering. Throw it into Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator; it will take you 5 minutes to present it properly when you have created a template display board.
Don't export the board in an editable format. Send a rasterized copy whenever possible, but turn editing capabilities off if you have to use a PDF.
Have the logo on the design in the rendering. For example, putting a black and white version of your logo in an unobtrusive place on your design using decals in your rendering program, or Photoshop
Have an element of your brand close cropped or overlapping the design. It doesn't have to be your logo, but something that establishes that it came from your company if the rendering was cropped from the board
Have an brand logo or element behind the design. You can render this in, or what I do is render without background and in a format with transparency (eg. as a TIFF file) and have the logo behind the board. Turn up those anti-aliasing settings; your FireGL card will make the transparent edges very clean.
Have a watermark over the rendering. This may seem like the most logical and secure way of protecting, but it can do more harm than good if it deters from your design. But if you can do it elegantly, go for it.
Put the date on your board, and a reminder to update it every time you use the board.
Keep a copy of the email if you emailed it, or keep a copy of the board if you printed it, and note they date they received it.
Sign the design. Physically sign the printed copy, or put a scanned copy of your signature on the board. This is a great way to get your personal brand out there.
Put some "legal-ese", or fine print on the bottom of your board. It doesn't have to be drafted by the legal department, just anything official sounding to show that you are serious about protecting your intellectual property.
Don't put it on the internet. It becomes public knowledge when you display and unregistered design in public.
Be careful and consistent; you don't want to give your client or contact the idea that you think they are untrustworthy. Use the measures you choose to use for all client's or contacts on all projects, making only 1 time exceptions if required. Don't single out a client that you actually feel is untrustworthy, unless you want to loose their business.
Are these legally binding? No. Can you use them on the negotiating table if you every get into a dispute? Absolutely. Their mere existence will deter theft of your designs so you don't have to exercise them legally. You want to keep the intellectual property you generate as a designer from becoming the pay day for another company.
Promotional documentary from RhinoFX on how they developed the concept, the direction, 3D models and character animation for ATI’s Ruby digital superstar. Key technologies in the making included FirePro accelerators and Maya. The motion capture (mocap) fighting scenes are pretty great as is the explanation of the facial animation.
Rob Jamieson from AMD captured this underwater theme park video on his new Sanyo Camcorder, at the IBC conference in Amsterdam. It shows a very cool, real-time underwater 3D simulation running on a FirePro graphics accelerator (including stereoscopic 3D).
The technology from VR Space Theatres enables an audience to view a real-time 3D stereo projected film, and to participate in - and therefore influence - the events on screen. (imagine this video capture as a simulated deep sea rescue operation, where the mini-sub is controlled by the audience). The technology combines the two big themes for the future of the entertainment industry - 3D stereoscopic visualization and interaction.
Apple today announced their new MacBook and MacBook Air lineups and they feature Display Port for video out. I’ve written several Display Port posts about why this is makes particular sense for notebooks. Foregoing inclusion of any legacy DVI or HDMI ports had to be a toughh choice. But Apple puts a premium value on keeping their form factor small, keeping power requirements low, and upping performance (e.g. driving their 30 inch display), so they went 100% Display Port - impressive
You’ve probably already read the news from Ceatec, that ATI graphics accelerators will be supporting DirectX 11, as well as OpenGL. Given the move by companies like AutoDesk to support DirectX in their professional products over OpenGL, this is a good move by ATI to make sure their hardware and drivers are top-performers regardless of the graphics API. In any case, I thought I would cover what we know about DirectX 11 in terms of features relevant to the CAD and professional markets.
Hardware Tessellation
Tesselation has been part of the XBox 360 and Radeon GPUs for years (including the RV7xx). Basically, an object further away will render as a coarse model using fewer triangles because details aren’t need. As the object moves closer to the viewer, the GPU hardware adds more triangles (actually patches and points) to create a more detailed and refined model. So you can create huge and complex graphics scenes with less overhead, directly in the GPU (think millions of polygons vs thousands) - great for gaming, but also great for complex visualizations and immersive simulations.
Hardware tessellation should also be scalable - so that low end hardware will simply generate less complex models without choking, but both low and high end hardware receive the same data.
Compute Shader
This is the equivalent to CUDA, AMD’s Stream Computing and the OpenCL open standard for parallel general purpose GPU computing tasks (computations traditionally handled by the CPU) such as blur or other special FX. The graphics pipeline will also be able to generate data structures that can better be used to handle general purpose applications. (think physics, scientific computing and raytracing as good examples).
Shader Model 5.0
Shader Model 5.0’s primary enhancement is to help manage the increasing complexity and interactions of shaders. In Shader Model 4, developers often use uber-shaders to manage all of their shaders and conflicts. But this leads to complex code that is both difficult to debug and is also more inefficient in terms of performance. Shader Model 5 essentially introduces subroutines so that developers can create shaders on the fly from common code fragments.
Multi-threading
The purpose of multi-threading is to spread rendering work across many parallel GPU threads to speed up tasks. It also enables the graphics pipeline to take advantage of dual- and quad-core CPUs for things like aynchronous resource loading.
When will this all happen?
So when will all this happen? ATI hinted that it will be in the next 12 months - so 2009. And it will be available on Vista and Windows 7 only (not XP). I would expect to see many applications developers simply jumping past DirectX 10 and moving straight to DirectX 11.
In addition to DirectX 11 support, ATI also indicated they will be strongly supporting OpenCL (Open Computer Language) and that they expect to see more mainstream applications (not just supercomputer/HPC apps) use GPU computing capabilities effectively.
For more reading on DirectX 11, Tom’s Hardware has a good recent summary.
Comparing rendering engines is much like comparing paintbrushes; some may allow you to do different things, but what makes them great is the artist behind them.Thankfully rendering engines are more alike than they are different. Most rendering packages that come out-of-the-box with the CAD packages industrial designers use, include features like ray-tracing, material libraries, drag and drop materials, video rendering, and wrap around textures and decals. Some new features are upping the ante in terms of render realism. Both Photoworks for Solidworks, Autodesk ImageStudio and Pro/ENGINEER Advanced Rendering Extension have HDRI scenes. This means that High Dynamic Range (HDR) images of common places (outdoors, kitchen, photo studio) are mapped on invisible spherical environments to create great reflections and specular highlights, with matching lighting. Just a few years ago I had to work very hard to fake this capability in Photoworks.
The two main out of the box rendering packages are the afore mentioned Photoworks and Autodesk ImageStudio. I only have direct experience with Photoworks. They both have the features I mentioned before, interactive renderings, indirect illumination, and global illumination. They are both easy to use. The two are more similar than different.
But they are different. Photoworks is based on the Lightworks engine, while ImageStudio is based on the Mental Ray engine. Photoworks is used to render Solidworks models, but ImageStudio can accept Solidworks, PRO-Engineer or CATIA models using STEP or IGES standard file formats. ImageStudio has the capability to schedule renderings. ImageStudio is also optimized to be able to handle large assemblies, something with which Photoworks has a hard time.
Other out of the box rendering engines are Pro/ENGINEER Advanced Rendering Extensions and AutoCAD rendering. These have most of the standard features you would expect, and are made to meet the needs of the industries their parent programs are targeted at. They do not go above and beyond, but work as you would want them too.
Rhino has taken the different approach of having a decent out of the box rendering engine, but opening it up for and encouraging users to user 3rd party programs. Rhino interfaces with rendering engines such as V Ray, Maxwell, Bryce, Flamingo and Penguin. All of these have their own strengths and weaknesses, and will be reviewed in a future column.
To really go above and beyond with renderings, you can always use Digital Content Creation (DCC) software like 3D Studio Max. These programs have a long learning curve, but their potential is endless. I see a fair bit of designers knowing 3DS Max out of college or university. As crude as the out of the box rendering engines seem by comparison, they are easy to use. This is important because you want to spend more time designing and less time rendering - the same reason you have a workstation graphics accelerator!
Update Oct 8, 2008 A reader comment informed me that while PhotoWorks 1 was based on Lightworks, PhotoWorks 2 is based on MentalRay. And of course, the new PhotoView 360 as an option for SolidWorks 2009, uses technology from Luxology.
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