AMD will give a first-look at it's latest high end graphics card (all we know is it "will expand on the FirePro V8800") at IBC (Hall 7, J30). In addition they will show the FirePro RG220 Remote Workstation Graphics card (think low-power and energy efficiency for cloud computing graphics).
FirePro technology will be shown in partner demos including with VizRT, StudioGPU, Ventuz, MainConcept, Dell, HP, Barco, The Foundry, and Planar. Highlights include:
HP and Dell - workstations will be available to view on the stand, including AMD support for 30-bit colour in Adobe Photoshop with the HP Dream Color monitor
VizRT showcasing its broadcast graphics solutions with a 12-screen video wall demo
StudioGPU showcasing its MachStudio Pro (version 2?) real-time 3D graphics solution
Just in time for the climate summit in Copenhagen, the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program grants free design and engineering software to early-stage clean technology companies in North America who are working to solve some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. The grant gives you up to five licenses each of Inventor, Revit, Vault, Showcase, NavisWorks and Alias Design. Kudos to Autodesk! Would like to see more companies put their money where there mouth is.
Just saw this promo page for Innovation Revolution 2010 which, based on the “evergreen” in the URL appears to be a site geared toward an upcoming generation of FirePro professional cards. Currently there is no information on the site, however there is a contest promo to win a FirePro V3750.
Got this video via email from one of the engineers on the FirePro team. Seems someone at Autodesk University was so impressed by FirePro graphic performance that they upgraded the FirePro team to one of the massive presidential suites at the Mandalay Bay. The video is entertaining to watch as much to see what a presidential suite looks like (nothing like the rooms I have stayed in in Vegas), as it is to see how the engineers get so blown away (obviously good for these guys to get aways from their computers now and then)!
How could you not love this story! Essentially AMD, developer relations manager, noted how Nvidia seems to be “abandoning the gaming market” (implied is professional CAD and DCC), primarily because of their lack of work on DX11 support and their extreme focus on proprietary standards like CUDA. It’s a good read and there are some good points.
Lots of news, speculation and rumors this week regarding the latest in the GPU world.
ATI has sold hundreds of thousands of Radeon HD 5870 DirectX 11 cards, with no impact or slowdown from the Nvdia Fermi announcement - Fudzilla
Reports are circulating that NVIDIA will kill off the GTX 260, GTX 275, and GTX 285 and exit the high-end and mid-range graphics card market, focusing instead on the scientific community. DirectX 11 Fermi-based entry level cards won't arrive until 2010 - ZDNet and Fudzilla
Nvidia has put all CPU-bound chipset development work on hold, pending resolution of a legal dispute with Intel - VizWorld
Obviously I have no inside knowledge of what is true or just partially true, but it is definitely interesting reading.
Update 9/22 - OK - although I thought the YouTube video I had up was a great example of nerd humor, it seems it riled up a few folks and I was asked to pull it off of Fireuser. So I pulled it. I want to emphasize that no harm was intended. I found this video when doing a search for “ATI Evergreen” shortly after the AMD event on Sept 20. The new DX11 cards from AMD are a big thing, and I was looking for footage form the event, but this video caught my attention and appealed to nerdish humor side. By the way, if anyone was able to get some footage of the DX11 cards in action for professional applications, drop me a line!
I was just reading VizWorld and noticed a reference to an article summarizing a JPR industry report with the following:
“The quarter was the first where AMD finally started to gain back some share from NVIDIA. JPR reports that AMD’s unit share rose from 31% in Q1 to 35% in Q2 with NVIDIA seeing their share decline the same 4% to 64% overall. That means that AMD took every bit of its growth from NVIDIA’s marketshare.”
Would have love to have seen this comparison specifically for the professional markets.
By nature, human beings don’t like waiting; so no matter what workstation you use it will never be fast enough. If you have a brand new machine it will feel faster for a while but over time you will probably notice it getting slower. This could be because you’ve got used to the speed but maybe because your system is getting furred up like a kitchen kettle.
To help give you some extra performance, either for loading bigger assemblies or in order to wait less time for your system to do something, Rob Jamieson, gives his top ten tips on how to get more performance out of your workstation through configuring hardware and tuning drivers.
At Computex 2009, AMD gave a series of demonstrations of a true DirectX 11 graphics processor at Computex. Featured were tessellation, support for Compute Shaders (similar to using OpenCL, targeting GPGPU computing), custom filter anti-aliasing and high-definition ambient occlusion shading. While the demos were targeted at the gaming audience, the implications for faster rendering with improved detail for the professional DCC and CAD using the FirePro line should be apparent.
This YouTube video shows off DirectX 11 tessellation on the GPU.
FireUser.com is a community resource for visualization, 3D, video and engineering professionals to learn about the latest acceleration and display technologies, discuss support issues, as well as influence the features and direction of the FireGL and FirePro accelerator line.
By nature, human beings don’t like waiting; so no matter what workstation you use it will never be fast enough. If you have a brand new machine it will feel faster for a while but over time you will probably notice it getting slower. This could be because you’ve got used to the speed but maybe because your system is getting furred up like a kitchen kettle.
