SolidWorks and Autodesk offer programs to help out-of-work engineers

With the stated goal of assisting out-of-work engineers,  both SolidWorks and Autodesk have announced programs to help engineers beef up their CAD skills.

The SolidWorks Engineering Stimulus Package provides a 90-day version of SolidWorks 3D CAD software, training materials a chance at certification, and job leads to any U.S. or Canadian resident seeking to develop, upgrade, or refresh 3D CAD skills that employers need.

The Autodesk Assistance Program offers 13 month access to student license of AutoCAD, Revit Architecture, Autodesk Inventor Professional, and AutoCAD Civil 3D, and includes online training and discounts on certification testing.

OpenGL 3.1 Released - Proof is in the Pudding

Khronos and the OpenGL ARB have done it! OpenGL 3.1 and GLSL 1.40 have been released on the 6 month schedule promised at SIGGRAPH 2008. As promised, most of the legacy features marked as deprecated have been removed. No more display lists. No more immediate mode rendering. No more fixed function pipeline. The cruft accumulated over the last 17 years has been cleaned up to create a simplified and performant 3D graphics API. OpenGL 3.1 really does match the current generation of programmable graphics devices.

In addition to removing deprecated functionality, OpenGL 3.1 adds a bunch of handy new features.

Uniform buffer objects
The first and biggest is support for uniform buffer objects. This new object allows a shader to group uniforms together into a block of uniform memory. New interfaces make updating groups of uniforms easier and much more efficient. These new buffers can also be shared between programs, reducing wasted memory usage and shader uniform-reload time.

Texture buffer objects and Copy buffers
Texture buffer objects were also introduced into core OpenGL 3.1. This new texture type allows generic buffers to be attached to a texture as a 1D array. Now general buffer data is accessible to shaders through new fetch functions. Additionally, a copy mechanism (GL_EXT_copy_buffers) that allows for direct accelerated buffer-to-buffer copies has been added. This extends the benefits of generic buffer objects and creates interesting opportunities with multithreaded load/execute algorithms.

Instanced rendering
Instanced rendering has been added to core, allowing apps to draw multiple copies of similar objects without incurring system bandwidth costs (I mentioned this inadvertently in an earlier post).

Other features
Primitive restart, SNORM textures and several other new features were also added.

OpenGL is continuing to march forward with progressive revisions bringing new functionality to 3D developers. AMD will follow with full driver support for OpenGL 3.1 shortly.

The OpenGL Roadmap - The hows and whys

I have seen many concerns, questions, comments, etc on the progress of OpenGL over the last few years. Some are positive, some not. But what really seems to be lacking is a clarity on the how and why.

First, OpenGL is a public and open specification that is available for all to read and program for. It is written by a consortium of companies and individuals within the Khronos Group who have an interest in 3D graphics. Generally speaking, considerable time and effort is volunteered by these groups to help promote open 3D graphics specification. Modern OpenGL specifications are not the creation of one company or individual. OpenGL is intended to work on a considerable selection of platforms, making code very portable between operating systems. OpenGL is intended to work on many levels of hardware, allowing the same application to run on various graphics chips. I'd argue OpenGL related specs (OpenGL ES/SC/etc) are some of the most portable APIs for 3D graphics.

So how exactly does an OpenGL specification get written? The ARB looks at hardware capabilities and corresponding OpenGL extensions to determine candidates for inclusion in a future version. Input on feature candidates is gathered from industry players and individuals. Features are then prioritized by general usefulness and future compatibility, and then added to the core language. Simplified, a new feature goes from Idea --> Vendor/ARB Extension --> Core OpenGL Specification, assuming hardware is capable.

Why use this process? One reason is that extensions provide an efficient proof-of-concept. The idea has been tried. Its weaknesses and strengths are known and can be addressed as the extension is promoted to core. Another reason is that free-form design by committee is cumbersome and error prone at best. The side-effect of this process is that the core specification may lag behind some hardware and vendor extensions. But the final core specification is more stable and predictable.

A really common question I have seen is "I see feature XYZ in the DX spec, why isn't it in OpenGL?" There are several reasons. First and most importantly, OpenGL is a unique, separate, and independent specification. It does not, and should not follow any other API. Second, OpenGL makes decisions that are in the best interest of the industry, not of one company.

How can you help?
Given that new OpenGL features are likely to come from extensions, contact IHVs and Khronos members with constructive feedback of what you need and what types of features you think will be helpful. Use vendor specification extensions, let us know which ones are most helpful and would make good candidates for core features. OpenGL is our 3D graphics API. We can work together to make it the best API for the future of graphics.

Khronos ARB frequent contributors (AMD, Apple, ARM, Blizzard, IBM, Intel, Imagination Technologies, Nokia, NVIDIA, Transgaming, many others)

Green News - FirePro 2450 quad display card designed to operate at less than 18 watts

As part of the growing move to be green and energy efficient, AMD has released the FirePro 2450,  a single low profile video card that can attach and drive as many as four DVI or VGA displays at once, even at 1920x1200 resolution. It is intended for anyone who needs as many screens as possible without the space or cost requirements of multiple video cards. In terms of power, it peaks at 32W under a heavy load, dropping to 17W in typical 2D-only conditions.  It supports DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.1. It comes with 512MB of memory for $499.

Catalyst driver 9.2 add three new OpenGL extensions

Last month I posted about the Catalyst 9.1 drivers with the full support for OpenGL 3.0 on Radeon HD 2400. ATI has released the new 9.2 driver and it introduces three new OpenGL extensions:

• GL_EXT_bindable_uniform
• GL_EXT_texture_shared_exponent
• WGL_AMDX_gpu_association

I wrote to AMD to find out if the new WGL_AMDX_gpu_association was the equivalent to NVIDIA’s WGL_NV_gpu_affinity extension for binging an OpenGL render context to a specific GPU (when several GPUs are present). AMD responded back with the post from Nick Haemel.

Welcome to the future of graphics! AMD OpenGL 3.0 driver release on Jan 28, 2009

Welcome to the future of professional graphics!  That future begins with OpenGL 3.0. As most of you know, the OpenGL 3.0 specification was finalized late in 2008. It represents a big step in modernizing cross-platform 3D graphics support and bring applications closer to the torrential power of the modern graphics chip. OpenGL 3.0 will enable applications to continue pushing the edge of the graphics envelope while maintaining portability across all major OSes.

AMD has supported the core GL3 features as extensions for some time, allowing developers to get a head-start in developing for the new API. That means developers have had access to floating point color buffers, instanced rendering, updated GPU shader language features, new texture formats, and much more on Radeon and FirePro hardware.

The first official driver release with the full support for OpenGL 3.0 on Radeon HD 2400 and above is built into ATI Catalyst Release 9.1, set for public consumption on January 28, 2009. It will be available for download on the AMD Support & Drivers page. This release will enable full and forward-looking GL3.0 contexts on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux. Look for official FirePro support later in Q1. The great news is you will be able to use GL3 on current ATI FirePro V3700 and above cards as well as ATI Radeon HD 2400 and above with a driver update.

Stay tuned for more updates on how AMD and OpenGL are enhancing application capabilities, speeding up workloads, and helping to move the CAD industry forward.

Update Jan 29, 2009 -  9.1 Driver is available for download. Check out the release notes for more info.

Siggraph Asia 2008 technology highlights

For the professional crowd, SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 was really the happening place to find out the latest on workstation graphics products. Although it is a month past, I thought I would point out some of the interesting stuff shown. If you read Chinese you might also want to check out some of the Asian press (nice graphics if nothing else).

So what was shown of particular interest relevant to workstation graphics?

• The OpenCL announcement for standardized GPGPU computing
• The first demo showcasing OpenCL in action (running one computational task across two or more GPUs)
• 56-inch 3840 x 2160 QuadHD LCD display from Sapphire
• MachStudio demo showing real-time soft shadows, simulated GI, reflections, refractions, SSS, DOF, and HDR exposures

ATI will make significant workstation gains in 2009

Fudzilla is reporting that Nvidia will start to lose market share in 2009 for the professional workstation market and ATI will gain significant ground.  The dramatically improved drivers, the new FirePro line, as well significant deals with HP, Dell and Lenovo account for the increase by ATI.

AMD to release Fusion Render Cloud petaFLOP graphics supercomputer for interactive content delivery

From CES - AMD made a rather bold announcement of a “a new kind of supercomputer unlike any other ever built. It is being designed to break the one petaFLOPS barrier, and to process a million compute threads across more than 1,000 graphics processors. We anticipate it to be the fastest graphics supercomputer ever. And it will be powered by OTOY’s software for a singular purpose: to make HD cloud computing a reality.” AMD plans to have the sytem ready by the second half of 2009.

Look for AMD OpenCL-compliant SDK release in first half of 2009

Today the OpenCL CPU+GPU compute standard was ratified by the Khronos Group and AMD announced that it is making good progress on its OpenCL-compliant offering and plans to release a developer version of the ATI Stream SDK v1.4 with support for OpenCL 1.0 for content developers in the first half of 2009. Working from early specifications of OpenCL, AMD’s engineering team has already started running code on its initial implementation.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language), a way to extract computing performance out of GPUs and multicore CPUs in an architecture-independent way. In other words, programmers can use the GPU as a data-parallel coprocessor without having to go through a specialized graphics API like OpenGL or DirectX. 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, to greatly improve speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications from entertainment to scientific and 3D visualization.

The new ATI Stream SDK 1.4 will add finer grain data type support, graphics API interoperability, multi-GPU support and support for Radeon HD 4870 X2 and several ATI FirePro 3D graphics accelerators