Just to let everyone know, if you haven’t already noticed, updates will be sparse today. I’m traveling back home from SC09 today, and therefore spenting the bulk of the day in the air.
Check back for a few updates later tonight, and things will be back to normal tomorrow.
New Moon man be laughed at by many as just another teenage emo drama, but the visual effects used to bring the werewolves to live in ways that can interact with each other and real actors makes use of several cutting-edge technologies. Chris Weitz, Director of the movie, sits down with 30ninjas to talk about the process.
I think any animator will tell you that the toughest things to do are CGI characters interacting with the real world and two CGI characters interacting with each other. That comes up when two creatures fight with one another, and although it’s something we’d done before with The Golden Compass, we had much more time to do it for that film. There’s a wolf fight in New Moon that works extraordinarily well, but you’ve really got two mathematical equations battling it out. You’ve got two physical representations of what something would be like in 3-D space which are conflicting with each other, so you’re figuring out what would give and where, and I can’t claim to hold the keys to that kind of mathematics, but that’s the stuff that takes up a lot of server space.
NVidia has constructed what they call the “Ultimate Gaming PC” and is auctioning it off on EBay. Current bidding price is just over $3k and the final auction price will be donated 100% to the Luekemia and Lymphoma society. The specs:
- 2 x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Graphics Card in SLI ($1,050)
- NVIDIA 3D Vision Glasses ($200)
- 22” Samsung 2233RZ 3d Monitor ($400)
- Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition CPU ($1,000)
- ASUS Rampage II Gene X58 Motherboard ($250)
- 12GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3 Memory ($400)
- 2 x 256GB Crucial Solid-State Hard Drives ($1600)
- 2 x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black Hard Drives ($200)
- Danger Den Double Wide Tower Case ($400)
- Complete Danger Den Water-cooling system ($750)
- Custom Smooth Creations Paint Job ($1000)
- Silverstone DA1000 Power Supply ($300)
- Case Accessories by Performance PCs ($350)
- Custom Sleeving by Performance PCs / Out of the Box Mods ($150)
- Case LED Lighting by Oznium ($100)
- Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard ($200)
- Custom NVIDIA Themed Razer Boomslang Mouse ($150)
- Microsoft Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Edition provided by TigerDirect ($300)
- 13 of the hottest The Way It’s Meant to Be Played PC Gaming Titles ($650)
- Billeted Aluminum Feet from mnpctech.com ($50)
- Custom Built by OutoftheBoxMods ($750)
- Estimated Value of Complete System: $10,25
Digitimes has information from Apple suppliers Foxconn, Quanta, and Pegatron that the long-rumored Apple Tablet is a reality, and will come in two versions:
Of course, it won’t be cheap.
Since 9.7-inch OLED panels are currently priced at about US$500 and panel costs normally account for about 30% of the device's total cost, Apple's 9.7-inch OLED tablet PC is expected to have a cost of about US$1,500-1,700 (based on today's prices), the sources estimated.
With price drops related to volume, it could come down to a retail of $2000 which could be driven down even lower if combined with 3G Telecom subsidies.
via Apple tablet PC reportedly delayed until 2H10, with OLED model now included.
NVidia has posted an interview with Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) Researcher Pat McCormick where he discusses the use of NVidia GPU’s and SCOUT to render data from their simulations.
In his research, McCormick is using a language called SCOUT that uses NVIDIA GPUs to help speed data analysis. “When using GPUs, rendering and data analysis goes directly through the GPU. The combination of using SCOUT and processing directly on the GPU saves us the time of writing separate programs as is traditionally required. This speeds up the process of data analysis to almost real time—saving time in both processing and analysis. ”
AMD is taking advantage of NVidia’s delay in a new video card by releasing the HD5970, what they are calling the “Fastest Graphics Card in the World”.
Enthusiasts can expand their field of view, ATI Radeon™ HD 5970, driving up to three displays at once, delivering an unmatched maximum resolution of 7680×1600 and creating an unparalleled game play experience.3 For the first time ever, ATI CrossFireX™ technology leverages the power of multiple graphics processors to deliver even more game performance in 20 of today’s popular titles when using ATI Eyefinity technology, with more to come.
The ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 graphics card delivers nearly 5 TeraFLOPS of compute power, ensuring superior performance in the latest DirectX® 11 games, as well as in previous versions of DirectX® and OpenGL titles.
No doubt the card is impressive, but reports claim that it draws a whopping 294W of power in full use. This puts it just barely within the margins of the ATX power specs (300W), making any overclocking or tweaking a tricky matter.
via AMD Introduces ATI Radeon™ HD 5970: Fastest Graphics Card in the World.
Anyone who’s done any CUDA or OpenCL Programming has dealt with the problem of moving data. First you move it from Disk to Main Memory, then from Main Memory to the CPU Memory, then the CPU Memory to the GPU Memory, where you finally do some work. Then you reverse the whole process. It’s time consuming and becomes the primary bottleneck of GPGPU codes. A new partnership between Infiniband provider Mellanox and NVidia aims to reduce some of this by granting the GPU direct high-speed access to IO.
The system architecture of a GPU-CPU server requires the CPU to initiate and manage memory transfers between the GPU and the InfiniBand network. The new software solution will enable Tesla GPUs to transfer data to pinned system memory that a Mellanox InfiniBand solution is able to read and transmit over the network. The result is increased overall system performance and efficiency.
We are happy today to roll out our latest feature here on VizWorld, although the eagle-eyed among you may have already noticed it in the top navbar: Job Listings. If you are an employer looking to hire somone in any of the fields we discuss here on VizWorld (scientific visualization, graphics hardware, visual effects, animation, etc) then head on over to our Jobs page and submit the job details. While we are ironing out the kinks, posting a job listing is free.
Our first job comes courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Labs, who need a Postdoctoral Visualization Scientist:
The successful candidate will perform independent and team research on scientific visualization techniques and participate in work with NREL scientists to visualize and analyze large spatial and non-spatial data sets, microscopy and spectroscopy laboratory data, and simulations related to renewable energy and energy efficiency research and deployment. The candidate will assist NREL scientists in a wide variety of applied areas, including: renewable energy resources (wind, solar, and biomass potential over space and time), modeling and simulation of materials at the atomistic level, metabolic modeling and multivariate analysis in bio-energy research, and geo-statistical analysis for worldwide solar and wind resource assessment. Additionally, the candidate will assist in the planning, design, and installation of NREL’s future visualization and virtual collaboration capabilities, supporting both hardware and software.
So go check it out, and if you manage to score a job thanks to a listing here, let us know!
In case you do not know, Fermi is the code name for the next generation GPU from Nvidia. The Fermi chip consists of 3 Billion transistors and is manufactured at TSMC on a 40 nm process. By way of comparison, the previous generation of NVidia graphics cards was the GeForce 200 series. The GeForce 200 series consists of 1.4 billion transistors and is built on a 65nm process. Once can easily see that Fermi is more than twice the number of transistors of the previous generation.
Read the rest of Paul’s story after the break, including pictures and video of the elusive Fermi in action.
Some news has come out today about Autodesk’s Smoke product coming to the Mac OSX platform. From FXGuide:
We haven’t been able to say anything up until now as we strongly respect our Non-Disclosure agreements as beta testers, but the rumors are true: there is definitely smoke for mac in Autodesk’s future. According to Autodesk, they will be “showing a technology preview of its industry leading Autodesk Smoke editorial finishing software running on the Mac OS X platform” at the Inter BEE 2009 conference in Tokyo. Inter BEE is a high-end post production conference in Japan, similar to NAB in the United States and IBC in Europe. “This will be the first time an Autodesk finishing product has been designed to run on the Mac platform,” says Autodesk.
Shortly afterwards, AutodeskPR‘s Twitter account had the following:
Autodesk reveals Smoke 2010 on Mac will sell for $14,995 US SRP
Definitely not cheap, but it’s great to see Autodesk developing a native product for the Mac.
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