Infographics Summary for 2010-09-22
10:30 pm
Micoy’s 360 degree 3-D bubble
3:00 pm
At the Nvidia GPU technology conference in San Jose, Micoy is showing off an inflatable bubble that can display a 360 degree movie in 3-D.
I saw one of these inflatable hemispheres at SIGGRAPH a few years ago. Inside of it, Nvidia was projecting a 360 degree NASA movie. They had pillows in there, and soon several people had fallen asleep, one of whom snored. It is a nice piece of technology to take on the road, but I would not expect seeing it showing up in houses anytime soon.
The Laptop Mag Blog has a post about the technology behind it, and even has a video posted, showing how it looked inside.
Current 3D technology seen in theaters–think Avatar–is based on projecting an image to a flat screen. Therefore, there’s a single focusing point (like when you stitch together a bunch of photos to create a panoramic image) and as a result, the 3D draws your eye into the screen; while objects do pop out, having the whole film in front of the screen causes headaches.
By contrast, Micoy’s 3D rendering technology is based on a curved screen with infinite focal points, so when you’re sitting in the theater, images “fill” the space between you and the screen, creating a more immersive 3D experience. Like Nvidia’s and ATI’s 3D technology, Micoy uses active-shutter glasses that flicker at 120-Hz, and cost about $50 per pair.
via : Avatar 2.0: Eyes on with Micoy’s 360-degree 3D Projection Technology @ Laptop Mag Blog
NVidia Product Roadmap – Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell
2:27 pm
If you were reading our LiveBlog of the GTC2010 Keynote Speech, then you saw the note about the Product Roadmap. NVidia has historically been pretty secretive with roadmaps, particularly with the press, but this time Jen-Hsun threw up a single slide announcing not only the names of their upcoming 2 new products, but estimated performance figures and dates.
The two new products:
- Kepler – To be released sometime in 2011, 28nm process. Estimated double-precision Gigaflops performance of 4-6GFlops per watt.
- Maxwell – To be released sometime in 2013, 22nm process. Estimated double-precision Gigaflops performance of 15-16 GFlops per watt, making is about 16x better than the Fermi-driven cards.
How can they expect to hit these unbelievable numbers? First off, they’re going to work on reducing the process size (Fermi is at 40nm) so simply cutting down to 28nm would allow a significantly quantity of extra transistors to be added. However, that’s not the only thing that will have to happen. Beyond that, NVidia wouldn’t say much more than “architectural changes” similar to what happened with Fermi.
I was, personally, very glad to see NVidia presenting figures in Performance Per Watt, as in Jen-Hsun’s words:
Math is Free. Transistors are Free. Power is expensive. Performance Per Watt = Performance.
And this translates through their entire product portfolio. The changes that will enable this kind of performance on the high-end will also show up in the consumer-side (GeForce) as improved gaming performance, better PhysX, and more real-time raytracing, and it will show up on the mobile side as improved Tegra chipsets (CUDA in the power of your hand??!).
IBC 2010: Sony Vegas Pro 10 3D features
2:00 pm
Director Michael Bryant at Sony Creative Software presents the cool new 3D features in Vegas Pro 10 just launched at IBC 2010 in Amsterdam.
CGSociety on the Original TRON
1:00 pm
TRON Legacy comes ever closer, but doesn’t seem to diminish the technological masterpiece that is the original. CGSociety acknowledges this with a great detailed writeup, containing lots of conceptual graphics from preproduction, covering how creation of the technology and the movie.
“I think the most difficult thing in doing Tron was to marry the computer simulation moments with the live-action photography, and have them feel like they were all in the same place,” stated computer effects supervisor Richard Taylor (Time After Time) who along with computer image choreographer Bill Kroyer (Technological Threat) had to deal with computer graphics companies unfamiliar with the world of moviemaking. “We went in not knowing anything about computer technology,” remarked Kroyer. “We only knew what we wanted to achieve on the film. In discussions with the development groups of each company, we were convinced that we could actually develop the technology as we went along and marry it with the creative needs, and end up with a film that would look good.”
via CGSociety – TRON.
NVidia Announces iray Realtime Raytracer for 3dsMax
12:17 pm
On stage at GTC2010, Ken Pimental (Autodesk), Micheal Kaplan (mental images) and Jen-Hsun Huang (NVidia) stood together to announce the next generation rendering technology they’ve integrated. They showed a simple scene of a few chairs around a table that had been rendering the scene for over an hour, and was approximately 10% in when they were on stage. Mainly, the delay would due to the fast that the scene has no direct lighting, all lighting was indirect through the set of double-glass windows in the back and then reflected off the various elements in the scene. They then paused it to show the various Render panels, showing the details of Final Gather and illumination settings, about how they have had to include many options to control the various shortcuts.
The iRay Control Panel.
Starting next week, subscription owners will be able to download iRay, mental image’s real-time GPU-accelerated ray-tracing solution, for use directly within 3dsMax as a new renderer. The result is a far simpler control panel, far faster renders, and vastly more accurate images at the end. On the right, you can see the control panel (click for larger-size), and you can see how trivial the new setup is.
After that, they clicked the “Render” button. It took approximately 10s to translate and pad the scene into the proper formats, then within seconds a near-complete render was visible. iRay is an interative renderer so the longer you let it go, the better the result will be, however the initial result is usually good-enough (to tell that something is wrong, needs to be corrected, etc) making the iterative process MUCH faster.
The same scene in iRay, 5seconds in.
This will be available to 3dsMax Subscription members next week.
Next, they showed the “cloud rendering” capabilities on stage, run by Peer 1 hosting, showing how the iray rendering (on 32 GPUs) offers interactive real-time rendering. In addition to simply rendering the image faster, it enables the user to actually “walk” around the scene and see it rendered interactively as they use it. Via a custom web interface, they could then place furniture and art within the room, all rendered realtime. In addition, since there was no direct lighting they could change the time of day to see completely different lighting environments.
iRay on the Web
The web-interface is all research, and I’ve seen it several times before, but the “official” presentation is new.
Asus Crosshair IV Extreme uses Hydra chip
12:00 pm
The Lucid Hydra chip is an independent solution to allow multiple GPUs to render scenes in games. This means that you are no longer dependent on SLI from NVidia or Crossfire from ATI. In the past, there have been several problems with the Hydra chip, which appear to have been on the software side of things. We have talked about the Lucid Hydra chip several times in the past.
Guru3d is reporting on a new motherboard from Asus that uses Lucid’s Hydra chip.
On Crosshair IV Extreme, a unique layout design features a total of five PCI Express expansion slots. Two provide dedicated native graphics card support for either a single GPU or two in CrossFire configuration. The additional three feature Lucid HYDRALOGIX and CrossLinx 3 technologies, which enable a mixture of graphics cards from different vendors and generations, with a total of four detectable and working at once. Users keen on tuning their system gain greater freedom to do so with the unprecedented five PCI Express slots, and the technology maintains optimized performance whether in single or multiple-GPU arrangements.
via : ASUS launches Lucid Hydra based Crosshair IV Extreme @ Guru3D
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