Digital Home Thoughts: AMD Tech Day: Afternoon Sessions

Cinema 2.0: Going Beyond Standard Computer Graphics
Patrick Moorhead, VP of Advanced Marketing, talked about the innovations that AMD had accomplished in the market, which covered everything from the first true quad-core processor to the software they've released through AMD Live!. Cinema 2.0 is a concept that involves taking the dynamic nature of games and merging it with the involved feeling of a movie.


Figure 7: Patrick Moorhead talking about Cinema 2.0.

Moorhead talked about the Radeon 4800 series GPU, which was officially released the day I was on the AMD campus. The 4800 has some serious firepower under the hood: 800 stream processors, the industry's first teraflop GPU, and GDDR5 graphics memory (in the case of the 4870). In the 4800 series, all cards support DirectX 10.1, offer 2.5 times the performance of the previous generation card, and pricing starts at $199 for the entry-level model. Since we didn't leave with a card to check out, after I got back from Austin I picked up a 4850-based card for $199 from my local Calgary computer parts store and have been very impressed with it. My gaming has been kicked up a notch in quality, the card isn't very loud, and everything is nice and stable.


Figure 8: Two ATI Radeon 4870 cards in CrossFire mode. Surprisingly, the loudest thing was the power supply - the cards themselves were fairly quiet.

DVD upscaling and dynamic contrast technology are part of the 4000 series GPUs – and if the slides they showed us are any indication, the difference is quite impressive. These improvements are limited to certain players though, which includes DVD players from Roxio/Sonic, Cyberlink, Windows Media Player, and others. I asked them to talk to the guys from VLC, because that's the video player I use most of the time now - and with over 89 million total downloads and counting, I know I'm far from alone.

Moorhead then showed us a series of videos that demonstrated the real-time rendering abilities of various ATI cards over the years, and it's impressive to see how far real-time graphics have come. The latest real-time video as rendered on two 4870 GPUs in CrossFire mode, looked extremely good...dare I even say photo-realistic in some ways. I managed to find a site that has screen shots and a Flash-based version of the clip. Here's another example of real-time rendering - the glass in particular impressed me.

Benchmarking Realities
Mark Welker, the Manager Product Development Engineer, tackled the subject of benchmarking in an off-the-cuff presentation. We learned that the CPU was 25-35% of the power consumption on a typical notebook, so while AMD continues to work to minimize processor power, there are other factors at play that influence battery life more than the CPU (namely the screen). When it comes to benchmarking, it's amazing how the little things matter. The example that Welker gave was how some benchmarking programs that use Microsoft Word will use "Lorem Ipsum" text (here's an explanation of what that's for) - the problem is that the grammar checker will go berserk and chew up CPU cycles, lowering the benchmarking score for that text.


Figure 9: Mark Welker in his racing reds.