Fermi launched yesterday and it redefined the meaning of realtime raytracing/pathtracing. Everyone knew it was going to excell at CUDA computing tasks such as raytracing, but this is really nuts: Anandtech benched Nvidia's latest Optix demo called Design Garage which features sports cars rendered with path tracing, and the benchmark results are totally off the charts: Anand measured an 870% improvement in pathtracing performance between the GTX480 and the GTX285. Damn...I bet it flies in voxel raycasting too.
This is excellent news for all the GPU based renderers.
"Design Garage" is a really cool app and remarkably complete for a tech demo. It's probably the coolest tech demo that I've seen since the ATI Ruby demo for the HD4800 series (only this time it's playable ;-). Congratz to Nvidia and the Optix team for innovating and pushing GPU technology to the limit (despite the problems)! And fuck you Charlie (ah it feels so good :-)! Now if someone could just make a simple low res interactively pathtraced game with Optix...
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
How the Labour Party Lost My Vote
I've always been a bit of an old lefty. I figure the world is a better place to live in when the the minimum standard of living is a bit higher than a cardboard box and a blind eye turned. So imagine my disgust when I saw the latest bit of direct marketing by the Labour Party.
"Lib Dem Leader: Thatcher was right!" declares the headline. Although it doesn't actually stoop to telling us why he thought that, or what about. Don't you love a lack of context? But wait! They've helpfully expanded this with an alleged newpaper headline - "My admiriation for Thatcher; by Clegg". Even more lack of context. It could have been admiration for her hair, or standing up to critics, or even suceeding in a mans world.
"But which newspaper is this from?" you ask, so you can have an informed opinion. Why, the Daily Mail of course. *head-desk*
If you trust this gutter rag to report fairly, and accurately, then I have a bridge you might like to buy.
The soon-to-be-recyling then goes on to say how the Lib Dems are more in line with the old Tories, than the new Conservative party is. I suppose that's because the new Conservatives are too busy trying to emulate the New Labour party policy of "Say what will get most votes from Middle England" rather than having some firm ideals or values?
After I'd torn the leaflet up I dicovered a wonderful nugget of scare-mongery on the back - "Only Labour can beat the Tories," it claims. "A vote for the Lib Dems or any other party wll let the Tories win!" If a party is reduced to advocating tactical voting, I think they've already lost.
I still can't forgive the Conservatives for snatching school milk, the miners strikes, and the Poll Tax, but if the opposition has sunk to this level (remember when the Consevatives created the New Labour - New Danger posters?) then we have nothing left to lose.
Personally I will be voting for the party I want to win*, not the one I hate less.
*=Certainly not the Conservatives or one of those single policy parties like UKIP or the BNP either!
"Lib Dem Leader: Thatcher was right!" declares the headline. Although it doesn't actually stoop to telling us why he thought that, or what about. Don't you love a lack of context? But wait! They've helpfully expanded this with an alleged newpaper headline - "My admiriation for Thatcher; by Clegg". Even more lack of context. It could have been admiration for her hair, or standing up to critics, or even suceeding in a mans world.
"But which newspaper is this from?" you ask, so you can have an informed opinion. Why, the Daily Mail of course. *head-desk*
If you trust this gutter rag to report fairly, and accurately, then I have a bridge you might like to buy.
The soon-to-be-recyling then goes on to say how the Lib Dems are more in line with the old Tories, than the new Conservative party is. I suppose that's because the new Conservatives are too busy trying to emulate the New Labour party policy of "Say what will get most votes from Middle England" rather than having some firm ideals or values?
After I'd torn the leaflet up I dicovered a wonderful nugget of scare-mongery on the back - "Only Labour can beat the Tories," it claims. "A vote for the Lib Dems or any other party wll let the Tories win!" If a party is reduced to advocating tactical voting, I think they've already lost.
I still can't forgive the Conservatives for snatching school milk, the miners strikes, and the Poll Tax, but if the opposition has sunk to this level (remember when the Consevatives created the New Labour - New Danger posters?) then we have nothing left to lose.
Personally I will be voting for the party I want to win*, not the one I hate less.
*=Certainly not the Conservatives or one of those single policy parties like UKIP or the BNP either!
Monday, March 15, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
SVO and path tracing update
A few months ago, I started thinking about an implementation of extending Sparse Voxel Octree raycasting with realtime GPU accelerated path tracing as a proof of concept. Well, no need for that anymore as the guys behind Voxelstein 3D have beaten me to it.
Hans Krieg, the (only?) programmer of the Voxelstein 3d engine incorporated a path tracing extension to the engine which uses SVO and BIH (bounding interval hierarchy) to render the voxels. The code runs on both CPU and GPU(CUDA) and the first images are rather crude, but have a warm and natural global illumination to them.
For pictures and details about the engine, visit http://www.jonof.id.au/forum/index.php?topic=1411.msg12406#msg12406
UPDATE: Samuli Laine has written an excellent paper entitled "Efficient Sparse Voxel Octrees" which uses a nifty trick to make the contours of the voxels much less blocky. On top of that, he posted a video and the complete open sourced CUDA code of his technique as well. All can be found, read, watched on http://code.google.com/p/efficient-sparse-voxel-octrees/ . Fantastic work and probably the most practical and "efficient" implementation of SVOs yet, ready to be abused by graphics engineers :-)
Hans Krieg, the (only?) programmer of the Voxelstein 3d engine incorporated a path tracing extension to the engine which uses SVO and BIH (bounding interval hierarchy) to render the voxels. The code runs on both CPU and GPU(CUDA) and the first images are rather crude, but have a warm and natural global illumination to them.
For pictures and details about the engine, visit http://www.jonof.id.au/forum/index.php?topic=1411.msg12406#msg12406
UPDATE: Samuli Laine has written an excellent paper entitled "Efficient Sparse Voxel Octrees" which uses a nifty trick to make the contours of the voxels much less blocky. On top of that, he posted a video and the complete open sourced CUDA code of his technique as well. All can be found, read, watched on http://code.google.com/p/efficient-sparse-voxel-octrees/ . Fantastic work and probably the most practical and "efficient" implementation of SVOs yet, ready to be abused by graphics engineers :-)
OTOY this summer?
Excellent must read article about OTOY:
http://games.venturebeat.com/2010/03/10/otoy-announces-supercomputer-will-enable-revolutionary-games-on-demand-service/
Apparently OTOY is building multiple supercomputers (Fusion Render Clouds) with AMD and Supermicro which are expected to launch this summer. Wooooot!!
Check out their revamped website as well: www.otoy.com Finally some action :-D !
This press release summarizes it all: http://www.otoy.com/media/press/launch.html
I'm just hoping that the awesome voxel raycasting technology first seen in the Cinema 2.0/Ruby demo for the HD4800 series in June 2008 (sheesh, that was 21 months ago!!!!), will be used as well on these cloud supercomputers, as it would be an ideal fit and instant justification for the concept of cloud rendering.
In other news, Onlive is also launching its cloud gaming service on June 17th! Are we going to have a cloudy summer?
http://games.venturebeat.com/2010/03/10/otoy-announces-supercomputer-will-enable-revolutionary-games-on-demand-service/
Apparently OTOY is building multiple supercomputers (Fusion Render Clouds) with AMD and Supermicro which are expected to launch this summer. Wooooot!!
The hardware itself is quite intimidating. A supercomputer will consist of 128 servers, with a total of 250 AMD “Mangy Cours” Opteron microprocessors and 500 graphics chips based on AMD’s Cypress designs. Each of those graphics chips can process 2.7 teraflops, or 2.7 trillion math operations per second. Each supercomputer could serve 3,000 high-definition users, or 12,000 standard-definition users. Otoy’s own software on a consumer’s own machine is tiny, taking up just four kilobytes of data.
Check out their revamped website as well: www.otoy.com Finally some action :-D !
This press release summarizes it all: http://www.otoy.com/media/press/launch.html
I'm just hoping that the awesome voxel raycasting technology first seen in the Cinema 2.0/Ruby demo for the HD4800 series in June 2008 (sheesh, that was 21 months ago!!!!), will be used as well on these cloud supercomputers, as it would be an ideal fit and instant justification for the concept of cloud rendering.
In other news, Onlive is also launching its cloud gaming service on June 17th! Are we going to have a cloudy summer?
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Prezi Templates
It occurred to me that we could make Prezi look really cool if we had some familiar, iconic templates. Could this be the start of 'Prezi Art'? I don't know if I'm the first person to do this but here is my attempt at a cool template - the classic iPod outline (what is particularly sweet is that you can embed a YouTube video into the screen!).
http://prezi.com/i67d4clx2m6w/
http://prezi.com/i67d4clx2m6w/
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Mobile Trends 2020
Complied by Rudy De Waele http://www.slideshare.net/rudydw/mobile-trends-2020
Mobile Trends 2020
View more presentations from rudydw.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
March Updates in Progress
The following updates are taking place during the month of March 2010:
Andromeda Media Group
- March 1: Some icons were updated to remove white borders.
- March 1: Broken images have been repaired.
- March 1: [Downloads] was re-enabled.
- March 1: Anti-Spam filters have been installed, in cooperation with StopForumSpam.com.
- March 1: User registration has been opened to the public.
- March 2: The primary domain name has been changed to [andromedaunderground.com].
- March 2: Some style issues are appearing. We know about this issue and are working to fix it.
- March 3: Quick access to report bugs, ask questions, or send a feature request. This takes the form of a Feedback button on the left of each page.
Andromeda Media Group
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
OTOY teams up with SolidWorks
Nice bit of information about OTOY (finally). Thanks to the realtimerendering.com blog!
more here: http://www.upfrontezine.com/2010/upf-635.htm
Otoy's cloud technology
Dassault Systems SolidWorks frustrated the media at SolidWorks World 2010 by being vague on the technical details of their cloud-based CAD, despite it apparently being under development for three years. So I was happy to speak with Jules Urbach of OTOY, the ceo of the company behind the curtain.
It was OTOY technology that powered the SolidWorks-in-the-cloud demo. OTOY uses a different approach from than of other technology providers, such as VisualTao (renamed PlanPlatform, renamed Autodesk Israel, recently acquired by Autodesk for its Project Butterfly for online co-editing of AutoCAD files).
The primary problem with running software on the cloud is latency -- the delay between the distant server and your computer. Latency is a function of bandwidth (how fast is the Internet connection?), distance (how far is the server from your computer?), resolution-quality of the screen images (how much data needs to be sent to your computer?), and the processing speed on the server (how quickly the data can be generated?).
Mr Urbach has been working on this problem for a decade, originally developing just such a system for playing video games over the Internet on behalf of entertainment companies like Nickelodeon. For the last couple of years, though, he's been working with AMD to deliver very high resolution images very quickly over even relatively slow connections -- which solves most of the problems associated with latency .
How OTOY Technology Works
The solutions are to (a) greatly compress images and (b) generate images at very high speeds on very low cost "computers." Compression is merely a software problem; the high-speed-but-cheap computing is made possible by AMD's new RV770 GPU with its 800 stream processing units and 2GB of 256-bit RAM boasting a bandwidth of 115GB/sec. "We're talking pennies per vector core doing parallel processing," Mr. Urbach told me.
The software-hardware combination can deliver real-time encoding of up to 3840x2160 resolution. For the more typical 1080p display, OTOY generates a frame every millisecond -- that's 1,000 frames per second. Indeed, he envisions running BluRay video from the cloud on iPhones and other devices, complete with all BluRay menuing systems.
The one problem he cannot completely solve is distance; it is desirable to keep latency under 16msec, for which the maximum distance should be about a thousand miles. But even with a server in San Francisco and the client in New York (3,000 miles), the delay is just 85msec; to Japan, about 100msec. He gets excited about the possibilities of applying his technology to ultrahigh bandwidth countries like Korea. (Companies like Akamai specialize in hosting replicated data in centers distributed around the world to cut latency for clients like CNN.)
more here: http://www.upfrontezine.com/2010/upf-635.htm
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