Late last year, Imagination Technologies introduced its IMG A-Series. At the time, they said it was their most important GPU launch since the mobile PowerVR GPU, 15 years ago. Now, 11 months later, the company says it has topped itself and announced the IMG B-Series—a new expanded range of GPU IP. Imagination says the B-series multi-core lets customers reduce … Read more
(Source: AMD) AMD created an extraordinarily good design with the Zen architecture in April 2017. You can measure that by the steady generation-to-generation improvements the company has made with Zen’s various derivatives. The latest iteration is the new Ryzens. AMD predicts a 19% improvement in instructions-per-clock (IPC) for the Zen 3 over last year’s Zen 2 design version. This improvement … Read more
(Source: KPF. Beijing Century City) As mentioned in my Siggraph blog, the coronavirus pandemic has shifted the way content is created and consumed. Work now often involves teams dispersed worldwide, working remotely on high-resolution content while using multiple workloads and requiring massive computing resources. Nvidia has contributed with the new RTX A6000 and A40 AIBs that use the 8 … Read more
The Oculus Quest 2 is the latest result of years of collaboration between Qualcomm and Facebook to offer an immersive self-contained gaming VR device for consumers. Qualcomm’s contribution is its Snapdragon XR2 Platform and the company claims its latest version offers staggering improvements. The company says these improvements include, twice the CPU and GPU performance compared to its predecessor [the … Read more
The traditional 3D graphics pipeline is now 60 years old—is it time to reimagine how 3D graphics should be processed and displayed? In pursuit of greater display acuity, pixel densities are increasing in spatial resolution and color depth. In pursuit of greater realism, triangles, the basis for 3D models, are increasing in density and shrinking in size such that there … Read more
Nvidia’s RTX3080 in box presentation PC Benchmarking got started back in the mid-to-late 1980s when PC clones became abundant. Of course, they weren’t perfect clones, they had their own variations and features and to the new PC's fidelity and ability to run programs compared to a genuine IBM PC, we used the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.0. Today, the landscape is even … Read more
When 3D graphics controllers were just immerging in the late 1990s, one company in particular, 3Dfx, experimented with ways to scale up the performance of accelerating the 3D gameplay. Their idea was scan-line interleave (SLI), introduced in 1998 as part of their second-generation chip introduction, Voodoo2 (or Voodoo2). In SLI mode, two Voodoo2 add-in-boards (AIBs) could run in parallel, with … Read more
Although not really a graphics chip in that it directly manipulated any pixels, the Geometry Engine introduced in 1981 was a breakthrough in VLSI of critical mathematics functions used for graphics. The Geometry Engine was a special-purpose processor with a four-component vector, floating-point processor for three basic operations in computer graphics: matrix transformations, clipping, and mapping to output device coordinates. … Read more
After months of leaks, rumors, and speculation, Intel formally and officially released the details of its 11-generation processor, code-named Tiger Lake. The processor leverages Intel’s SuperFin 10 nm process and introduces Intel’s first integrated Iris Xe GPU claiming 2× the performance over the previous generation — 2× is a lot. The CPU and other processors as well as the communications … Read more
Leaks, peaks, and sneaks took some of the explosive value out of Nvidia’s big RTX 30 reveal this week, but it was of no consequence because Nvidia had such a big story to tell. Whatever you thought you already knew was nothing compared to what Nvidia showed. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder, and CEO, invited us into his kitchen again to … Read more
Qualcomm is building on the promise of its 7x line to enable high-end features for mid-range mobile devices. The Snapdragon 732G mobile platform arrives as a successor to the Snapdragon 730G and it’s targeted at devices with gaming in mind. The big news is that this latest chip will arrive in a new Poco phone. Poco officially spun out of … Read more
Siggraph has become an important gathering point for the open-source community. Many of the developers creating tools for digital content creation are working at studios serving the movie industry or at companies working with the studios. Naturally then, Siggraph is the site for the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) meetings to provide updates on the organization's work over the year. The … Read more
