AMD gives India a taste of "Cinema 2.0" experience, unveils teraflops graphic cards

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On the sidelines of the launch of the ATI Radeon 4800 series in Mumbai, Raja Koduri, CTO (Graphical Processing Group), AMD, said the cards would enable content developers to combines the real-time interactivity of video games with the ultra realism of today's digital cinema. Until today, content developers had to choose between cinematic realism rendered offline and absent of the rewarding sensory experience of interactivity, or an interactive experience that fell well short of photorealism.

However, the "Cinema 2.0" experience allows the fusion of dynamic real-time interactivity with convincing cinematic digital effects that deliver environments rivaling the realism of video.

"You're passive when you watch films. The game industry is interactive. But there are also limitations in video games. They don't perfectly match the visual impact of cinema," Dasaradha Gude, managing director, AMD India, said. "In each genre, the content directors want to take the experience to that next level, but until today, they just didn't have the technology. The Holy Grail of Cinema 2.0 is taking the visual fidelity of films and pairing it with the interactivity of games, blurring the line between the two."

"With Cinema 2.0 you won't just watch movies, you'll play in them," Koduri said. "Imagine the ability to look around the environment in a sci-fi movie, put yourself in the driver's seat in a race scene, duck behind things and pop up to see what's going on in an intense gun fight - all of these things are possible with Cinema 2.0. The challenge for any director has always been taking a wonderful vision in the canvas of the mind and translating that to film for the audience to see. Cinema 2.0 breaks down the time and cost barriers of getting a scene or shot that's 'just right,' and what's better, allows audiences to dive deeper into the experience to explore every part of that director's vision."

"From an application stand point, we have delivered a graphic supercomputer for gamers with its teraflops compute power, whose purpose is to deliver stunning images," he said.

"With Cinema 2.0, movies become more interactive and the video games look like movies," said Chris Hook, Head of Desktop Platform PR and Performance Communication, AMD, at the launch.

"This is a whole new day in terms of sensory entertainment. Now you can interact with cinema; now video games are going to look as good as cinema. We've introduced a revolutionary GPU after working with some of the most visionary technologists in Hollywood and Bollywood to make this happen," he said.

Till now, a typical computer-generated scene could take up to 30 hours to render each frame on CPUs. However, to achieve the "Cinema 2.0 experience" or the experience of smooth interactivity seen in today's games in movies, a minimum of 25 to 30 frames per second of rendering speed is needed. The AMD Radeon 4800 Series graphic cards are the answer to the prayers of movie directors, visual effects companies, computer graphics artists and game developers, as they make the "Cinema 2.0 experience" possible.

"AMD made a strategic decision to focus on GPU designs that maximized our efficiency and allowed us to provide enthusiasts, performance and mainstream users with the most compelling value proposition at every price point. The ATI Radeon 4800 series sets a new industry standard in key metrics such as performance-per-watt, performance-per-mm2 of chip die size, and performance-per-dollar," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager (Graphics Products Group), AMD.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphic cards, which have the ability to process and render visual still and moving images in teraflops, would be available in India for around Rs.12,000 and Rs.16,000 respectively.

While the ATI Radeon HD 4850 is the first teraflops graphics card available in the market, the HD 4870 based cards feature GDDR5 memory.

The new offerings from AMD would directly compete with Nvidia's GTX 200 series but are expected to sell more, as they are more compact in size and priced lower.