The Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, was founded in 1947 as the world’s first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is currently around 78,000. Its headquarters are in New York City.
SIGGRAPH (short for Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics (CG) convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974.
This year’s conference was held in Boston and I was asked by AMD to speak every day at their booth.
Originally, Siggraph was convened so that scientists, engineers and propeller-heads in general could tackle the issue of getting computers to display graphics. I realize that this may seem an alien concept to anyone born within the last 20 years, but computers were all text based back in 1974 when the conferences started.
Nowadays, it is a Mecca for artists, movie studios, hardware and software OEM’s to get together and show what amazing things you can do with computers these days. I will try to give you the highlights (be gentle with me, it’s my first time at Siggraph.):
Nvidia Quadroplex
Ever wonder what an $18,000 video card looks like?
Behold Nvidia’s solution to rising power and heat demands graphics cards are making on a PC’s cooling system: The External Video Card! Yep, we’ve gone Back to the Future as Nvidia resurrects more 3dfx technology hidden away in it’s coffers. But, like SLI, this is no clone of ancient tech from a bygone era. It is the highly evolved descendant of the 3dfx 6000 returning to us as a quad-GPU, self-contained, externally powered, independently cooled external system. To top that the systems can be daisy-chained to give you unmatched graphics power!
Havok Physics Engine
In the ATI booth there were about a zillion systems on display all sporting everything from an X1600 Mobility to the FireGL V7350 (drool). However, tucked away in a corner was a lonely guy demoing the upcoming Havok Physics Engine. Havok differs from Ageia by using a spare GPU to power the physics instead of a dedicated card. More interestingly, the minimum configuration is 2 GPU’s and the system allows for asymmetric card configurations! Yes, you do not need a Crossfire pair + a third slot and the cards don’t even have to match. The GPU for physics must be an X1600 or higher. I saw the system running on a FireGL V7350 + X1900XT on an SLI mobo! What were they demoing? Well they were running a bowling simulation, but instead of 10 pins, you had to knock down 5000 pins to get a strike. It was highly entertaining to watch.
VESA DisplayPort
VESA (the Video Electronics Standards Association) has developed a new interface standard to replace the aging (and limited) DVI connection. Dubbed DisplayPort, the new connector uses twisted pair wires to for longer cable lengths (up to 15m) and provides greater color depth for HDR. The DisplayPort is a standard connector for TVs, computer monitors, and projectors.
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The DisplayPort technology on display was of the demonstration variety. No actual products incorporating this technology are expected until mid-2007.
3D Printers
OK, being a die hard trekkie, I love to see tech supposedly from the 24th century showing up early. This device amazed me. There were several models on the show floor from different companies, but they all did more or less the same thing: "print" (and I use the term loosely) three dimensional objects. The objects were made of polystyrene (and in one case plaster), but they emerged from the machine fully assembled and almost ready for use (a little air blowing is needed to clear manufacturing debris). These objects are not carved from a solid block (called subtractive assembly), but are built up using a mechanism similar to an inkjet printhead. However this printhead sprays molten plastic instead of ink, building up the desired objects layer by layer. The objects can simple maquettes, mechanical devices or even be complex mechanisms that would be impossible to assemble by hand.
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New Product Versions
Newtek was present in a large booth nestled between ATI and Boxx. They were announcing the release of Lightwave3D 9.0 with great fanfare. I even saw an old friend gracing the banner of the Newtek booth.
As my talks were centered around the practical benefits of 64-bit computing in digital content creation (using Lightwave3D in our case) I tended to loiter there a bit. I even got to run some benchmarks using a Boxx Apexx8 (a truly sick little number sporting 16 processor cores and 64GB of RAM). I discovered that Lightwave3D v.9 is currently limited to 8 cores max out of the box. Some dicussions with the developers yielded that the next dot release will support 32-cores (in the 64-bit version only). Start saving up for quad-cores.
Autodesk was also present showing off Maya 8 (now available in 64-bit!) and previewing 3D Studio Max 9 (also available in 64-bit). For those of you with small children, the Autodesk marketing types did not get the joke about them now owning Maya and Max.
Avid was showing Softimage XSI 5.11 and Face Robot 1.5. Softimage XSI is now available for 64-bit platforms as well.
Boxx Technologies
Boxx had a very large booth right across from Newtek. They had their Apexx8 workstation out in force. For those who do not know, Boxx is a specialized PC maker whose target market is the very high-end crowd. So high-end in fact, that Silicon Graphics (SGi) announced that they were partnering with Boxx and that Boxx would be manufacturing workstations for them.
The Apexx8 is their premium 8 socket Opteron workstation specially designed for 3D modelling, CAD and other high-end graphics work. I had the chance to play with one and it was nothing short of amazing.
AMD
AMD (who sponsored my trip) had the largest booth at Siggraph. Opterons were the CPU de rigeur and you were not going to find an Athlon64 anywhere there. IBM was a guest in the AMD booth and had their new Socket 1207 Opterons servers & blades on display. Many other companies shared the booth as well, including a firm called Bunkspeed who was demoing their 3D rendering package capable on manipulating scenes with 20 million+ polygons in real time! It’s amazing what $55K will buy you these days.
Studios
The following studios were also present with large (and very animated) booths: Disney (who was hiring animators and engineers for their upcoming film Meet the Robinsons); LucasFilm/LucasArts; Sony Pictures/Dreamworks; Pixar Studios and various others.
Open Source?
The Open Source community was well represented by the team that brought you Blender, the free 3D modelling/rendering program for Linux and Windows; and the Jahshaka Project: a freeware non-linear video editing package.
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Conclusion
I could go on babbling about all of the very cool stuff I saw there, but I restrained myself. Needless to say the realm of professional graphics is well represented in this venerable, yet constantly fresh, event. I look forward to Siggraph 2007 in San Diego.