Touching teraflops — graphically ++>>really too advanced !!!!

The graphics arena is in a reprise of a classic contest

Terrific speed: The ATI Radeon HD4870 card takes graphics computing to the teraflop era

Some 45 years ago, the world’s second biggest car rentalcompany, Avis ( it was second to Hertz), launched a highly successful campaign build around the slogan. “We’re only no. 2. We try harder.” The public loved it — and helped narrow the gap.

The graphics and visual processing arena is seeing a reprise — albeit unstated — of that classic contest: The US Silicon Valley company nVidia has long been recognized as a leader in the business of graphics accelerators : the additional cards one slips under the hood of the personal computer if one wants to ‘play’ ( literally!) with visually rich and computationally demanding games.

ATI used to be the ‘other’ graphics card player — till it was acquired by mainstream PC processor maker AMD. The advantage is obvious: ATI’s graphic products can now be fuelled by processors from AMD’s considerable line of multi core PC chips, and can draw on AMD resources to create new graphics-intensive processors.

The result of the synergy was obvious last week when AMD showcased in Mumbai, two new graphics cards in the ATI Radeon catalogue that demonstrated performance at least three times better than ATIs best offerings till six months ago.

Ceiling broken

More significantly, the 4850 and the faster 4870, (both fuelled by the RV 770 processor) broke a virtual performance ceiling and booted graphical processors into the teraflop era.

The 4850 hit one teraflop with a core clock speed of 625 MHz. It consumed just 110 watts of power. The 4870 was rated to deliver 1.2 TFlops clocking 750 MHz and used 160 watts.

Interestingly both offerings came aggressively priced — at approximately Rs 12,000 and Rs 16,000, which was almost half of what competing cards in this category used to cost...till some of them revised their prices to compete.

AMD may not remain alone for long; indeed nVidia simultaneously launched its own new range of cards, the GTX 200 series consisting of the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 cards. The GTX280 has 240 processors, while the GTX260 comes with 192 of nVidia’s G 200 processors.

A comparison of specification shows that the new nVidia cards might work to faster processor clocks ( 1.24 GHz for the 260) than the AMD/Radeon offerings. However they are known to be using DDR 3 (Double Data Rate) RAM while Radeon claims to be the first graphical cards with the new DDR5 memory which is supposed to triple the memory bandwidth.

Fairly obvious

Interestingly nVidia has been explicit in saying what is becoming fairly obvious: these heavy weight entrants in the graphical lists are not merely tools for fun and games.

They have computing clout to say: we can give you New Age graphics, we can help you smoothly transition to the high definition video viewing; we can also crunch your numbers better, faster in your scientific and high performance computing (HPC) applications. Enter a new combo buzzword: GP-GPU or General Purpose Graphical Processing Unit.

It is highly unlikely that mainstream processor leaders like Intel will roll over and allow this invasion of its turf to happen unchallenged. It is already committed to integrating graphics into its CPU in the new series Larrabee.

Back in the present, graphics processors of the teraflop class shown by AMD can make mincemeat of compute-intensive tasks like rendering: generating an image from 2-D or 3-D models using computer programmes.

Typical computer-generated scenes could take up to 30 hours to render each from using the CPU of the computer. Such games typically ran at 25-30 frames per second, marginally faster than the speed of cinema (24 fps).

To achieve cinema-like realism in games seemed like a goal that was a decade away. But it seems that cards such as Radeon 4800 are going to make it happen today.

The obverse

The obverse of cinema-reality in games, is games-like interactivity in cinema. Not too far away is the day when the movie experience might include the ability to control the narrative, to choose from a selection of alternative plot lines.

We may no longer mock at such instances of creative confusion and might even demand the right to remake the director’s vision in any which way we please.

Teraflop graphics processors will facilitate such a blurring before the twin, but hitherto separate, worlds of cinema and gaming, AMD’s Chief Technology Officer for graphical processing, Raja Koduri told me.

One has to wait and watch to see which of the two industry embraces this technology earlier... unless of course even this distinction vanishes in a few years, in a new synergy of sight and sound that will make today’s movie experience as well as gaming consoles seem like crude street side peepshows.