Headworx

Some of you may wonder what the title means... Well... these are the names of three rising giants of the next generation electronic gaming battlefield. I laughed last week when I read somewhere the current game consoles will stay for next three years... Really? In the ever accelerating world full of innovation and with its event horizon shrinking, how anyone dares to predict something developed three years ago will stay for the next three unchallenged? Well... May be they are right, may be neither Sony nor Microsoft is able to reinvent gaming platforms... Actually this is quite likely, as progress very often comes from small challengers who bet everything on one card and have nothing but venture money :) to lose... So... Faithful readers should at least be familiar with Otoy, as I mentioned it and it's father, Jules Urbach, a number of times. Actually it was Otoy - related news last week that prompted me to touch base on the new developments in gaming. With rendering algorithms mi...

Catching up with post - CES comments, my attention has been captured recently by the press release from AMD, referring to the peta-flop supercomputer project powered by 1000 (one thousand) ATI Radeon GPUs and running... surprise surprise... the OTOY software. OTOY has been mentioned here a few times . I was the lucky one to attend two sessions by Jules Urbach (2007 and 2008) and they were just blowing the audience away... When Jules was presenting his real time rendering software, there was complete silence in the room with an occasional sound of people picking their jaws from the floor... Jules has been promising us the render cloud for some time. Algorithms constructing the virtual reality that is undistinguishabe from real reality running on massive server farms and client computers running just a tiny layer of client software to display the rendered VR. There is a short interview with Jules on the AMD site ( http://www.amd.com/us/fusion/Pages/otoy.aspx ). In the background you may ...

For years ATI and NVIDIA, known for their high performance graphics boards, have been the synonyms of fast games. Recently everybody have been talking about Sony PS3 and its ultra high performance graphics based on the NVIDIA RSX engine coupled with the Cell processor. And suddenly it looks like what was initially designed for games finds its way into high performance servers. A few days ago Wired reported about an astrophysicist who replaced his number - crunching supercomputer with a cluster of PS3s. This trend becomes even more mainstream, as some serious companies offer serious programming tools. Terra Soft Solutions has a version of Linux tailored for the PlayStation and RapidMind offers its stream programming toolkit for the console. This year's acquisition of PeakStream (a competitor to RapidMind) by Google amplified the trend even more. All these platforms and solutions share a common paradigm - multiple processing cores and parallel execution of tasks. What seems now a ...

We have not revisited Otoy for a while. I am told they are doing extremely well. But still not much is visible to the outside world. Apart from the ORBX.js . The pure HTML5 / JavaScript 1080p60 codec. Decoding FullHD video in a browser is an impressive achievement and solves a variety of problems, especially for companies like Netflix or other video streaming services. But the Holy Grail of Cloud video processing has been online gaming, not video streaming. Which brings me to the question that matters: what is the lag of an online game rendered and encoded in the Cloud, and decoded on the client (in JavaScript)? ORBX.js may cope with 60fps, but nobody says how far behind those 60fps are? Online gaming is about fast reaction to the actions. If you could not dodge the bullet, it's not you, soldier, it's the lag . Lag is the nightmare of today's Internet. We have buffers at every level. And there is one thing buffers do perfectly: generate lag. While 4G/LTE may seem as ...

Another Telecosm brought another great talk by Jules Urbach . Hew as showing some new stuff (I even do not know I I can share it here, as he was requesting the cameraman to stop taping what was on the screens a number of times...). But anyway. You know - they have full ray tracing in the GPU. And he was showing how his models perform on stage. OK, I mean the computerized models of virtual reality. Humans with skin modeled several layers deep... some reflective, some absorbing different parts of light spectrum, with veins and bones below them... Or a model of the SpiderMan, all of them generated in high definition theater - like quality real time. This "real-time" part is the breakthrough. We have seen many computer - generated moves already, but nobody but OTOY can do it in real time. And all it takes is a number of clustered NVIDIA cards. This GPU trend is turning the computing industry upside down. Suddenly we have discovered GPUs are not only for graphics... they are supe...

Recently I have been provoked to make a second approach to the Decade Of Decadency post. And while I firmly stand behind the general opinion expressed there (oh yeah... I would be delighted if we would return to the Moon on the 50th anniversary of the first landing...), there is another perspective we may look at. Vision and execution. Among the ten companies with the largest market capitalization we have Exxon Mobil leading the pack, followed by Microsoft. There are two other tech companies - Google and Apple, some more oil companies, a few banks and one retailer - Wal-Mart. The question of interest is obviously how this top-ten chart will look like ten years from now... Let us try to picture just the information technology related ones (I am still open for other discussions like energy or genetics...). Everybody agrees the star of Microsoft is fading. Yes Windows 7 is really a great operating system. But other areas are shaky... Mobile seems to be lost to Apple and Google. Gaming is...