Siggraph 2003 The Tech Side

[Greg Hess]

Ok guys, here's a quick rap up of cool techy stuff at siggy.

 

1) HDR displays.

 

How bout an LCD which can display the entire range of color/lumance our eyes is capable of seeing?

 

Or how bout a 200,000 cm/m^2 (Average LCD is 250)

 

Needless to say, this was by FAR the greatest and most significant tech advancement at siggraph. These displays will change EVERYTHING. Now we just have to wait for them to hit the market.

 

2) Opteron. Opteron. Opteron.

 

Opteron all over the freaking place. Heck if I didn't know any better, I'd even say Intel had opteron's in one of their systems . Needless to say, the Opteron presence at siggraph was MASSIVE. A very large portion of machines were running solely on Opteron processors...in some cases the entire booth (AMD/Nvidia/Boxx).

 

The presentations on the processor were equally impressive. Tests by myself indicate the processors are AT LEAST as fast as a Xeon running a gigahertz faster. (in 3dsmax scanline rendering). I should be blessed with a test system in a month or so, and will try to provide some data on multiplatform tests. (Maya, XSI, LW, Max etc).

 

3)GPU Power

 

Both Nvidia and FireGL were flaunting their latest babies...both supporting a whopping 256 meg of ram (Of course wildcat did more then that years ago, but whose counting ram) and showing off nifty little flashy demo's. The FX 3000 was running on nforce3 motherboards, featuring Opteron processors. While the FireGL X2-256 just looked plain pretty.

 

4) Small Form Factor

 

Lots of wee cases sprinkled all over the floor. Different designs, different models...but all smaller then a shoebox...and fast to boot.

 

5) Case Design in General

 

Alienware, Boxx, Apple, Falcon Northwest...all sporting hip designs.

 

Er I'm tired. I'll type more later.

[Hector]

Hello:

 

Where can we find more information about the hdr displays?. Was it a prototype, was it made by a commercial company or is it just at research level???

 

Hector

[Ernest Burden III]

Yeah, I'd love to have a display that is deep in color bits but flat as an illustration board. I have never bought a really big monitor because I don't want to be doing Hippo wrestling.

 

What about luminence values, and viewable angles?

[Greg Hess]

http://www.sunnybrooktech.com/hdr001.html

 

I already gave the lum values.

 

Normal LCD is around 250:1 cd/m^2.

 

HDR display is capable of 200,000:1 cd/m^2.

 

(Aka far in exceedance of the human visual range)

[Ernest Burden III]

I already gave the lum values.

Normal LCD is around 250:1 cd/m^2.

HDR display is capable of 200,000:1 cd/m^2.

I was confused, I thought you were describing really BIG displays

Or how bout a 200,000 cm/m^2 (Average LCD is 250)

I wasn't sure why a size would be given as centimeters divided by meters squared, but then I'm not the techmeister you are--but it sounded REALLY, REALLY BIG, which is a good thing. I see now that it was supposed to be candelas, right, cd's? 250 cd in a square meter ain't much.

 

I had a quick look at the link--I sure hope their monitors are dynamic, because their website sure isn't. Just goes to show, hardware is fun, but content is king.

[Greg Hess]

Hey Ernest,

 

Ya its pretty confusing, and the website basically sucks. If I get some time this week I'll scan in the HDR display booklet I picked up at siggy. It explains the technology a bit better in detail.

 

But basically in summary, these are displays which are capable of displaying images past the visual capabilities of the human visual system.

 

Must have...HDR display.