Laptops are on track to soon replace desktop units as the most popular personal computer type. Over the past couple of years, more powerful mobile CPUs and GPUs have made lighter weight laptops prime candidates to become the machines of choice for pro graphics and NLE users too.

While they didn’t have a booth on the show floor, Dell still garnered interest by the introduction of two potent new members of its line of pro-oriented, ISV-certified mobile workstations, which turned up on display in Intel’s and NVIDIA’s booths. more

Unlike the slowly changing, monolithic market for CPUs, the development of graphics chips and cards looks chaotic, with chip designs, products, and companies coming in and out of the market at a near furious pace over the decades since the first graphics technology delivered in 1960.

Over the past eight years or so, however, two companies have come to dominate the market for discrete chips and cards: ATI (since 2006 a division of AMD) and NVIDIA. While the companies continue to slug it out, most everyone else had fallen to the wayside. Now, the two companies own 98 percent of the discrete GPU business, according to on Peddie Research. more

On the convergence trail once again this afternoon, I learned a bit of the Bunkspeed story (booth #311). What intrigues me most about the company’s 3D rendering engine, created specifically for product designers and engineers (starting with the auto industry folks in 2002), is that it has potential to be a pre-viz tool for Hollywood–another example of technology crossing over from one application to the next.

Bunkspeed marketing chief Thomas Teger told me the company’s HyperShot technology, introduced last year as a simplified and way to render and move photographic images in real-time was used a while back for pre-viz and storyboarding work by a freelance artist who worked on Transformers, for example. He adds that the focus of the company remains on design applications, but increasingly, that world requires movement, and so, this year, Bunkspeed announced the addition of enhanced animation capabilities with its new HyperMove tool (slated for an October debut). HyperMove is basically a tool for moving photo-real imagery rendered in the Bunkspeed world for display purposes (driving a car, posing a cell phone on a turntable, etc), without requiring the artist to have any significant computer animation skills particularly. more

A lot of focus this year at Siggraph has been on stereoscopic 3D and its emergence as a new language of filmmaking. If 3D is a new way of making movies, then the vast visual effects team that worked on Speed Racer discovered a reinvention of 2D filmmaking.

Visual Effects Supervisor John Gaeta calls the style pioneered on Speed Racer many things. Among them: “virtual cinematography,” “photo-anime,” and “2 1/2 D” layering. When he and Dan Glass first started working on the project, it was a liberating experience to force themselves to let go of the need for any kind of photorealistic element. This quality is something ingrained into any visual-effects artist worth his salt from the get go. Letting go of that instinct is like asking a cat to ignore a mouse. more

An interesting early-morning panel today at Siggraph was the videogame panel Games: Evolving on an Order of Magnitude, which featured apropos comments about where the industry is going technically and from a business point of view from some heavy hitters in the game world. The panel, moderated by Michel Kripalani of Autodesk, included Lyle Hall of THQ Inc., Martin Walker of Artificial Mind & Movement, Steve Theodore of Bungie, Steve Sullivan from Lucas Arts, and Jeff Lander of Electronic Arts. more

IRIDAS, the world leader in RAW playback technologies, is drawing crowds to the PNY booth (#747) at Siggraph 2008. Visitors are experiencing first-hand the image fidelity of IRIDAS’ RealTime RAW 2.0 in SpeedGrade and FrameCycler. By leveraging the power of the new graphics cards from NVIDIA by PNY, IRIDAS provides real-time de-Bayering of RAW content allowing filmmakers to review and color correct content at up to 4K resolution straight from the digital cinema camera. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

Sony Electronics is unveiling a new workflow solution for faster processing of high-resolution effects and computer graphics. This new technology platform, named ZEGO, is based on the Cell/B.E. (Cell Broadband Engine) and RSX technologies, and is designed to eliminate bottlenecks that can occur during post production, especially during the creation and rendering of visual effects. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

About 10 minutes before I visited the Avatar Reality booth (#727), someone on the show floor told me “people have been talking about virtual reality forever, but we never really get there.” In many ways, of course, he’s right. That notion of giant goggles and wacky gloves, or entering the holographic cube, while all technically possible more or less right now, have largely failed to take off as a consumer entertainment industry thus far. More successful in luring real people into different planes of digital existance have been those online 3D virtual games and worlds that are all over the internet. Some are more focused on being multi-player, online games that take place in virtual environments, like “World of Warcraft,” while a few others are trying to create real socially-based online societies largely designed and built by its residents, like “Second Life.” more

Demand for better graphics performance and programmability within the professional notebook market continues to increase as animators, designers and engineers work with larger 3D models, datasets and images. NVIDIA, a worldwide leader in visual computing technologies, continues to address the demand with the introduction of a new series of NVIDIA Quadro FX mobile GPUs, featuring an NVIDIA CUDA Parallel Computing Processor. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

The only thing more popular than laptops and Starbucks at Siggraph this year is the double-feature panel featuring the visual-effects wizards behind Cloverfield and Iron Man . Tippett Studio and Industrial Light & Magic split the bill to reveal some of the secrets behind two of 2008’s biggest FX-heavy blockbusters.

The Tippett team, headed by Eric Leven, gave the impression that the best kind of movie to work on is one with a limited budget and nothing to lose. Such a project was pitched to them as a kind of “Blair Witch meets Godzilla.” Originally Cloverfield was budgeted at $25 million when they got the call from J.J. Abrams’ team to work up the monster, known affectionately as “Clover.” Once the filmmakers got the original tests back from Tippett, the excitement they generated resulted in more money. more