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

mental images, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools, unveiled RealityServer 2.2, the server-based, highly-scalable 3D web application and services platform available to developers and system integrators. The new version is particularly geared towards providers of 3D web application services, including Software-as-a-Service solutions.

RealityServer software platform was designed from the ground up to be the web application services platform for achieving the highest-quality renderings for large large-model visualization in 3D. It allows users to create and deploy 3D interactive web services and applications across numerous disciplines including aerospace, automotive, architecture, product design, product showcasing and product configuration. Ideal for geographically dispersed collaboration, RealityServer enables real-time viewing and interaction with high image quality across the web without the need for downloads or client side viewer applications. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 Show news from The Briefing Room

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

mental images, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools today announced that the latest version of their industry-leading rendering software, mental ray 3.7, is now integrated as part of the recently announced Autodesk Maya 2009 software digital content creation package. The release of Maya 2009 will mark the first availability of mental ray 3.7, which will subsequently be integrated by other key mental images customers.

Many of the new features and improvements in Maya 2009 and mental ray 3.7 are intended to provide considerable speed and memory usage performance gains over previous versions. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

In scheduling a 9am press conference on the opening day of the Siggraph, Sony lost no time in providing an answer to the many who–over the years since technology was first announced—questioned the value of the Cell processor initiative.

The joint venture with IBM and Toshiba to develop a new type of media-savvy processor initially appeared in the PlayStation 3, but seemed adrift for any other applications, since the hardware design was significantly different from the legacy x86 the computer industry has grown comfortable with. (The Cell processor—referred to by the consortium as the Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor , or Cell/B.E., is a relatively unusual design that combines a general-purpose IBM POWERPC processor core that communicates with eight special-purpose, on-chip DSP cores.) more

“Live-action 3D is the future/Teach it well and let it lead the way,” Whitney Houston once sang, I believe. Oops, wrong bad joke. The big joke among people who make 3D stereoscopic films is that it is way more work than making a regular 2D film because you have to make the same film twice.

This summer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth was shot in stereo with dual Sony HDC-950 HD cameras mounted on Pace Technologies‘ 3D HD rigs. The movie’s Visual-Effects Supervisor Christopher Townsend was on hand to explain that there is no cheating space when you’re filming live-action 3D. You can’t use any of the solutions normally associated with 2D movies, such as flat matte paintings for backgrounds, 2D compositing, or any 2D cueing traicks at all. Journey to the Center of the Earth is the directorial debut of longtime visual-effects supervisor Eric Brevig and the movie was the first ever full-length stereoscopic motion picture shot in HD to be released in digital 3D. more

Founded in Austin in 1998, BOXX Technologies is using this Siggraph to celebrate its 10th anniversary with a number of prize contests, giveaways, and special edition hot-rodded workstations, to name just some of the reasons why the booth seems to have a sense of excitement.

The company holds a special place in the hearts and minds of those creatives who spend their days in the trenches creating the effects seen in many top feature films and television commercials, says Francois Wolf, director of marketing at BOXX. “A lot of companies have fallen off the cliff,� says Wolf. “We haven’t, because we don’t try to offer everything, but choose to do a few things very well.� more

It’s the same general approach, only with very different visual presentations.

Robert Neuman, stereoscopic supervisor at Walt Disney Animation, showed a trailer for the upcoming computer-animated feature Bolt, which is from the talking-animal variety of kids-oriented films. In this movie, John Travolta voices a dog who thinks the popular TV show he stars in is real life. Neuman stressed the importance of using 3D as an aid to storytelling and not as purely a gimmick, something echoed by all the presenters so far today. Having objects flying nonstop at the screen seems to be a William Castle-like relic from the past. more

I never thought about it like this before, but what we know as a close-up shot isn’t really a close-up at all. Phil “Captain 3D” McNally from DreamWorks Animation likes to instead refer to this staple of 2D cinematography as a “big-up.” The object isn’t any closer to the the audience, it’s just bigger.

That’s just one example of the redefining of traditional movie terminology that McNally peppered throughout his talk about discovering the difference between 2D and 3D moviemaking this morning during the Animated 3D Cinema: Imaginary Worlds Brought to Life panel. Because 2D techniques are so ingrained in filmmakers and audiences as the only way to make films, it is ironically seen as real life. In reality, 2D moviemaking is the art of converting a spatial world into a flat one. McNally showed a clip from the studio’s Kung Fu Panda that was quite impressive in 3D, but then revealed the process behind converting a 3D production through the 2D filter- about 1/3 of the clip was the same, 1/3 was slightly adjusted 2D footage, and 1/3 of it was new or extended edits. more