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

The Nokia Theater hosts the Siggraph Computer Animation Festival’s awards ceremony today at 3:45, when the winners of the Audience Award, the Student Prize, the Jury Award, and the Best of Show award will be announced. I’ve covered many of the films up for these awards in previous blogs. See France dominates Computer Animation Festival and Commercials and Promo Spots are Shorts Too for details and links to some of the actual films themselves.

I’ll take this chance to spotlight some of the nominees I haven’t covered. Carbon Footprint is a time-lapse movie depicting 50 years in the life of a discarded aluminum can and is enough to make you vocal the next time you see some jackass throw something away on the street. It comes from the U.K.-based Jellyfish Pictures, and despite its very short running time, is a strong contender for Best of Show. 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

As the Siggraph show floor closed Wednesday, millimeter Senior Editor Michael Goldman had the opportunity to sit down for a chat with the creator of Massive AI software technology, Stephen Regelous. With Massive well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous tool in the visual effects world for realistic movement simulations in crowds large and small, they chatted about additions and improvements made to the software in its new version, 3.5, introduced this week at Siggraph. Listen to a portion of their conversation.

“He was fearless,” says James Cameron. Stan Winston always had the charisma to talk nervous producers into letting his creature effects and make-up studio create expensive, experimental visual effects for their movies. Cameron should know, because some of Winston’s most famous and groundbreaking work was done for Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Last night at the Nokia Theater in downtown Los Angeles, hundreds gathered to pay tribute to legendary Hollywood effects guru Stan Winston, who died this past June. The man left a huge legacy of memorable and award-winning visual effects moments from movies such as Jurassic Park, Aliens, A.I., Iron Man, Predator, and Edward Scissorhands. Jody Duncan, author of “The Winston Effect” interviewed Cameron and some of Winston’s other collaborators about the keys to Winston’s success. more

The “Neurosymphonic Self Reflection” image posted by my pal, Amanda Fletcher, along with some of the other tripped-out images from the Slow Art Gallery is part of Kevin Mack’s burgeoning abstract digital art career. Mack, of course, won an Oscar for his visual effects work on What Dreams May Come (1998), which, if you remember, was itself a very early use of stylized, painterly CG along the lines of his growing roster of “digital paintings.” He’s still part of the Sony Pictures Imageworks’ stable of supervisors, and is also the guy responsible for creating the opening of this year’s Computer Animation Festival. more

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

Having covered the motion capture beat for years, I have found in recent years the most interesting stories for our magazine(s) have always been application-specific stories–how it was used on a particular project like Beowulf , Polar Express , etc. In terms of the technology specific stories, I’ve felt we havent’ received earth-shattering news from the industry in a long while–either the technology was optical or it was tethered or it was some kind of wireless gyroscopic transmission system. Either it was high end or it was low end, and either it was put to good use or it wasn’t.

While it’s still not earth-shattering given the rapid pace of today’s IP-based developments, I did see today something on the technology side I had not seen before, and something that I think has some interesting applications. That something was Animazoo’s IGS-190 system, which the company dubbs “live Internet animation.” By that, they mean that they have come up with a pretty seamless approach for live streaming of motion-capture data in real time, creating all sorts of interesting possibilities on the remote collaboration front. more

Allegorithmic, an emerging technology company developing advanced procedural texturing tools for real-time 3D content, today announced that game development studio Ready At Dawn Studios has chosen ProFX to create its very first title for new-generation platforms. Ready At Dawn, acclaimed for its famous PSP game titles God of War: Chains of Olympus and Daxter, selected ProFX for its ability to quickly produce extremely small texture files while keeping the highest visual quality intact. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

I didn’t get what was new and useful about HP’s DreamColor technology when it debuted for monitors at NAB 2008. (DreamColor was introduced in 2007, but aimed initially at color printing solutions.) There seemed to be a lot of noise being made for better color rendition, but what was exciting or new about that?

I think I’m starting to get it. Attending a talk by HP and a group of DreamWorks artists and technicians–their partners in developing the technology–the differences in the crisp colors and black blacks of the new 24-inch HP DreamColor LP2480zx display and a standard LCD at its side were remarkable.

The new display is described as “true 30-bit”, which means it can choose from a range of over 1 billion colors to display. The result? No banding, and rendering of colors subtle enough to best reflect what the artists want to see on the big screen. more