AMD STARTED TOUTING what they called Cinema 2.0, a reference to a few inflection points, and some background technology. It was aimed at the mainstream press, not techies, and there was little discussion of silicon or algorithms.

The premise is pretty simple, in the past, movies had huge, high-res models that required massive computer power to render scenes, sometimes taking more than a day a frame. This meant that technology was well out of the hands of normal users, much less gamers.

The holy grail is to have the same art assets, possibly the most time-consuming and therefore expensive part of a film, be usable in other things, specifically home computers and gaming. No more multi-million polygon Transformer model for the movie and multi-thousand polygon versions for the home, you make one and use it for both. This would lead to the possibility of interactive movies with potentially the same quality as the real thing, and all sorts of other things like audiences influencing stories of movies in real time.

The problem? If a frame takes 30 hours to render, that is a little worse than you need for a video game/interactive movie where you have 1/30th of a second to do the same job. Until compute power at the home level reaches the point where you can do it in that time, interactivity won't be possible. Since Hollywood, Inc isn't there yet on their render farms, you won't be able to do it in a game on any home machine soon.

With the impending 48xx GPU line launch however, AMD is claiming that you can work with the same art assets in realtime if you are a bit creative and take a few liberties. They demo'd this last fall with the Spider platform launch, showing off Spiderman movie models running on a home machine with acceptable interactivity.

Now they are going to launch a new GPU with the requisite increases in horsepower, and that will only double the frame rate. If you have the potential for eight of these GPUs in a box, it is possible, along with a long list of hacks and approximations (read: cheats), to run movie assets in realtime. At home. The caveat here is your home needs a PC with a 4-core CPU and 4 $500+ dual GPU video cards in it, a $399 Best Buy special with the Broken OS on it won't quite cut it.

Eventually however, those $399 El Crapola(R)(C)(TM) PCs will have the same power as the super PCs of today, and that point isn't really that far off on the horizon, 2-3 years or so. When that happens, you have hit the holy grail listed above. The lines are converging, but have not crossed yet. They will though, it is inevitable.

That is why AMD is beating the Cinema 2.0 drum now. We are at the point where the movies, games, and creations of that era are going to be started, if they have not already. To make this vision a reality, you need tools, art assets, and content creation pipelines that can be worked with during production. If those tools cost thousands a seat, that is a price worth paying, rounding error on a $100 million movie budget.

So what AMD's marketing folks did yesterday was to show that they are working on the problem, drag out the stars, and in general make people aware of what may be coming. It is a nice idea, and make no mistake that there are millions of dollars being spent on the problem right now, but that is all behind the scenes.

There was little tech shown off yesterday, and the future was only talked about in vague broad swathe terms. One has to wonder how much of this is protecting trade secrets and how much is the visionaries not having a clue, much less wanting the assembled press to hold them to predictions.

In any case, you know the direction that both Hollywood and Silicon Valley are going. Cinema 2.0 is AMDs attempt at coining a phrase for the inflection point where content from movies moves seamlessly to PCs and becomes interactive. Are we there yet? Emphatically no.

Are the tools there to start such projects in a realistic way?

We think so. µ