AMD Ruby 4 (R600) demo is impressive

AMD is faithfully protecting the possible leakage of pictures with marking all of the boards with name of the partner it was intended for, only problem there was the colour of the markings.

We do not see the reason for this paranoid behaviour, since all of the important R600 pictures ended up on websites a long time ago. We have seen UFO, GDDR3 boards floating around with a "subject-to-change" GF8800-looking triple-heatpipe cooler in red colour, but we'll leave it at that. The theme of this story is Ruby, after all.

We have seen the demo running couple of times and this poor hack has to say that it looks quite impressive, especially when it comes to snow itself or fur on Ruby's winter outfit. There is also a matter of realistic blend of textures on her face and skeleton animation. You could easily imagine that Ruby is a real person, judging by insane amount of detail that went into a creation of this demo.

Main render target resolution is not full HD or 1920x1080 (or 1200) pixels, but rather a baseline 1280x720p with HDR in FP16 format and MSAA turned on to 4X. Anisotropic filtering should be set at high in all cases, but this resolution left us confused a bit. It seems that ATI will push the CrossFire two-board package for full-HD resolution. This is mainly due to texture memory budget, since current demo is eating 680 MB. Since ATI is only having 1GB boards around, you can easily calculate that remaining 320MB would not be sufficient for the 1080p frame buffer and decent framerates. However, do not think that there are issues with GPU themselves, since virtual memory addressing is working just nicely on both G80 and R600 chips.

Scenes in the demo have between two and two and a half million triangles, depending on scene complexity. Ruby is around 200K triangles and it uses 128 morph targets for facial animation and around 200 bones for skinning animation. When it comes to the face of ATI's bride, animation was done by filming a face of the real-world Ruby (actress) with a high-definition camera. After the filming, plain vanilla video was analysed and processed step-by-step, using highly complex facial recognition software in order to extract facial animation data. After this video session, Ruby's face alone got layered with 15 different textures, and placed in a scene generated by procedurally generated snow. Snow simulation is processed entirely on a GPU and can be dynamically melted or amplified to increase the snow cover (and the snow effect while Ruby is doing a snowboard scene in Janica Kostelic style).

When it comes to the fur on Ruby's collar, this is no longer simple vertex-generated fur with predefined movement, but rather a simulated with a physics model, also done on the GPU.

This demo will be available in time for the R600/RV610/RV630 launch, with a Duke Nukem-style launch date: when its' done. µ