On the same day competitor Nvidia released its GPU 200 series of high-end graphics chips, Advanced Micro Devices announced what it called “the Cinema 2.0 experience” that will be possible because of its forthcoming teraFLOPS graphics chip.
At a press conference in San Francisco on Monday, AMD said that, until this release, content creators had to make a choice — between cinema-like experiences that were rendered offline and didn’t have interactivity, or interactive experiences that didn’t have ultra-realism.
Play in Movies
But now, the company said, the experiences can become one. Charlie Boswell, director of the digital media and entertainment group at AMD, said Cinema 2.0 will allow users to not only play movies, but to “play in them.”
He added that the possibilities could include looking around inside a sci-fi movie, being in the driver’s seat in a race scene, or ducking behind things for cover during an intense gunfight.
In fact, AMD touted the power of the chip as more powerful “than every generation of video-game console ever brought to market,” combined. A teraFLOP is a trillion floating-point operations per second.
The company showed a demo that it said fused real-time interactivity with what appeared to be “real places and things captured on video,” made possible because of the power of the chip. The demo system included two of the TeraFLOPS chips, which are code-named RV770, along with an AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processor and AMD 790 FX Chipset.
AMD worldwide developer-relations manager Richard Huddy said the new chip could allow moviegoers to see a feature film in a theater, and then play a game at home in which the scenes were not just close resemblances to the on-screen versions, but identical.
Coming This Summer
The TeraFLOPS chip is expected to be introduced this summer as an ATI Radeon HD-branded graphics card. The company said that,…