Hot3D panel at HPG 2011

Interesting panel at the end of HPG 2011. David Luebke (nVidia), Mike Houston and Mike Mantor (AMD), and William Mark (Intel) talked about futures of graphics hardware. Interesting that all speakers talked about the impact of other forces that are driving GPU development (mobile computing/power/sales volumes, getting the GPU closer to the CPU). This, combined with other comments during the conference (did you know that the PS3 gpu is five years old and isn't going to be updated for another couple of years) and the influence of HPC on GPUs makes you wonder if high performance graphics will be the driver of GPU development in the future.

High Performance Graphics (HPG) 2011

Back in conference mode so better update the blog. Spent the last couple days at HPG 2011, a conference that is running in parallel to SIGGRAPH 2011. Brings back memories of early to mid nineties when I was working in this area. Back to my teapot days as my brother would say. Pretty interesting to see what is going on. In some ways the same stuff (voxels, bounding volume hierarchies, and frames per second) and in some ways very different (20 ms per frame, and coaxing flops from GPUs). Lots of interesting papers!!!

Bonus was that I got to meet with a couple of old colleagues, including Eric Haines (from my Ray Tracing News days circa 1992) and Mark Bolstad (from IEEE Vis circa 1993).