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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (103259)	10/19/2003 3:20:39 PM
From: niceguy767	Respond to of 275872

"I don't see anything there that companies will beat your door down to." I can't pick it up on the machine I'm at right now. Just one comment, though: If the average consumer test drives an A64, my guess is that they won't be satisfied with a Dell/INTC price equivalent fast obsoleting 32-bit (I didn't say 2-bit, but I was definitely thinking it)only offering!

To: steve harris who wrote (103259)	10/19/2003 10:57:40 PM
From: Epinephrine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

RE:<I don't see anything there that companies will beat your door down to.> Steve, Wow! are we looking at the same video? I downloaded the 20MB Divx version and while I can't say I that I saw much in the first person shooter clips that really struck me since everything was going by so fast I was definitely amazed by several of the other clips. I haven't really been into gaming in a year or two so maybe I am behind the times but there were some things being showcased there that were completely new to me. Did you check out the bits from the "Herb the Herder" demo? That is the first time I have seen long strand based hair rendered in any real time demo, and it seems as if it may even be movable. I don't think it's any coincidence that NVida's Dawn had a short immovable crewcut, they couldn't do it any other way. There was also hair on the growling bear and when they went to the 4 pane split window of it I think they were hinting at real time bump mapping, transparency mapping, and reflection mapping, etc (but that could be more of a custom shader video card thing). Another thing about the bear besides his real time hair rendering that struck me is his quivering cheeks. Watch it again at full screen and pay attention to the corners of his mouth and the surrounding cheek area. That is a level of detail and a subtlety of motion that I have never seen in any real time game or demo before, not even close. (although like I said maybe I'm behind the times). Then there is the dancing deforming man ("Bubble Dancer For AMD64") in which AMD's site says that "a liquid dancer changes shape and form to the sound of futuristic grooves.", If his changes aren't scripted and he actually changes dynamically then that is another thing that I've never seen before and don't think anyone's done yet. It's one thing to make a 3D model move in a scripted way where all the points in it's mesh are simply translated around certain joints or are even completely scripted altogether and it's another to morph a mesh smoothly from one amorphous shape to another unscripted one. Then finally there is the Animusic clip with all the bouncing balls. If that's real time there sure is a lot of physics going on. In one of the scenes I counted around 40 little platform things each of which had 2 or 3 degrees of freedom, from 5 to 10 bouncing ball bearings, and at least 25 vibrating string gizmos, and I'm not sure I'm catching all of the things going on. That's actually my favorite because I don't think video cards do physics (maybe newer ones do, do they?) and if they don't then maybe the AMD64 is doing an amount of real time work in that scene that would not be possible for an Intel processor to match. Please take this all with a grain of salt cause I'm no expert but it seemed pretty impressive to me. Epinephrine