New AMD Chip Lets Game Developers 'Sip from'Holy Grail'

AMD, the chip maker that owns graphic card manufacturer ATI, has unveiled a new chip codenamed "RV770" that has the power to calculate a trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops). Based on this chip, AMD showed what they're calling a Cinema 2.0 demo in San Francisco and boasted that it's "more powerful than every generation of game console ever brought to market combined" and "achieves [an] industry milestone that was presumed to be years away."

This Cinema 2.0 experience demonstrates "the fusion of dynamic real-time interactivity with convincing cinematic digital effects that appear to be real places and things captured on video." The company further boasted that the technology will "punch a hole in the sensory barrier between cinema and games."

AMD believes that once movie directors, visual effects artists, game developers and others get their hands on this technology that the door will be burst open for "unprecedented engaging entertainment experiences."

"With Cinema 2.0 you won't just play movies, you'll play in them. Imagine the ability to look around the environments in a sci-fi movie, put yourself in the driver's seat in a race scene, duck behind things and pop up to see what's going on in an intense firefight – all of these things are possible with Cinema 2.0," said Charlie Boswell, director, Digital Media & Entertainment, AMD. "The challenge for any director has always been taking a wonderful vision in the canvas of the mind and translating that to film for the audience to see. Cinema 2.0 breaks down the time and cost barriers of getting a scene or shot that's 'just right', and what's better, allows audiences to dive deeper into the experience to explore every part of that director's vision."

"Today's demonstration of Cinema 2.0 represents a sip from the multi-billion dollar gaming industry's Holy Grail, while presenting a new quest to digital filmmakers," said Richard Huddy, worldwide developer relations manager, AMD Graphics Product Group. "Imagine going to the opening of a movie and upon getting home being able to play a game that looks and feels absolutely identical – right down to the character models and sets."

AMD says that this kind of leap forward in interactive realism was previously thought to be at least 10 years away, but the company intends to get the technology out there soon as part of its ATI Radeon HD branded graphics cards, which will no doubt cost a very pretty penny.

While Sony's PlayStation 3 is equipped with a GPU from Nvidia, both Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii utilize graphic chipsets from ATI. It'll be quite interesting to see how this technology evolves and if it ultimately ends up powering one or more consoles in the next round years from now.

More information on AMD's new technology is available here.