Tuesday is it?
I dunno hat the big fuss is abotu with this annoucnement at XYZ time..
if they know, why not jsut trell us, its not like its going to change anything.. bloody ridiculous if u ask me.. ooo we can tell them yet.. we have to build up the hype...

i think people are now well over hype... this app has been around for long enough to be able to give us the results we need in an NLE.. if it didnt, we wouldnt be using it.. so now, al we want to know, as users, is what improvements can be made on this proven tool...?

Vegas on AMD Barcelona platform will go to 11.

"Vegas on AMD Barcelona platform will go to 11. "

HUH? thats all arabic to me mate..

Spinal Tap ( movie ) reference.

And Barcelona is the core name for the AMD quad core.

My bet is on GPGPU using an ATI card as a stream processor. Either way, I don't think either of these is going to be shipping this month.

Rob Mack

hmm.. i wonder how much more of a benefit it woul dbe..

put it this way, many ppl i knwo upgraded their GFX card to NVidia as Vegas isnt the only app they use.. they also use premPro2 and MB2, which takes advantage of Nvidia HW...

now these people will defiantely NOT go out and buy an AMD CPU let alone an ATI gfx card.. especially if theyre running Matrox RT2 or AXIO boards... theres no way in hell theyd touch ATI... let alone AMD cpus...
You gotta remember half these people are set in their ways... just look at Avid users.. Premiere users are no different..

so i wonder.. will this GPU processing tap (i assume if sony arent going to use GPU, they'll use the GPU of the GFX card... ) would be worthwhile? Or will it only benefit those with relatively new machines or ATI GFX cards?

I mean were speculating here, but i sure as well WILL NOT get rid of my Nvidia 6800 GT card.. ive had it for 6 months and its the most powerful AGP card available for what i need, so why would i jump back to ati?
I guess we just have to wait and see..

If you are at ten, where would you go from there???
This one is louder. It goes to eleven!!!

A great rockumentary, isn't it?!

;-)))

Marco

"These go to 11"

One of the all time great lines.

.......So whats this big AMD Sony announcement....
Having no insider info my speculation is
AMD springing for the beer at the openhouse

http://www.vasst.com/mailers/2007/NABParty.htm

From what I can see, they are paying for the venue for the better good of this and similar content creation communities, or certainly a contribution to part of it at Vasst along with Microsoft.

Really if VAIO PC models are still shipping with Adobe Premiere etc, then I somehow doubt CreativeSoftware is in the sights of AMD and Microsoft with any real Sony bias. For AMD and MicroSoft it is just good to be associated with things that are good.

Although I'd like to be proven wrong and to see a 4K or 8K field camcorder with built-in Vegas working on Vista x64 and 4x4 AMD processing with ATI DirectX 10 functionality/integration and a LiteOn BD-writer for XDCam/MXF support. Perhaps with some 64GB SSDs and all for sub US$10k! Oh, a magnetic levitation harness for an additional US$2k wouldn't be useless either.... ;-)

Oh, definitely, any sort of GPU coprocessing is not going to drive people to change graphics cards right away, and there's no point in changing cards if you're running AGP - AGP isn't going to cut it for this.

Both ATI and NVIDIA have GPU coprocessor efforts in progress. NVIDIA's is called CUDA. As far as the ATI stream processing efforts go, you see speed improvement estimates ranging up to about 40x. I think ATI's effort is a bit more mature but both will eventually offer something.

Remember, this is a coprocessor, kind of like the math coprocessor you and I would have installed in our old 286 systems. It'll be useful for audio processing, video processing, graphics processing, etc. I saw mention that Adobe had made use of ATI's stream processing in Acrobat, for instance. It's not the same thing as the 3D acceration that PP2 is currently using.

As far as running Axio with AMD CPUs...we have three systems running dual Opterons with quadro cards of some sort. (The total hardware address overhead in these means that 32-bit windows only has 2.4 GB available with 4.0 GB installed, BTW). Do they fly? When PP2 works at all, yes, they fly. Given the amount of time pp2 spends in a near hung state, Vegas would make better use of our time, but Vegas doesn't have the selling points (no hardware acceleration, 8-bit).

If the announcement were ATI stream processing, here's what I'd expect (I'd expect it with CUDA as well):

-- Requires DX10 (Hmmm...)
-- Applies to all sorts of general purpose processing
-- Is a driver level function
-- is general enough to not be "special hardware" and so fits into Madison's hardware independent scheme
-- does not require matching hardware (i.e., an ATI card with stream processing shouldn't require an ATI chipset or an AMD processor)
-- could use SLI or Crossfire, but not required

in other words, consumer technology with a low cost of entry that is easy to use.

But then, I don't think we'll see anything concrete about this at NAB.

Rob Mack

Gazing in the muddy crystal ball FWIW...

CPUs aren't going to get faster for a bit, so increases in horsepower have to come from parallel ops -- nothing new at all... For many folks saving the GPU's work drawing the screen to hdd is a long time ideal. Accessing the GPU for non-graphics, pure math work [i.e. ATI's folding@home] has those who analyze a lot of data more than thrilled. Neither Adobe nor Sony Creative has been able to come close to the speed of software like VirtualDub, & at the same time need to retool many of their previous optimization routines for Vista. Writing either fast parallel code for multi-core or fast code to use the GPU for math isn't that easy today -- I'd dare to assume that Sony Creative might welcome increased resources.

AMD only seems to be pushing their connect to ATI with integrated graphics, though PR seems a bit hazy re: future plans -- perhaps building support & testing the waters before committing to or unveiling anything.

If all the stars & planets align favorably perhaps we'll see PCs more oriented towards video editing that overcome any [debated] Intel video-related advantages, and provide benefits unique to the integrated ATI graphics. PC video component technology is such a swamp at the moment, it might make sense to offer something along the lines of but more advanced than the HP or Sony media PCs.

My admittedly hopelessly muddy glass ball suggests that hype now might be aimed at nudging those celestial bodies into place, hopefully resulting in whatever alliances to ultimately pull off sales and distribution... I don't see a m/board bundled with SC software doing gangbusters at Newegg.

If the GPGPU solution is for the future and, initially, it will be a high cost solution, would it not be better to put those megabucks into some medium performance systems to use in a render farm?

If the multi-gpgpu system (regardless of chip maker) become cheap, it would be even quicker to have a render farm made from these 'cheap' systems.

Just my $ 1/50...

You're talking about megabucks on the personal scale, right? Like purchasing a $5000.00 graphics card/physics processor/stream processor/pick a name?

MPM is right that AMD/ATI is working towards an intergrated GPU for this, but that's not the only goal. Not by a long shot. They're also demoing cards.

One of the concurrent efforts on the AMD side is a new version of hypertransport that would give a graphics processor more direct access to system memory. In fact, i was looking at some information on certain graphics cards last week and noticed that all of them were capable of using system memory (on demand) in addition to their onboard memory. I'm assuming that's a Vista thing. The point here is that there's already a trend to blur the lines between system RAM and graphics card RAM.

On the Intel side of things I think I was seeing references to a PCIe 2.0 bus for faster communication between gfx cards and system memory.

From everything I've been reading about the ATI side of this, general purpose GPUs are being looked at as a commodity item, and it seems like DX10 is a factor in this. Things I had been reading were pointing to a consumer ATI product in Q2 of this year.

I'm not saying that *anything* along these lines is going to happen at NAB, but the more I read the more it seems like this is a good fit for Vegas.

Rob Mack

Built-in graphics stuff on motherboards share the system RAM... i.e use up a chunk of it.

Some of the low-end Nvidia cards do this to some degree, although the Nvidia card has like 16MB of RAM on them.

My (faulty) understanding of this anyways.

So Sony is conceding the BD authoring market for NLEs to Adobe. Well, I guess its nice to know where your NLE is headed or in this case not headed. Why does Sony even bother with NAB then? If that was the only announcement then NAB was a major joke for Sony. No mention of when Vista support is expected? Pathetic.

where did u get that info from? (re- dvda)

Well lets look at it this way. Adobe has a product that it is offering now that does BD authoring. Sony's 64bit Vegas wont go into beta until late this year. I seriously dont see them offering BD support before DVDA5. Which looks like NAB next year before we even get a whiff of V8 and DVDA5. So by allowing Adobe to have an entire year of offering BD (a sony creation) to its customers while Sony customers continue to toil and wait, they have in fact conceded the BD authoring market to Adobe by the lack or failure to provide any viable solution. Sony appears to no longer take Vegas seriously for their customers.

i hear u there.. but sony have surprised us in the past..
one thing im surprised about is if they do indeed allow a full year to come to pass before even offering BD authoring, they will definaly end up killing DVDA5 before its even released..

with this news.... and with the "oh so exciting" 64bit announcement... i think it might be time to start looking elseware for an NLE and disc delivery solution...

I agree. The Adobe suite looks like the more robust and well thought out offering if works as advertised. God knows i dont want to have to go to a Mac to run FCP but I will if I absolutely have to.

if theyre going to totally write off BD on DVDA til V5 or next year or whatever.. then thats a bullet to the head for alot of us whove ben waiting on the PS3 to distribute our work..

i really dont want to go out and learn another DVD authoring program...

so much for natural progression.. ..