AMD introduced a couple of months ago the Cinema 2.0 program which will allow game developers and film producers to include photorealistic characters and objects in their works without the need of render farms. Analysts said that photorealism in CGI would be attained in about 5 years, but AMD/ATI has now teamed up with Image Metrics and claim that they are able to render photorealistic characters and environments and integrate them seamlessly into games and movies. First, take a look at what happened at the AMD conference in New York a week ago.





Now, let’s take a closer look at that Emily clip.

As you can read from the clip itself, Emily was produced using a new modeling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated. The Emily you see in the clip is practically the digitized version of actress Emily O’Brien. According to TimesOnline, this is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

The team at Image Metrics has also taken care of the facial animations in Grand Theft Auto computer game. The basic aim of the company is to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical, but without using motion capture devices. So that’s how they came with the Light Stage superscanner you can see in the first two clips.

OK, we have the technology to make photorealistic characters in upcoming videogames, but what kind of supercomputer do we need to actually play at smooth frame-rates? AMD claims we only need a decent quad-core CPU coupled with their latest Radeon HD 4870X2 graphics cards, which can process up to 2.4 TFLOPS.

I reckon we won’t get to see characters as detailed as these before DX11 gets introduced later next year. They will double the processing power, anyway, but AMD representatives say that the line between what is real and what is computer generated will still remain visible up until 2020.