CES 2010 Wrap-up – Looking to our Future

AMD and NVIDIA

AMD

AMD was all about “Vision”.  Its “Vision Experience Center,” AMD’s booth in the Grand Lobby was much larger than NVIDIA’s secondary booth directly right across from it which featured a single demonstration of 3D Vision Surround. AMD has a new hardware buying guide program called Vision. It is similar to Intel’s “star” rating program and also similar to Vista/Windows 7 with its Basic, Premium and Ultimate products in that AMD now differentiates performance levels between its series products.

AMD Vision gives consumers and non-enthusiasts a rather over-simplification of the hardware differences between the various PCs that they see for sale.  At AMD’s booth, notebooks were displayed carrying their three logos, Vision, Vision Pro and Vision Premium logos.

The latest AMD mobile graphics was also set up on two Acer Ferrari notebooks. This new external GPU technology for notebooks is called the eXternal Graphics Platform.  Notebooks with the right connectors can use the new Mobile Radeon HD 5000-series which were also announced at the show.

The company also had several large triple-monitor EyeFinity setups on display running DiRT 2 in DirectX 11 (2D). In contrast to NVIDIA’S 3D Surround which requires SLI, each Eyefinity setup was using only a single Radeon HD 5870 to power their LCDs.  AMD was stressing that they have the first and only graphic chips that are DX11 capable.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA had much more than 3d Surround Vision and automobile computers.

They had little netbooks powered by their GeForce graphics on ION platform and could easily stream HD content to large screens; quite unlike Intel’s integrated graphics, they stressed.

A picture is worth 1,000 words.  At least.

NVIDIA stresses the pairing of their graphics with any capable CPU for a superior viewing and playing experience.

Fermi, NVIDIA’s upcoming new GeForce GF100 was at CES and they were demonstrating DX11 features such as tessellation as in this “Rocket Sled” real time demonstration.

NVIDIA’s partners were also demoing their products at CES and vReveal is one of the most interesting.  It is by MotionDSP and it uses CUDA to speed itself up.  vReveal cleans up the background, eliminates digital noise, stabilizes the content, balances color and more.  I was so intrigued by this, I got a copy of vReveal from the presenter in the following video clip so that I can review it for our readers.   At present, the current version does everything for standard definition content and in a couple of months, an upgrade will be released for HD.  What is cool is that current users will have a free upgrade to the HD version of vReveal.

I also got a review copy of muvee’s Reveal which I am also using to upload all of my videos made at CES.  Muvee Reveal is a quick and painless way to create home videos with flare.  Simply add your photos and/or video, choose your background music and select a style. Muvee Reveal creates personalized, automatically edited home movies that are perfectly synced to your music in just a few clicks.  As with all video production software exporting the final movie can be extremely time consuming – even with Core i7 and support for hyper-threading – so as with MotionDSP’s vReveal, muvee’s Reveal supports NVIDIA’s CUDA acceleration technology, which claims to speed up video creation by as much as eight times.  It simplifies video editing and sharing so that even the busiest of us will no longer be frustrated by complex programs – but one can start immediately sharing their videos on social networking sites.

I will do double duty and review both muvee’s Reveal (video editing SW) and MotionDSP’s vReveal (stabilization and cleanup) in a forthcoming review.  These same videos in this article will be further transformed for that article.  Both of these products have trial versions available at their individual above linked web sites.

vReveal was originally developed as very expensive commercial software for the military and and forensics especially for cleaning up surveillance video and images.  The cameras we use; the phones, the helmet cams, and especially anything with telephoto, all are shaky unless shot on a tripod.  You can see in the examples above why MotionDSP’s vReveal is such a quality and inexpensive solution for all photographers.  We look forward to bringing your our reviews of muvee’s reveal and MotionDSP’s vReveal shortly.