SIGGRAPH 2008 Graphics Coverage

Taking place this week in Los Angeles, California is SIGGRAPH 2008, which is one of the best and most well known graphics conferences. We aren't attending this conference, but the biggest news to have come out of it so far this week has been the OpenGL 3.0 (and GLSL 1.30) release. There is quite a bit of negative feedback surrounding OpenGL 3.0 as it's failed to deliver on what was previously promised by the Khronos Group and those involved with the OpenGL design process. However, plenty of other events have taken place at SIGGRAPH too.

At SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA has unveiled a new Quadro Plex system, the Quadro Plex D Series VCS, which is a $10,000 super computer when it comes to visual computing for styling and design, geo-sciences, and scientific visualization. The NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2200 D2 VCS is made up of dual Quadro FX 5800 GPUs. For more information, check out the NVIDIA press release.

If you're interested in coverage of the technical talks from SIGGRAPH, we would recommend you check out Ian Romanick's talk. Ian was previously on the OpenGL ARB, worked on the open-source XGI Linux driver while at IBM, and most recently has joined Intel to work on Linux graphics as part of Keith Packard's Portland team and to work on optimizing Intel's Mesa 3D stack.

Ian's coverage from the first day covers Intel's Larrabee GPU architecture, interactive photo tourism, and much more.

On the second day of SIGGRAPH he mentions NVIDIA's talk on realistic hair in real-time, "Logarithmic Perspective Shadow Maps", "Multiresolution Texture Synthesis", and many other graphics-related papers were also delivered. Last but not least, the day ended with the much-anticipated OpenGL 3.0 talk. According to Ian, not many there were that angered about Longs Peak, but free beer was involved (though probably not opened the proper way).