The dog days of summer are here again, and that can only mean one thing: it's Siggraph time. The biggest graphics show on Earth took place last week in sunny New Orleans, to the great delight of 26,000 attendees. This year's event focused mainly on the new platforms for entertainment. Overall, the show was really huge: it lasted one full week, it offered over 40 courses, and there were more than 300 exhibitors in about 150,000 square feet. Thus, I'll outline the major hardware and software highlights of the show, and offer some insight on trends.

New Hardware On Display

Sony's GScube. The award for best booth this year probably should go to Sony. The Japanese giant had one of the most interesting exhibits on the expo floor, where it showcased its vision of the future of entertainment. The space was divided into two main areas: the first was dedicated to game systems, and the other to passive home entertainment. In the games arena, the PS2 was presented as the essential system for both casual and hard core gamers. Along with the consumer product, the Playstation 2 development system was shown, which some of us had already had the opportunity to see at the GDC last March. This new development system is very different and is an improvement over the original Playstation development process -- PSX games were programmed via a PC extension board. The PSX development process made creating games in a networked environments rather complex, as the card was assigned to the PC it was plugged into. This problem no longer exists with the Playstation 2 development system, which is a full-blown external device that can be operated in two different ways. The first (dubbed programming/debugging mode) is similar to what you had with the classic Playstation. The second (dubbed workstation mode) lets you hook the PS2 dev system to network via an Ethernet connection, transforming it into a Linux-based development server.

Sony's GScube, targeted at content creation and broadband delivery markets.

In the home entertainment arena, Sony's vision improves upon the classic TV concept by adding Internet access, broadband connectivity, and unprecedented digital image quality. Although we saw a large flat screen showing some impressive movies, both the console and home entertainment areas were nothing shocking for most of the attendees. What was shocking and unexpected sat in between these two areas: a black cube about the size of a microwave oven, with "GScube" printed on it. It was the living proof of Sony's plans to blend passive and interactive entertainment worlds together in the future.

The GScube is a rendering device targeted at the content creation/broadband delivery markets. It consists of 16 cascaded processing units, each of them based upon an enhanced version of a Sony Playstation 2. Every processing unit has an Emotion Engine CPU (which was jointly developed by Sony and Toshiba), and an improved Graphics Synthesizer equipped with a 32MB frame buffer (eight times the memory of a regular PS2). This yields a total 512MB of VRAM, and it can theoretically reach a peak performance of 1.2 billion triangles per second -- a number that sounds like it comes from science fiction books. The device must be controlled by an external broadband server which feeds data to the GScube, and at Siggraph that device was the brand-new SGI Origin 3400. At the Sony booth, we enjoyed a real-time battle between characters from the movie Antz rendered in real time, as well as interactive sequences from the upcoming Final Fantasy movie shown at 1920x1080 pixels and a sustained rate of 60FPS.

In the Antz demo, I counted 140 ants, each comprising about 7,000 polygons, which were rendered using a ported version of Criterion's Renderware 3. All ants were texture mapped, and the results looked surprisingly close to the quality of the original movie. The Final Fantasy demo was just data from the now-in-development full-length CG movie based upon the game series, rendered in real time by the GScube. It showed a girl (with animated hair threads) in a zero-gravity spaceship, with a user-controllable camera viewpoint. The demo rendered about 314,000 polygons per frame, and included an impressive character with 161 joints, motion-blurring effects, and many other cinematic feats. According to Kazuyuki Hashimoto, senior vice president and CTO of Square USA, the GScube allowed them to show real-time quality, in "close to what is traditionally software rendered in about five hours." Sony believes that the GScube will deliver a tenfold improvement over a regular PS2, and future iterations of the architecture expect to reach a 100-fold improvement.

Xbox Demos. The second surprise at Siggraph was seeing what seemed to be a fully-operational Xbox at the Nvidia booth. The device, still in its fancy silver X-shape, was plugged into a large screen and showed the same demos that we saw at the GDC and E3 (the girl dancing with her robot, and butterflies flying above the pool). Quality seemed a bit lower than the original GDC demos, but the animations still looked gorgeous. Whether the device was a real Xbox or just a very early prototype is unknown, but having more than a year of development time ahead, it seems premature to claim what we saw as the definitive architecture. We have to wait to see how the system evolves.