AMD Demos GPU Compute at GDC 2012

Passionate people seem to be at the right place and at the right time. So was Semiaccurate’s Charlie Demerjian who was reportedly able to catch a glimpse of AMD’s new Leo Demo.

The demo is used to show how a developer can use the GPU compute power of AMD’s APUs and GPUs.

We’re talking about rendering a 3D scene that has many lights coming from everywhere. The lights, if rendered in the traditional way, would make the demo move very slow; completely different from real-time.

As AMD’s PR put it: “you’d have a non-working demo.”

AMD’s software cuts every scene in tiles that are 32 by 32 pixels in size and then calculates and renders only the lights that are visible.

We underline the fact that this can be done in the normal CPU/GPU way, but by using GPU compute, the scene can be rendered in real-time, no matter how many hundreds of lights you add to it.

You can watch the initial demo with us, but you can also head to Charlie’s short interview and a technically detailed demo over at Semiaccurate."

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