Surely the biggest issue at the moment related to consumer electronics would be the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD competition.  It looks like Blu-Ray has a majority of the market, and recently more companies have been dropping HD-DVD in favor of Blu-Ray.  As a consumer who doesn’t yet own an HDTV, and is not interested in paying $30 or more per movie, it doesn’t really effect me as much as it could, but I have been rooting for Blu-Ray from the side lines.  I have a Blu-Ray burner, and Adobe Encore CS3 supports Blu-Ray authoring, and I also just think the technology is better.  50GB on a dual layer disc, more capacity in the future, it is just superior all the way around, higher priced or not.

 A number of manufacturers are offering 120Hz LCD screens.  This technology is advantagious in a number of ways.  24p content will look smoother at 120Hz, as each frame is flashed 5 times, instead of alternating 2 and 3 refreshes on current 60hz screens.  Certain 3D TVs combine 120Hz with internal polarization to provide multiple image streams that can be separated with passive filters.  My primary application for this would be stereoscopic 3D video display, but there is also talk of future gaming consoles offering each player a dedicated fullscreen view.  Instead of 3D glasses, you would have Player 1 glasses and Player 2 glasses, each filtering out the other’s view.

Westinghouse is showing off their 8MegaPixel 4x1080P display, which I see being useful to all those new Red enabled 4K film-makers.  3840×2160 isn’t technically 4K, but it is close, and for $15K, what a bargain.  No indication of how they intend users to input to it, most likely through two channels of dual-link DVI.

Dell is developing a 16×5 wide monitor under the Alienware brand, targeted at gamers, but it might make for an interesting NLE workspace at 2880 pixels wide.  On a related note, Dell updated their 30″ LCD to the 3008WFP, which added analog inputs, HDMI, and the new DisplayPort, which is currently useless.

Intel’s new Skulltrail platform is what I call clever marketing of an existing product.  It is a dual socket design, identical to the professional Xeon workstation platform.  The only real addition for the consumer is overclocking capability.  I will take my 5000 series Xeon workstation instead thank you.

On that note, Apple released the details for its long awaited refresh of the MacPro lineup.  No surprises there at all.  8 cores at 2.8-3.2 Ghz, 1600MHz FSB, video options are ATI HD2600XT or faster Nvidia 8800GT, in a reversal from last release where ATI was the faster upgrade option.  Same case, 4 drive bays, now with SAS options, 4TB SATA max.  Nothing there was unexpected.

Intel also released more info on its upcoming consumer level 45nm CPUs, both desktop and mobile, but nothing much of interest in the specific details.  Maximum clockspeed still hovers around 3GHz.  Blame AMD for no serious competition in that regard.

As newer post-production software is developed to squeeze every last bit of available performance out of available hardware, the GPU is becoming a more important factor in building a high performance workstation.  A few pieces of software that I use that depend on the GPU are: Matrox’s AXIO-LE, Red Giant’s Magic Bullet (especially Colorista), and Iridas’ SpeedGradeHD.  Each has a list of supported cards, and hopefully there will be some intersection in those subsets, or these software applications will be incompatible with each other.  For any given product, there are usually a variety of options, sometime ranging in price from $50-$2500.  Determining which of these options best suits your needs is an important decision, and sometimes the best choice is not immediately apparent.

The competition between NVidia and ATI used to be much stronger, but recently, NVidia has pulled ahead significantly.  I am not sure if this is related to ATI’s abrupt acquisition by AMD last year, or anything else, but NVidia’s development has been consistently resulting in products that are much more capable than ATI’s.  In the professional arena, ATI doesn’t even offer features like SDI outputs and Genlock, to compete with NVidia’s offerings.  These specific features are very relevant to the utilization of these cards in the post-production workflow.  SLI is another NVidia development that ATI has no answer for in their professional line, but implementations of that technology are more tailored to 3D animation and scientific applications.  Stereoscopic output has been offered by NVidia’s QuadroFX line for many years, although their solution is a bit outdated at this point.

ATI has few advantages to counter with.  The most significant one I am aware of, for post-production, is that the ATI architecture is better optimized for returning processed images to the system bus.  Certain applications are able to pass more data to and from ATI cards than their Nvidia counterparts, which is beneficial if you plan to do more than preview the results on screen.  This is why Matrox’s AXIO-LE gets better performance when paired with ATI cards than much more powerful NVidia solutions.  Another issue I have seen with Cineform’s RT engine in Premiere is a color shift between between the video overlay and still frames.  According to David Newman at Cineform, this is due to an inconsistent implementation of YUV overlay on NVidia cards (See his comment on the ProspectHD post) and ATI cards, to their credit, do not suffer from this problem.  There are very few other features in ATI’s favor that I am aware of, but I am always open to being enlightened in that regard if I am overlooking something significant.  Given the current state of things, my recommended choice in most cases, would be to go with an NVidia based card.

Choosing between NVidia and ATI solutions is not the only significant step in the selection process.  Frequently, the most confusing aspect of choosing a new display card, is motivated by chipmakers’ desire to make higher profits from business customers, in that “professional” 3D graphics cards are much higher priced, than seemingly identical consumer gaming 3D graphics cards.  The actual specific differences are rather vague in many cases, and will depend on the requirements of your application.  Certain features such as SDI output and Genlock are clearly exclusive to professional hardware, and product support is much better for the professional lines, but when it comes to GPU processing, the differences are not so obvious.  This is especially true since both companies utilize a unified driver architecture, allowing the same drivers to support almost any of their cards.  Both companies throw around the term OpenGL in regards to their professional cards, but most of the same features are available from the consumer cards.  I have used OpenGL acceleration in After Effects, and have found no real differences, but I am not a professional animator, so higher end 3D animation and modeling programs might see certain advantages.

ATI has their FireGL line of professional cards to compare to their Radeon series.  I have used very few of these cards, so I can offer little in the way of advice.  They are rarely recommended or required by post-production software solutions.  My primary experience with the Radeon line has been in conjunction with the Matrox AXIO-LE, and I have not been impressed with the stability or features of the cards.  The most important feature that I find totally unsupported is the hardware spanning of two displays.  I also have occasional vertical sync issues when running LCDs at 1920×1200, but all this is based on my experience with two X1900 series cards.  I have much more experience, and a greater level of success with NVidia cards.

Nvidia’s QuadroFX line of professional graphics cards is VERY similar to their GeForce line of cards, and with even greater price differences.  In my experience, most software runs equally well if not better on GeForce cards compared to their QuadroFX relatives.  I own a QuadroFX3400 which is almost exactly identical to the GeForce6800GTX, and was four times the MSRP when I bought it.  Although the card has served me well, I have found no compelling reason to have required it over the similar GeForce option.  There is a rumor that Nvidia disabled certain functions when they released their newest generation of consumer cards, that will now only be available from the QuadroFX line, but I have not been able to confirm that.  Specifically they are said to have disabled hardware support for full screen video overlay, (allowing full screen preview in an NLE) which I intend to test once I get a working GeForce8 card.  I would appreciate information about anyone else’s experiences in this regard.  If that is true, it means that we might soon find signicant disadvantages from using consumer cards for professional work, but fortunately, I do not think we have yet come to that point.

What all that boils down to is, currently Nvidia is the performance leader, and unless you have a compelling reason to shell out the money for a QuadroFX model, a GeForce card should be suitable for most applications.  That said,the new 8800GT is a remarkable value for almost anyone who needs a powerful GPU. (Please note I am NOT speaking of the much lower end 8600GT card)  As an added benefit, the new 8800GT should run cooler and quieter than any other card with similar performance.  I also expect that the new PCIe 2.0 compatibility should be able to be taken advantage of with upcoming release of the next generation of Intel Xeon workstation platform early next month.  If I hadn’t been in the process of acquiring the similar 8800GTX, which is at least twice the size, price, heat, power, and noise, for similar resulting performance, I would have already ordered a GT by now, and still might do so regardless.

Then in the summer of 2006, Intel released two major processor upgrades back to back.  The Dempsey cores (5000 series) were a maxed out variation of the Pentium 4 “Netburst” architecture, and finally brought dual cores to the Xeon line.  The 3.73 Ghz was well above AMD’s 2.6 Ghz and the 1066Mhz FSB final topped AMD’s 1Ghz.  Only one month later, Intel released its entire new line of CPUs for all platforms, based on their totally new “Core2″ design.  The Woodcrest series of Xeon’s (5100 series) were clocked lower, were supposed to be much more efficient per clock cycle, along the lines of the Opterons.  Woodcrest had everything to finally close the gap between Xeons and Opterons, with dual 64 bit cores runnning more efficiently and already at higher clock speeds, with a 3Ghz model available.  AMD had very little in the way of improvements in their response, and were totally unprepared when Intel released their next update less than 6 months later.

The Clovertown (5300 series) CPUs were simply two Woodcrest chips in a single socket, making it a Quad Core CPU.  This allowed a regular Xeon motherboard to support 8 discrete processing cores, clearly doubling performance in high end applications.  I had the privilege to use a Clovertown system for about a month when they were first released, and it was without question the fastest computer I have ever used, by a long shot.

AMD’s response was a new line of CPUs with a new numbering scheme, but no new major features.  Then recently, a year after Intel brought Quad Core CPUs to market, AMD released their long awaited Barcelona line, which were native quad core CPUs.  I have yet to see any version of those for sale nearly a month after release, and almost every review and benchmark has been negative.

We are now a month away from Intel’s next refresh of their CPU line, and are looking forward to more L2 cache, 1600Mhz FSB, and much lower prices.  AMD seems to have nothing in sight with which to compete with, which is unfortunate for both Intel and AMD users, since competition usually drives prices down for all users.  On the positive side, Intel doesn’t seem to be using their monopoly on the ultra high end to dramatically inflate prices. 

Xeons are still lacking AMD’s integrated memory controller and Hypertransport link, but those are scheduled to be included in Intel’s next major redesign, “Nehalem” in late 2008.  It will be interesting to see what AMD brings to the table by then.  Stay tuned for details when Intel releases their new line of CPUs next month.