Shamus Young’s “Pixel City” feels like flying in a helicopter into the art from Ghost in the Shell, or discovering a metropolis inside your computer. The latest work from an undiscovered YouTube talent, the software itself will be released under an open source license. I don’t need to tell you this could inspire other experiments for urbanist visualists wanting to work with real-time landscapes.

It’s also interesting that the process itself becomes part of the artwork: it’s by understanding how each element is pieced together that you really connect to the meaning of the whole.

This is a demonstration of a program I wrote to generate and fly through a dynamically generated city. You can read the step-by-step of how it was made at my website:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940

• The program was built on vanilla OpenGL, Windows, using MS DevStudio 6.0
• Building the city takes about 5 seconds.
• Took about 50 hours of coding time.
• Runs on older hardware. The goal was to have the program work on Windows machines less than 5 years old.
• To be released as a Windows screensaver.

The music is "Around" by Oursvince, used under the Creative Commons:
http://www.vincentbernay.com/

The link on his website also discusses other reflections on digital cityscapes, so well worth reading.

Part of the big idea behind Resolume Avenue 3 is putting audio and video in the same real-time performance app, without sacrificing quality or live processing in either. One key ingredient, hope the developers, is a new codec that transfers video decoding to the GPU without taxing the resources the GPU needs for accelerated effects. For lower-resolution footage, you may not notice a difference, but with a modern graphics card, Resolume claim intense multi-layered performance at higher HD resolutions. We’re keen to see just how that stacks up in benchmarks, not only Resolume vs. Resolume, but Resolume’s DXV up against codecs like Photo JPEG in other apps. But before we get there, we first wanted the inside scoop from the developers.

I got to speak to Resolume’s Bart van der Ploeg. I knew Bart had been dying to show us the new codec for months, so here I get to grill him about questions a lot of us have.

The good news: no, this won’t screw up your GPU-based shaders.

How did DXV come about?

While doing our research for a new GPU-based rendering engine for Resolume back in 2006, we discovered that a large bottleneck for a fast GPU video engine was the limited bandwidth to the video card. The rendering of video frames with fancy effects at a high resolution was absolutely no problem for the GPU, but half of the time it was just waiting for all the video frames to arrive to the video card’s VRAM. We just could not get the video frames to the video card fast enough to feed the GPU to its maximum potential.

We reduced the amount of data that has to travel to the video card by feeding it compressed video frames instead of uncompressed frames that come from any other traditional codec. This makes the whole engine run much faster and reduces the CPU usage so we can use that for other things like audio effects.

Apple apparently isn’t killing the white, $999, plastic MacBook at the low end of its line any time soon. They’ve even gone so far as to update the model – and that turns out to be a very good thing for visualists who want to go Mac on a budget.

Previously, you had a sort of painful choice on the Mac line:

1. Get TV out and FireWire with the original white MacBook, but have to settle for the lousy Intel X3100 integrated graphics – something that, speaking as an owner of one of these models, I would strongly advise against. (It will run things like vdmx, but you’ll be limited in terms of number of filters, lots of 3D stuff doesn’t work at all, and apps like Resolume 3 Avenue won’t run.)

2. Get better specs and a decent NVIDIA 9400M graphics card on the new, pretty, aluminum MacBook – but spend a few hundred more (or worse, depending on your country / rate of exchange), lose the ability to do TV out, and lose FireWire. (Ouch!)

3. Spend a LOT more on a MacBook Pro. You get FireWire (FW800, though FW400 will work with an adapter), a much better video card (9600M), and of course a bigger screen, ExpressCard … and you spend a lot more money. And you still don’t get TV out.

Now, the $999 model has improved upon its two Achilles’ heels:

For graphics cards, drivers are everything: it’s just not possible to be on top of stability, performance, and functionality without access to new, stable drivers. But for Windows notebooks, unlike desktops, traditionally you had to turn to OEM PC vendors to get your NVIDIA graphics drivers. That would be fine, if PC vendors kept pace, but my near-universal experience has been that vendors are awful about drivers. Just finding drivers on many sites is a Herculean task, let alone getting something up-to-date.

That had meant that, for GPU gurus, the only alternative was a site like laptopvideo2go.com. That site is an awesome resource, with in-depth detailed descriptions of every new build (stable and experimental) from NVIDIA. To get the latest and greatest, you can use mods that allow these drivers to be installed on notebooks without having to go through your notebook vendor.

But nice as that is, it’s still terrific news that NVIDIA has finally made the switch to offering their drivers directly on their site. Now, when you go to NVIDIA.com, you get a prominent, front-page option for downloading notebook drivers:

NVIDIA Notebook Drivers

This covers just about everything, thanks to NVIDIA’s unified driver model. (NVS and GeForce are both there.) Notably missing: workstation-quality Quadro FX drivers. But this is still major progress. Both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista and XP are covered.

This is a non-issue for Apple users, of course, and NVIDIA has long offered direct downloads for Linux (in addition to open source, community-supported drivers), but it’s great news for Windows users.

It specifically allows NVIDIA to push the beta of release 179 before the certified drivers become available. I hope this also means that, with added feedback, we’ll get more reliable NVIDIA mobile drivers.

NVIDIA also now prominently links to their Graphics Plus campaign, which promotes the use of your GPU for tasks like GPGPU and PhysX. There are tons of downloads there, though in the past those haven’t been officially supported on notebooks; with the beta, they are. I’m giving them a try later today on my NVIDIA 9500M GT to how they run with this new beta driver release. One big bonus for visualists: a chance to get faster video encoding. Being a fan of open standards, I’m still rooting for OpenCL in place of NVIDIA’s proprietary CUDA technology for processing on the GPU, but there’s no question NVIDIA does a lot to promote the science of GPU use. (And, for the record, NVIDIA has also pledged to support and promote OpenCL alongside CUDA.)

In fact, NVIDIA is specifically pushing these new notebook drivers for these features:

• Video applications
• Distributed computing (GPUGRID, Folding@home, and the like)
• PhysX in games like EA’s upcoming PC release of Mirror’s Edge (get the Dramamine handy!)

What about ATI? They helpfully let you select your notebook graphics card on the driver download page, then respond with:

Currently AMD does not provide any driver support for Mobility Radeon™ products. All driver and technical support for Mobility Radeon™ products is provided by the original laptop or notebook manufacturer. The drivers that are available for download at ati.amd.com are for desktop products only.

To download Windows Vista Mobility Radeon™ drivers or driver updates for your laptop or notebook product, please visit your laptop or notebook manufacturer’s website.

Ah, yes, because really, there’s nothing computer users enjoy more than dealing with notebook manufacturers. So, ATI, I hope you follow NVIDIA’s lead on this. If they can do it, so can you. We love your stuff, so help us run the latest drivers, okay? (By the way, does anyone know if there’s an ATI equivalent of laptopvideo2go?)

Thanks to Josh Ott (of superDraw fame) for the tip!

If you’re trying to find information on the NVIDIA 9400M Apple is adding to its lower-end MacBooks, here’s a hint: it doesn’t exist. (Not literally, anyway.)

Plain-English summary: NVIDIA’s new graphics card architecture used on the MacBooks combines a chip on the CPU (as found on the old MacBooks) with a dedicated GPU (as found on the MacBook Pros). The dedicated, “discrete” chip is designed for lightweight, power-efficient use, but it should be a boost from the old model. “9400M” applies to both those chips, which have … uh, different numbers. The problem is, no one knows exactly how the combination will perform until they test it; we expect to have more from live visual developers soon.

Updated: Actually, it seems “9400M” on the Mac refers to a new, single-die chip that NVIDIA considers equivalent to their two-chip (discrete + dedicated) combination with the same brand name 9400M. An anonymous reader points us here:
GeForce 9400M G

That last “G” apparently refers to this being a single-chip, motherboard graphics solution. Remove the “G”, and you have a different (though similar), two-chip motherboard + discrete solution. Both seem to have 16 stream processors total, even though the 9400M not on the Mac splits it across two other chips. (Confused yet?) As if it weren’t hard enough to follow whether that “G” is there or not, Apple calls the 9400M G the 9400M. So that means a lot of what I say here refers to the 9400M as on PCs, not the 9400M as on Macs. Ugh.

The information on the site above was added since I first posted this story. Update coming soon, though I’m going to sort my facts first, as this is not exactly Great Moments in Lucid Branding.

Exact details: Yes, as a bizarre twist of branding, the “9400M” is just a brand applied to the combination of two other GPUs. Put a GeForce 9100M G on your motherboard, and add either (bizarrely) a 9300M GS or or 9200M GS as the discrete GPU, and you get a 9400M. What’s the difference between the 9300M and the 9200M (aside from, uh, “100″)? Only the 9300M GS supports hybrid SLI (a technology for combining the two GPUs for better power/performance balance), and Blu-Ray playback.

And that brings us more questions than answers — some questions that are answered for Windows users, but even some questions for them, too (like real-world performance):