Powerful Displacement Mapping with Hardware Tessellation and Stereoscopic Camera Support Among Many New Features to Streamline Productivity

AMSTERDAM — (BUSINESS WIRE) — September 11, 2009 — StudioGPU continues to democratize the 3D production space for broadcast, cinema and design with the release of MachStudio™ Pro 1.2, a real-time 3D workflow and rendering package that leverages the horsepower of off-the-shelf professional graphics processing units (GPUs) to deliver real-time and near real-time workflow performance on a desktop workstation. Now available worldwide, MachStudio Pro 1.2 includes many dynamic new features powered by the new industry-leading AMD ATI FirePro™ V8750 professional 3D workstation graphics accelerator, which is included with the program. This powerful combination of hardware and software gives 3D artists a seamless way to create and interact with cinematic-quality 3D objects and environments in a non-linear desktop workspace.

The MachStudio Pro workflow is similar to a virtual real-time 3D studio environment, allowing artists, designers, engineers, directors, and technical directors (TDs) to work with lighting, camera views and multi-point perspectives for a real-time view of frames as they will appear in the final rendered format. Users can easily manage and interact with complex lighting, caustics, cameras, shaders, materials, ambient occlusion, and color grading for real-time shot finaling and compositing.

Visit StudioGPU in the AMD booth (Hall 7, booth H32) at IBC 2009 in Amsterdam, September 11-15 to see all of the new features of MachStudio Pro 1.2, including:

• Displacement Mapping Using Hardware Tessellation: Generate amazing 3D details from two-dimensional displacement maps with real-time hardware-based geometry tessellation. Exclusive to qualified ATI graphics workstation accelerators, MachStudio Pro can create sub-pixel geometry tessellation for greater efficiency and better control over surface geometry. And, by leveraging the tessellation library and power of the ATI graphics accelerators, MachStudio Pro can increase the polygon count exponentially, in some instances to more than one billion polygons, without any material drop in the render speed.
• Stereoscopic Camera Support: Quickly create anaglyphic effects with customizable eyeglass color schemes for true 3D stereoscopic effects.
• Cartoon Shader: Custom shader allows for cartoon-style color fills and outline rendering.
• Custom Configurable Anti-Aliasing: Choose from a variety of anti-aliasing algorithms to achieve the highest quality results for the desired look and feel.
• Unlimited Independent Render Passes and Render Layers: Create an unlimited number of independent render passes such as ambient occlusion, shadows, diffuse, specular, velocity maps, depth maps, and glows for use in compositing and third-party software. Generate custom defined render layers with the exact elements and render passes desired.
• Open EXR File Format Support: Write image files in the OpenEXR format, an HDR image file format developed by Industrial Light & Magic that includes features such as increased HDR (32-bit) and color precision, which is designed to maintain the highest quality while simplifying the compositing process.
• Floating-Point Velocity Maps: Use vector-based velocity passes to generate velocity maps and create motion blur in postproduction.
• Support for 64-bit Operating Systems: Allows MachStudio Pro to run in a native 64-bit environment and utilize more system RAM over the standard 3 GB limit of 32-bit operating systems for substantial speed and performance improvements.

Powered by the new ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accelerator, render times in MachStudio Pro can be dramatically reduced from hours to minutes and minutes to seconds or sub-seconds. Performance tests supplied by AMD reveal that MachStudio Pro can render projects 196% faster on the new ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accelerator than with the previous generation ATI 3D workstation graphics accelerator. MachStudio Pro now performs at rates of more than 900 times faster than traditional rendering packages.

Supporting a diverse range of industries—from computer-aided design (CAD) visualization and 3D animation to top-quality film and broadcast projects—MachStudio Pro offers seamless interoperability with leading professional 3D modeling, animation, and 3D CAD software packages. For a complete list of MachStudio Pro 1.2 features, new product overview videos, instructional tutorials and related software and hardware requirements, please visit www.studiogpu.com.

Pricing and Purchasing Information

MachStudio Pro supports Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista operating systems, and comes standard with an AMD ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accelerator card. The special North America introductory price of MachStudio Pro is $4,999 (USD MSRP), which includes one year of technical support and product maintenance updates. For pricing in other regions, please contact regional resellers located at www.studiogpu.com/buy/locator . Education and volume licensing is also available upon request. For more information about MachStudio Pro, please visit the StudioGPU web site at www.studiogpu.com .