AMD was showing how its professional graphics boards can support UltraHD and the firm was demonstrating the FirePro W9100 GPU card running dual Dell 3840 x 2160 displays, although up to three can be supported at up to 60Hz.
There was also a demonstration of a dual AJA board system that was being used to ingest UltraHD SDI video. The video could be directly passed to the GPU as AMD supports PCI Xpress version 3 – apparently an advantage over competitors.
Finally, we had a look at a Mac Pro system fitted with dual FirePro cards that was running Nuke 9 from “The Foundry” which supports the GPU cards for rendering through OpenCL. Three W9100 cards were being used to support real time rendering of content even though the original footage was “6K” footage from a Red camera.
AMD has been working on its technology called RapidFire which uses the GPU to encode and decode cloud content for some time. (It could be described as “Teradici without the chips”). At the show, it announced that the technology will be supported by RealVNC which has supported the RapidFire API. This means that even GPU-intensive applications can be run remotely with high performance. Apparently, up to six 720p streams can be supported at 30fps.
