Nvidia announces ultra high-resolution screenshot capture utility

Captures in-game screenshots at gigapixel resolutions with HDR

During its Geforce Pascal introduction on Friday, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang introduced Ansel, the “world’s first in-game camera system” that enables two-dimension and three-dimensional screenshot capturing up to 32 times higher than in-game resolution – from megapixels to gigapixels with a completely adjustable field-of-view (FoV), among other features.

Nvidia Ansel user interface (Larger image here)

The software, named after American photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams, will now allow gamers to capture in-game screenshots from infinite camera angles along with post-processing filters including High Dynamic Range (HDR) and traditional filters including “film grain,” “black and white,” sepia” and “hue shift.” The software also allows capturing screenshots in full 360-degree stereoscopic formats.

“Ansel is a revolutionary new way to capture in-game shots and view in 360. Compose your screenshots from any position, adjust them with post-process filters, capture HDR images in high-fidelity formats, and share them in 360 degrees using your mobile phone, PC, or VR headset.”

4K (8.3-megapixel) screenshots can now be saved in 8.3 gigapixel format

Once an in-game shot is framed and positioned by the user, it can then be saved in ultra-high gigapixel resolution by selecting the “High Resolution” option. This conveniently allows users to save images up to 1,000 times their current display resolution. With a 4K monitor (8.29 megapixels), for instance, an in-game screenshot can now be saved at a stunning 8.29 gigapixel resolution.

Duncan Harris, James Pollock , Leonardo Sang, Joshua Taylor and many other notable new media artists have created some galleries over the past few years with screenshots ranging from Street Fighter V, Mirror’s Edge, Gears of War, Star Wars Battlefront, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Tom Clancy’s The Division, RAGE and Fallout 4 with emphasis on landscapes, portraiture, action sequences and other stylistic elements found in environmentally diverse in-game situations.

“Capture your shot in super resolution for the most detailed images and perfect edges. Capture up to an 8-Gigapixel image, or 32 times your game resolution.”

Ansel is also fully compatible with OpenEXR, a high dynamic range file format developed by Industrial Light and Magic for computer imaging applications.

“Show your creativity, your humor, your sense of style, and maybe even become the next professional game photographer, wowing the world with stunningly composed screenshots worthy of display in an art gallery and on enthusiasts’ walls,” NVIDIA writes. “Anything’s possible with Ansel, and it will all be available for GeForce GTX gamers.”

Nvidia has also launched an Ansel 360-degree image gallery featuring seven spherical 3D in-game screenshots that actually seem quite impressive. The company claims these dynamic screen captures can also be viewed on a VR headset and the images are compatible with any WebGL-enabled web browser.

The screen capturing software will initially be supported on a majority of midrange to high-end Nvidia Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal GPUs, beginning with Geforce GTX 650 all the way up to Geforce GTX 1080.

Available soon, compatible with a number of “top games”

The company claims that in-game support for the Ansel image capturing utility is “coming soon” and will include titles such as The Witcher 3, No Man’s Sky, Tom Clancy’s The Division, The Witnessand the Unreal Tournament series, among others.

Below are a few in-game creative pieces from some featured galleries by the aforementioned screenshot artists.

“Rockfall” from The Witcher 3 by Duncan Harris (Larger image here)

“ADR1FT Walkabout Series 029” by Duncan Harris (Larger image here)

Star Wars Battlefront – “Pew Pew” by Leonardo Sang (Larger image here)

Skyrim night screenshot by James Pollock (Larger image here)

Corvega assembly plant in Fallout 4 by Leonardo Sang (Larger image here)

RAGE – “Faces of the Apocalypse” by Joshua Taylor (Larger image here)

 

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First AMD Zen chips may not be quad-core parts

AMD prepares for IPC race with Intel

In May 2015, we reported that AMD’s first Zen CPUs, launching in Q4 2016, would most likely be quad-core chips based on a presentation slide showing the company’s Zen core units scaling up to four cores with shared L3 cache. According to new information released one year later, this may not be the case and, the company could be preparing to launch eight and six-core variants in a tight efficiency race against Intel’s ‘Kaby Lake’ CPUs.

AMD’s Zen-based quad-core unit slide from May 6, 2015. (Larger image here)

AMD’s official “Zen-based Quad Core Unit” slide” was released May 6, 2015 during its Financial Analyst Day when the company claimed its new platform will have a more competitively-focused IPC design, higher core counts, lower latency caches and will be based on second-generation 14nm Low-Power Plus (LPP) process technology.

AMD’s Zen FX CPU roadmap slide from May 6, 2015. (Larger image here)

On Wednesday, sources close to the folks at Italian site Bitsandchips.it now suggest that AMD will produce 8-core and 6-core Zen x86 chips initially – and only in the event of bad yields will OEMs and ODMs decide to use quad-core variants. Due to the fact that Intel is launching 6-core and 10-core high-end Broadwell-E processors later this month, it appears AMD will be initially focused on bringing back some high-end desktop (HEDT) market share from Intel’s stagnant performance numbers.

In recent benchmarks, the Core i7 6950X is only about 10 percent faster than the Core i7 5960X in Cinebench multi-threaded performance, while the former Haswell-E chip is actually slightly faster in Cinebench single-threaded tests. This is a great place for AMD to gain some ground against Intel’s ‘Kaby Lake’ CPUs in Instructions Per Clock (IPC) by launching Zen with a higher number of cores, at least initially.

We mentioned in August 2015 that Zen uses SMT (hyperthreading) just like Intel’s cores and will be switching back to a single FPU-per core design. With this market approach, every core will be able to run two simultaneous threads just like Intel’s CPUs. This is AMD’s way of breaking from the “core pair” implementation that was established in Bulldozer in October 2011, also known as Clustered Multithreading (CMT).

Of course, AMD will eventually release a 16-core x86 Zen APU with Greenland integrated graphics, but this is not expected to compete with Intel until 2017 when 10-nanometer Cannonlake CPUs are released later in the year. AMD can also produce an 8-core and even 6-core version of this Zen APU

Bristol Ridge APUs will initially take dual-core and quad-core designs

Meanwhile, the company is planning to announce some new dual-core and quad-core APUs later this month at Computex 2016, codenamed Bristol Ridge, to compete with current Intel 6th-generation Skylake CPUs. These 7th-generation APUs are built using four ‘Bulldozer’ CPU cores and eight GPU cores, and AMD will categorize them as “entry level” CPUs when they launch later this summer. Already, HP has announced an Envy x360 15-inch convertible with dual-core and quad-core Bristol Ridge parts based on the AMD FX naming scheme.

GlobalFoundries has been ramping up production of its second-generation 14-nanometer technology, also known as 14 Low-Power Plus (14LPP) since Q4 2014 and provided some validation on production samples in December 2015. AMD has said in the past that it will not pay GlobalFoundries (or any foundry) to develop custom silicon for its architectural designs. With this in mind, the company is relying heavily on the success of the GF second-gen 14LPP process technology and fully-depleted silicon technology to restore its core PC business back to levels it has not experienced in years. The improvements should help AMD gain traction in both TDP efficiency and performance that will allow the company to effectively scale Zen designs across more market segments in years to come.

Fully depleted FinFET transistors (one fin shown here) — silicon-on-insulator vs. bulk silicon

 

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