A Few Of The Things I’m Looking Forward To At SIGGRAPH 2016

The 43rd annual SIGGRAPH conference will be taking place next week in Anaheim, California, and for the first time ever, we’ll be at the show taking in a whole lot of visual goodness and reporting on it after we come down from our high.

As this will be the first time we’re at the show, it’s hard to know exactly what to expect, but there are a number of things that have me personally excited.

At the forefront, AMD is going to be hosting a Capsaicin event that promises a look at “future insights and technologies”, which can be taken a number of different ways. VR is touted as being a big focus as well, and the company will be allowing its partners to take the stand and promote some upcoming technologies that will “inspire and benefit the entire CG and developer community.”

I am not going to beat around the bush: What I really want to see from AMD is the unveiling of new FirePro workstation GPUs, as the most-recent architecture in AMD’s current line-up spans back three years. For the love of GCN, let there be new FirePros!

If that doesn’t happen, at least we know some FirePro driver improvements are en route, giving a free performance boost to those who own current-gen models.

NVIDIA also promises to have a lot to talk about, but it’s unclear at this point if its announcements are going to include new product. The company’s Quadro product stack is already well-rounded, and I can’t imagine it’s ready quite yet to unveil a new series based on its Pascal architecture. I wouldn’t hate to be wrong, though.

One thing the company will be showing off at the event is the result of its partnership with SMI, to improve performance in VR through the use of foveated rendering. I look forward to testing this out first-hand.

A panel in particular I’m looking forward to is sponsored by Qualcomm. Called ‘A Vision For Computer Vision’, this panel which includes Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research and Michael Mangan of Qualcomm, will focus on using computers to perform certain vision-related tasks better than us humans – something that’s inevitable.

I’m also looking forward to being able to meet with a few companies that I’ve never been able to before – especially Autodesk. We’ve been using Autodesk products in our workstation testing for many years, so it will be great to finally be able to meet with the company – and of course, see what it has to announce at the show. Let’s be honest: it’s going to have some cool stuff to show off and talk about; it never fails.

Other companies I’m looking forward to bumping into include Epic Games (UE4 demos galore), Lightworks (Iray+ updates), workstation builders like BOXX and Puget Systems, and I’m sure I’ll remember many more once I’m finally on the show floor. It’s going to be a busy time on the show floor, to say the least, but I couldn’t be more excited.

More next week…