The year 2008 so far, has been very eventful for the graphics card market. A reinvigorated GPU lineup by ATI, brought in some fierce competition to NVIDIA, which resulted in a tug-of-war with pricing graphics cards in the market, with either company refusing to lose on grounds of pricing. This event, coupled with the announcement of several game titles by game publishers, resulted in bumper-sales of graphics cards, giving the present state of the global economy little or no relevance.

The months to come hold the same amount of importance for both AMD and NVIDIA, where the next round of competition begins with successors to current high-end products being slated. NVIDIA is expected to continue with its monolithic high transistor-count GPU design methodology, while AMD could bring in a little change to the way it uses two efficient GPUs to build powerful products.

S3 Graphics, a leading provider of graphics and HD Multimedia technologies, today announced the availability of S3FotoPro, a GPGPU application using the latest programmable architecture powered by the Chrome 400 Series GPUs. Utilizing an array of S3 stream processors, the GPUs can accelerate parallel data workloads and perform work on thousands of concurrent threads to achieve Gigaflops (GFLOPS) of high-throughput computations.

S3FotoPro is an example of a computationally expensive process for image quality improvements that is best achieved on a GPU instead of a CPU due to the S3 stream processor architecture. The algorithm complexity and high calculation requirements required by S3FotoPro enables the parallel workload speedup to be magnitudes (>100x) of times faster than the latest CPUs in the market today. In addition, the GFLOPS-per-Watt and GFLOPS-per-Dollar favor the GPU computational efficiency over standard CPU calculations.

AMD conducted a presentation at CEATEC Japan, where the company took a sneak-peak at how the role of GPUs would become critical to the PC of tomorrow. This of course revolved around the company's newly adopted "The Future is Fusion" slogan, integrating all of AMD's technological expertise into object and function oriented solutions for the PC industry.

Among the numerous slides that formed part of the presentation, one such slide, shows some very interesting points on what the year 2009 looks like, from AMD's perspective. It shows a lot of things slated for much later to make it to the industry. To begin with, the DirectX 11 API and Windows 7 (Vienna) operating system could make it to the industry in 2009. However, there's no mention of them being "released" as such, or if they could just be working prototypes, such as alpha releases for use by select parts of the industry for mutual technology development.