AMD shows off Froblins DirectX 10.1 tech demo

AMD has released a new "Froblins" tech demo to illustrate the advantage of DirectX 10.1. The demo shows several special features, including AI with dynamic path-finding on the GPU, the managing and rendering of large crowds, GPU tessellation for more detailed characters and advanced illumination.

The Froblins demo is designed to showcase many of the new techniques for character-centric entertainment made possible by the massively parallel compute available on the ATI Radeon HD 4800 GPU series. In our large-scale environment with thousands of highly detailed, intelligent characters, the Froblins (frog goblins), are concurrently simulated, animated and rendered entirely on the GPU. The individual character logic for each froblin creature is controlled via a complex shader – 3200 shader instructions for each froblin. We are utilizing the latest functionality available with the DirectX® 10.1 API, hardware tessellation, high fidelity rendering with 4X MSAA settings, at HD resolution with gamma-correct rendering, full HDR FP16 pipeline and advanced post-processing effects.

In this interactive environment, thousands of animated, intelligent characters are rendered from a variety of viewpoints ranging from extreme close-ups to far away “bird’s eye” views of the entire system (over three thousands characters at the same time). The demo combines state-of-the-art parallel artificial intelligence computation for dynamic pathfinding and local avoidance on the GPU, massive crowd rendering with LOD management with high-end rendering capabilities such as GPU tessellation for high-quality close-ups and stable performance, terrain system, cascaded shadows for large-range environments, and an advanced global illumination system.

You can download the demo (registration required) or a video of the demo over here.