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发帖数: 36 | 1 Technology Review's annual list of 35 Innovators Under 35
http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?trid=1084
High-speed: This image was generated in a fraction of the time required by
traditional graphics software.
Credit: Courtesy of Kun Zhou
Thanks to Kun Zhou, computer games will become more realistic and animated
movies will reach cinemas faster. The Zhejiang University computer science
professor has released software capable of rendering movie-quality scenes
using graphics chips of the sort that most PCs use to create comparatively
crude images.
These chips, known as GPUs, perform many relatively simple computations in
parallel. While this design is adequate to synthesize images for today's
computer games, it wasn't seen as a good fit for the complex algorithms
required to create the truly photorealistic images produced by animation and
special-effects studios. But in 2009 Zhou developed a programming language
that could efficiently break up these algorithms in a way that suited GPUs.
He used this language as the foundation of a rendering system called
RenderAnts, which generates images more than 10 times as fast as traditional
software. A Chinese animation studio is already using an early commercial
version of the software to increase the quality of its television
productions, and Zhou is collaborating with the Frankfurt-based gaming
studio Crytek—maker of the popular Crysis series of games, which are often
used to benchmark the graphics performance of PCs—to improve the realism of
its products.
Making games more realistic while keeping them fast enough to respond
instantaneously to a player's actions is a personal goal for Zhou. He says
he got hooked on games as a young engineering student and has been trying to
overcome their limitations ever since. —Peter Fairley |
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