Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513434
8 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 3 E arlier this year, CGW announced the winners of the Silver Edge Awards for SIGGRAPH 2023. Selected by our editorial team, the annual Silver Edge Awards recognize the most innovative and impressive technologies on display at SIGGRAPH. These best-of-show selections demonstrate remarkable advancements in the eld of computer graphics. Out of the many exhibitors participating in the 50th annual con- ference, CGW presented ten companies with Silver Edge Awards for their outstanding technological achievements. See the full list of winners and learn about their products below. A M D : R A D E O N P R O W 7 6 0 0 & W 7 5 0 0 W O R K S T A T I O N G R A P H I C S C A R D AMD recently announced two new additions to their Radeon PRO W7000 Series product line: the W7600 and W7500 workstation graphics cards. These new graphics cards are designed to tackle mainstream workloads across a range of professional industries, in- cluding Media & Entertainment, Design & Manufacturing, and Archi- tecture, Engineering, & Construction. AMD's Radeon PRO W7600 and W7500 graphics cards accel- erate everyday professional workows by focusing on eciency and increasing performance. The new cards leverage AMD's break- through RDNA 3 architecture and are optimized to deliver leadership price/performance, as well as outstanding stability and reliability. Both cards feature 8GB of high-speed GDDR6 memory to eort- lessly support data-intensive tasks and enable ray-traced renderings with incredible detail and realism. Building upon AMD's previously launched Radeon PRO W7900 and W7800 graphics cards, creators and professional users now have a broader selection of workstation graphics oerings to support an extensive range of professional workloads. "Our goal is to oer more choice for professional users, and these graphics cards do exactly that—built to address the largest market segment focusing on mainstream workloads," said Scott Herkel- man, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Graphics Business Unit. "AMD Radeon PRO W7600 and Radeon PRO W7500 Silver Edge Awards SIGGRAPH 2023 RECOGNIZING OUTSTANDING TECHNOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENTS graphics cards provide exceptional performance for a variety of pro- fessional applications, including CAD, BIM, and more, while oering incredible levels of visual delity and setting a new performance standard for mid-range professional graphics." A U T O D E S K & A D O B E : O P E N P B R S O U R C E S H A D I N G M O D E L Autodesk and Adobe recently announced their collaboration on a new source shading model called OpenPBR (open physically-based rendering), a new subproject of MaterialX, that will be a successor to Autodesk Standard Surface and the Adobe Standard Material. This new open-source specication is under the governance of the Academy Soware Foundation (ASWF). MaterialX, an open standard for representing rich material and look-development content in computer graphics, enables plat- form-independent description and exchange across applications and renderers. First launched at Industrial Light & Magic in 2012, MaterialX pro- vides an open standard to represent the data values and relation- ships required to describe the look of a computer graphics model. This includes shading networks, patterns and texturing, complex nested materials, and geometric assignments. OpenPBR builds upon MaterialX by providing a description of how an artist will interface with the physical properties of the surface they're creating, giving artists a more specic interface to work with- in, and the ability to transfer data back and forth between assets with very little conversion needed. To make their vision for a cloud-driven future a reality, Autodesk is also partnering with industry leaders to enable greater interopera- bility between 3D tools and data. They recently joined Pixar, Adobe, Apple, and Nvidia as inaugural members of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), launched by the Joint Development Foundation, an ali- ate of The Linux Foundation. Autodesk has stated that they are proud to be part of an indus- try-wide eort to make it easier for artists to collaborate more eec- tively across projects, tools, and teams.