2007: a retrospective.(editor's note)(Editorial)

Just about now, everyone is ready to kick back and enjoy the holidays. With a new year looming, it seems like a good time to look back on the CG industry happenings from 2007. For instance, CPU/GPU makers continue to build on Tesla, Cuda, Quadro, and the FireGL series. And, expect them to ring in the New Year on a similar high note. In fact, during the first quarter of 2008, AMD plans to deliver the FireStream 9170, the first Stream GPU with double-precision floating-point technology. The workstation market, meanwhile, treated us to machines utilizing quad-core technology. HP, Dell, Boxx, and others are providing the power; it's up to the users to harness it. Working hand-in-hand with the workstation vendors are the chipmakers, who are now looking beyond PCI Express and quad-core technology. So while the user community is just starting to discover the wonders of four cores, these vendors are looking to increase that number to eight, 16, 64, and beyond.

The year also proved big for motion capture, as vendors began offering solutions that ran the gamut from extremely high-end applications to those at the lower end of the spectrum. And, a number of vendors, including Vicon, began offering value solutions, making motion capture more viable to the masses. Another hot topic, particularly at SIGGRAPH 2007, was rendering. After all, who wants to waste valuable time waiting and waiting and waiting. Look for some further relief in this area to come in 2008.

Enough about the hardware. Let's get to the good stuff, the applications. Without question, 2007 brought us a new level of realism for digital characters. Museum-quality lions, zebras, elephants, and even a skeletal T. rex came to life in Night at the Museum, a delight during last year's holiday season. In the fifth Harry Potter movie, Order of the Phoenix, digital effects wizards showed, for the first ...