AMD CPUs Used in "Predators" Special Effects
AMD CPUs and GPU were used to create the special effects and animations in "Predator".
AMD said Friday that Troublemaker Studios, the film production company behind the just-released "Predators" movie, used its technology to generate the special effects and animations. More specifically, the studio used six-core AMD Opteron processors and ATI FirePro GPUs to get the job done.
Troublemaker was founded (and owned) by filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and producer Elizabeth Avellan in 1991. It's special effects division--Troublemaker Digital--generally uses AMD products for a good deal of its projects.
"With a long history in the movie making industry, Troublemaker Studios is using AMD technology to push the envelope of digital moving making and special effects in several blockbuster films," AMD said in a press release. "In addition to 'Predators', Rodriguez has looked to AMD technology to create six of his movies, including 'Shorts', 'Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams', 'Spy Kids 3D: Game Over', 'Planet Terror', and 'Sin City'."
AMD said that Rodriguez plans to "deploy" AMD technology as the digital hardware backbone for his next movie currently in production, "Machete." The movie is expected to hit theaters on September 3, 2010.
Unfortunately, hardware specifics--such as the actual setup of the rigs used at Troublemaker--wasn't provided. Still, it's interesting to know what's powering the visual candy we see at the movies.
Predators is slated to hit theaters Friday, July 9 (today), and is said to be to "Predator" what "Aliens" is to "Alien". We'll see.
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I thought they all used Macs? Or so people would have you believe. Glad AMD is getting a bit of news
Seen the film and basically its Predator the original revamped but not as good. Some of the effect was good but nothing to write home about.
Predator wasn't in it enough maybe in it even less than AvP so wasn't impressed with the film at all.
Another feather in AMD's cap
Absolutely NOT, film special effects are almost always done with PC's running either Windows or Linux, and nearly always running Nvidia hardware too (hence the PR story I suppose).
You can use Macs for 3D effects but very few people do...
Great to see AMD has been in the game for all these years, i like knowing what was used "behind the scenes" to generate what we see.
Reading between the lines, this means Intel & Nvidia does the job on all the remaining movies.
Maybe someone can break it down, not just the branding but the configurations. Some of these films studio's seem to be very secretive about the gear they use.
Heh, I remember a few years ago attending a Graphics Fair, and it being dominated by SGI. The PC stuff was so primitive by comparison it was unreal; one guy was demonstrating how SGI hardware could create broadcast-quality FX in real-time (putting a river in a street), and you could hear the gasps from afar. I think that scene was the one used in a video by the band Guns 'n' Roses. But the price disparity was well..you guessed it..astronomic, and this was all before the days before off-the-shelf graphics hardware that could be put to good use.
I also saw the Commodore Amiga-based Video Toaster unit at such fairs, and that also raised many eyebrows..if only Commodore had marketed that hardware better. Apparently it was popular in the USA, though, with the cable TV channels able to create FX and titles on a budget. All I know is, that machine was also streets ahead of anything I'd seen on the PC, including the good graphics cards from companies likes of Matrox. I have fond memories of that machine and even used it for a few of my own projects. The alternative PC hardware didn't even have TV-out functionality, unless you spent a bucket load on a suitable card, and I remember having problems with things like over-scan and scaling.