At a media event in San Francisco today, AMD demoed its Cinema 2.0 technology which they claim will be responsible for a defining moment in graphics when films would extend seamlessly into interactive gaming experiences and games and their characters would achieve true photorealism. According to the chipmaker, in a near future "you won't just play movies, you'll play in them."
Though Cinema 2.0 remains just a concept for now, AMD claims it's just a matter of months before game makers catch up to movie makers in realism. Powering the video demonstration were of course a pair of AMD's upcoming RV770 chipset, which should sit at the heart of their Radeon HD 4000 series cards scheduled to launch next week.
The company didn't provide exact details of the scenes, which include a robot attack in a lifelike city and a scorpion near a desert home. But though the videos indeed look quite impressive, their photorealism claims fell a bit short when their demonstration model Ruby appeared in its un-lifelike incarnation superimposed on a photorealistic street scene. AMD said they are "still in the process of updating her." Check out a brief video from the Cinema 2.0 demo, and more information regarding the technology here.