14 DAY TRIAL // Unity, a cross-platform game engine with a built-in IDE developed by Unity Technologies, is used to develop video games for web plugins, desktop platforms, consoles and mobile devices. It is utilized by over one million developers.
That means that anyone who finds a way to improve it is bound to profit greatly from the achievement, provided they find takers.
Advanced Micro Devices will definitely gather support just through the weight of its name alone, and Mixamo, its partner in this venture, is sure to benefit just as much.
So what did the two actually do? They developed an advanced real-time motion capture and 3D facial animation technology for the Unity engine.
Mixamo is an AMD Ventures portfolio company which provides 3D animation service for game makers.
Its Face Plus plug-in for Unity allows developers to capture their facial expressions through webcams and transfer them, in real time, onto a 3 character.
Developed for devices that support OpenCL 1.1 or newer versions, Face Plus captures motion at full camera frame rates using an AMD APU.
A system powered by an AMD A10-4600M APU was capable of up to 42 FPS captures in real-time with GPU-acceleration enabled.
That's a 13X performance improvement when compared to using CPU processing alone.
"AMD is impressed with the results Mixamo has achieved in optimizing its technology and is excited not only about the capabilities it brings to Unity developers today, but also the potential it could bring to new consumer applications," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Solutions at AMD.
"Thanks to incredible OpenCL performance, broad availability and the capability of AMD APU and GPU solutions across PC form factors, Unity developers can enjoy a much more streamlined development process, allowing their creativity to flow with technology so powerful it recedes into the background without interrupting the creative process."