HP and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the American technology and the multinational semiconductor companies respectively held a digital media roundtable session on March 22 at the Fairmont Hotel, Dubai.

The roundtable was chaired by Axel Kopprasch of HP Middle East who gave attendees an insight into HPs range of tech.

“The knowhow went far beyond desktop servers and computers. HP’s built in ‘Performance Advisor’ for workstations, for instance works in the background, optimising a workstation by looking into bottlenecks which affect system performance and making recommendations to improve workflow”, said Clyde DeSouza.

Attendees were introduced to the DreamColor display monitors which got its name from HP’s earlier collaboration with Dreamworks Animation to create monitors that could share a colour and calibration profile, across all displays in a studio or organisation.



HP’s Z range of workstations combined with DreamColor displays are well known in video and digital media production studios, and now with the advent of Virtual Reality (VR) content production, they come into their own.

AMD led an eye-opening session on VR production using AMD GPUs within HP workstations.

Jamie Gwilliam and Robert Jamieson, had especially flown in from the UK to introduce the roundtable members and to announce the advances and contributions that AMD is making to the VR landscape.

Far more than just selling Graphics cards, AMD is making much wanted toolsets free to developers working in VR content development.

ProRender, a Physically Based Renderer (PBR) that plugs right into known 3D software such as Maxon’s Cinema 4D, Maya and 3Ds Max was introduced in the roundtable. The inclusion of a VR renderer camera inside of Prorender will speed the creation of cinematic VR output proving beneficial for the VR content creators.

AMD also showed a demo of True Audio and working inside of the popular game engine, Unity. This technology allows the correct ‘modelling’ of a sound environment based on real world properties of structures in a VR scene.

“Attendees, myself included, came away richer with such high and low level knowledge being shared in the evolving digital media production field”, concluded Desouza.

