DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., maker of the “Shrek” movies and “Kung Fu Panda,” announced Tuesday it will switch from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. computer chips to Intel Corp.’s as it moves toward making all 3-D movies.

The studio’s relationship with AMD started in 2005, back when animating animal fur was a key industry milestone.

With that achieved in the very furry “Kung Fu Panda,” released last month, the animation house is following through on a commitment made last year to form all its movies in 3-D starting with “Monsters vs. Aliens,” which is scheduled for release in March 2009.

The 3-D format requires twice the computing potential of traditional animation considering viewers’ right and left eyes receive separate images, meaning it can take up to 16 hours to process a separate frame, the company said.

“Our artists, to a large degree, actually work blind,” DreamWorks Animation Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “They

send it out and have to wait overnight to actually see what they’ve done.”

“The impact of these new chipsets is that it will go from overnight to hours to minutes,” he said. “Within a handful of years — or less, actually — we may achieve the Holy Grail of our business, which is to actually work in real duration. So it’s actually, literally in the moment of creation, you can see your work.”

Some 1,000 workstations and 1,500 server units at DreamWorks Animation will build the switch to Intel chips by the next 18 months, and a team of Intel engineers will fine-tune DreamWorks’ proprietary software for use on the new equipment.

The studio began looking at its needs as its AMD contract neared an end, said John Batter, DreamWorks Animation’s co-president of production for feature animation. The final touches on “Kung Fu Panda” were made with computers running…

Original post by Top Tech News