AMD versus Intel Performance Results for the Mixamo Face Plus Plug-in for the Unity Development Platform AMD Performance APUs and GPUs are capable of enabling real-time facial animation captures at full camera frame rates with the new Mixamo Face Plus plug-in for the Unity development platform. Whether it is a standard VGA webcam capable of 30 frames per second, or a top end camera capable of 60 frames per second, AMD has the performance to deliver where it counts. Detecting and tracking facial features such as corners of the mouth, eyes, eyebrows, etc., with real time performance is a daunting task. We had an opportunity to do some testing to measure the system’s ability to process video streams of facial expressions in real time to animate a 3D character with the Mixamo Face Plus technology. According to Mixamo, computing facial expressions at 30-40 frames per second will give enough margin to provide good results with standard VGA webcams, while higher frame rates mean that you can take advantage of top-of-line camera capabilities. Our testing shows that a solid range of AMD 2012 and 2013 A8 and A10 APUs are up to the task of tracking facial features with real time performance and high quality. The test project was Mixamo’s stress-harness benchmark consisting of a 480p “poor quality” video containing a full range of facial expressions recorded in an uncontrolled environment with uneven lighting and lots of compression - typical of what you can often expect from an inexpensive, standard PC webcam. The video is loaded into system RAM to simulate the performance you would get when streaming live from the webcam, thus taking out any disk I/O load time. Thereafter, all the frames are processed at full speed so as to push the system to its computing limit. At completion, the average frame rate is shown which is based on the total number of frames processed and the total duration it took for the processing of the facial expressions to complete. Such a scenario is a stress test because it requires a great deal more processing to handle the poor quality and still achieve good animation results. According to Mixamo, for cameras capable of higher frame rates and larger resolutions, the increased amount of data needing to be processed is offset by the higher quality video such that the overall processing requirements compared to a poor quality 480p video are lower. Hence, using a poor quality, SD video to simulate something closer to a worse case scenarios was used, which enabled consistent testing to be applied across all parts tested. This benchmark project was correlated with actual results measured when streaming live video and found to be a good representation of what a developer can expect from the system in terms of Face Plus performance. As this chart shows, even a 2012 mobile part, the AMD A8-4500M APU which was introduced over a year ago, has the computational throughput to support real time captures with standard off the shelf webcams whereas even a 2013 desktop part from Intel, the i5-4670, falls well short of the mark. AMD is pleased to be able to enable great performance and productivity to developers across such a broad range of AMD products to Unity developers and we are excited to see the technology being used to enhance upcoming games and interactive movies developed with the Unity platform.
Posted on: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 10:20:56 +0000
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