Filmmakers already rely extensively on NVIDIA's Quadro line of computer graphics hardware to produce rich 3D effects for such blockbusters as The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars: Episode II. Now, the company has released its first film software offering, NVIDIA Gelato, which takes the benefits of the hardware to a whole new level. A major innovation in 3D film rendering, NVIDIA Gelato allows digital effects artists to create very high quality, sophisticated film images in as little as half the time of current techniques.
“We’ve been testing Gelato and are pleased with what we’re seeing,” said Cliff Plumer, chief technology officer at Industrial Light & Magic. “NVIDIA is delivering exactly what the industry needs with a product roadmap that uses mainstream graphics processors, bringing interactivity to rendering.”
Designed to create the highest-quality digital effects and animation, NVIDIA Gelato is the first commercially available application in the feature film segment to solve a critical problem—rendering—by using all of the mainstream hardware advantages available, such as floating point acceleration, 64-bit computing, PCI Express, and multithreading.
“NVIDIA Gelato delivers ‘no compromise’ film rendering,” said Chris Bond, president of Frantic Films. “With the world’s most advanced shading language allowing us extreme flexibility, we were thrilled with the quality of the images. The icing on the cake: the speed of renders due to the acceleration by NVIDIA graphics hardware... without losing the high-quality features we require.”
NVIDIA Gelato features and benefits include:
- Speed and power that scale with improvements in the entire system, including graphics hardware innovations, 64-bit CPU technology, and PCI Express.
- A flexible architecture that makes it easy to integrate Gelato into existing film production pipelines such as plug-ins for Maya and Python binding.
- Accelerated scanline and raytraced rendering, global illumination, ambient occlusion, and support for the full range of geometric primitives (NURBS, bicubic and bilinear patches, polygon meshes, subdivision surfaces, points, curves, and procedural geometry) for true film-quality images.
- A new shading language that not only unlocks the power of the NVIDIA Quadro FX hardware, but also adds innovative features including layered shaders for more precise effects.
“NVIDIA is delighted to work with people in the film industry who are pushing the limits of computer animation,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. “By building software and hardware products that solve their problems, NVIDIA is driving innovation in both offline and real-time rendering. We look forward to seeing the stunning visuals these new products will help to enable.”
NVIDIA Gelato is now available for purchase at http://film.nvidia.com in versions running Red Hat Linux 7.2, 7.3, 9.0, and SUSE.