NVIDIA Corp. announced three new additions to its suite of professional software products for the film industry:
* Gelato 2.0 rendering software, the latest major release of this product for film studios.* Amaretto, an Autodesk 3ds Max rendering plug-in for Gelato developed by Frantic Films.* Sorbetto lighting technology, an interactive tool that significantly accelerates the creation of realistic lighting.
"We are seeing orders of magnitude speedup in relighting with Sorbetto compared to the alternative of launching full renders for each iterative change," said Larry Gritz, chief architect of the NVIDIA Gelato renderer. "This translates to final render quality imagery in several seconds rather than several minutes, at full film quality, complete with antialiasing, motion blur, and all the usual rendering effects. This is unprecedented in the film industry."
Along with these new products, NVIDIA is introducing a new pricing structure designed to make these tools more accessible to both large and small studios. Gelato with a choice of the Mango plug-in for Alias Maya or Amaretto plug-in for 3ds Max is now priced at $1,500, which includes the first year of maintenance and support. When using these plug-ins, users have access to all the features found in Gelato. Amaretto is currently in beta testing with availability planned for this fall.
NVIDIA has done a great job of understanding the needs of film studios, addedMark Wiebe, director of research and development at Frantic Films. Sorbetto is a perfect example of a powerful tool which can truly revolutionize the way lighting is done. By speeding up the lighting process, thus accelerating the creative process, these new products will help change the way studios like ours make movies.
NVIDIA will be demonstrating Gelato 2.0 and Sorbetto at SIGGRAPH 2005 (booth #1714) as part of a digital production pipeline that provides a snapshot of how NVIDIA professional products help address the various workflow issues that customers have to deal with.
Gelato 2.0 brings performance improvements and major new features including volumetric shadows for hair and smoke, simultaneous rendering of stereo images, shader metadata, physical units in shaders and API support for 3rd parties to write lighting tools based on Sorbetto.
Sorbetto lighting technology allows you to add, delete or move lights (including recomputation of shadows), or modify any light parameter, and see the changes interactively. At all times you are viewing final pixels, including full antialiasing, motion blur and transparency. This saves artists time and allows them to adjust lighting in a scene to get the exact look they are trying to create. For Maya users, Sorbetto features are exposed directly in our Mango plugin for Maya. For developers, all relighting features are exposed through extensions to the Gelato APIs.
Amaretto allows 3ds Max users to select Gelato to render existing scenes, and access Gelato's extensive feature set including fast sub-pixel displacement, analytical sub-division surfaces and shader programming language to enhance the quality of their artistic output.
NVIDIA digital film products are available from authorized resellers by region, and evaluation copies of the software are available. For more information, please visit http://film.nvidia.com.
NVIDIA Corp. (www.nvidia.com) of Santa Clara, California, is a worldwide leader in graphics and digital media processors. NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), media and communications processors (MCPs) and wireless media processors (WMPs) have broad market reach and are incorporated into a variety of platforms, including consumer and enterprise PCs, notebooks, workstations, PDAs, mobile phones and videogame consoles.
Quadro FX 4500 Released
The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphics processing unit (GPU) has been released, a solution offering 50% more horsepower than the previous generation high-end product. NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU technology featured in the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 enables a number of unique capabilities:
* Support for 32x full-scene antialiasing (FSAA) delivering superior image quality.* Support for up to four dual-link high-resolution displays with a single system* Multiple GPUs matched with the NVIDIA Quadro G-Sync option board
NVIDIA Quadro capabilities, like framelock, genlock and multi-GPU, really set these solutions apart from anything else in the industry, said Mats W. Johansson, president of EON Reality. For example, our EON design software is seeing a 100% performance increase with SLI running in Frame Rendering mode by combining the power of two NVIDIA Quadro boards and the NVIDIA Quadro G-Sync option board to drive large product display powerwalls.
The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 offers a combination of features, including a unified 512MB frame buffer memory and SLI technology support, with a new architecture that increases raw performance for a solution that brings a new level of graphics computing power. The result is that a much broader range of customers now have access to advanced graphics systems that were previously only available in cost prohibitive and proprietary workstation solutions. A long list of standard features, such as a 128-bit floating point frame buffer and 12-bit sub-pixel precision, has made the NVIDIA Quadro one of the most widely deployed professional graphics solutions in the industry .
The NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450 GPU, also introduced today, offers an excellent mix of price and performance for customers looking to widely deploy a more cost-effective solution. This single slot card also supports SLI Frame Rendering mode, which allows the power of two of these cards to be combined in a single system to drive a single high-resolution display. It supports SLI Multi View mode as well, which allows users to pair any two NVIDIA Quadro FX PCI Express boards in a workstation and drive up to four high resolution displays.
HP is offering both of the latest NVIDIA Quadro boards in the HP xw9300 and HP xw4300 Workstations. HP is committed to providing customers with high-performance availability for their professional graphics needs, while delivering impressive scalability, performance and reliability, said Will Wade, workstations product manager at HP. We work closely with the NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group to help ensure our customers have the most advanced graphics solutions available.
The NVIDIA Quadro boards are now available widely through leading OEMs, including HP, leading workstation system integrators, including Alienware and BOXX Technologies, and NVIDIA channel partners PNY Technologies (US and EMEA), Leadtek (APAC) and Elsa (Japan).
NVIDIA Corp. (www.nvidia.com) of Santa Clara, California, is a worldwide leader in graphics and digital media processors. NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), media and communications processors (MCPs) and wireless media processors (WMPs) have broad market reach and are incorporated into a variety of platforms, including consumer and enterprise PCs, notebooks, workstations, PDAs, mobile phones and videogame consoles.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
