files/pictures/picture-35.jpgIn conjunction with NAB, NVIDIA has announced the release of Gelato, the first 3D final-film renderer accelerated by industry-standard graphics hardware; the Quadro FX 4000, a professional graphics solution; and Quadro FX 4000 SDI, a workstation-based graphics solution enabling weather, news, sports and virtual-set broadcast as well as video and film post-production.
"We’ve been testing Gelato and are pleased with what we’re seeing," said Cliff Plumer, cto at ILM. "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 industry that solves rendering problems by using hardware advantages, such as floating point acceleration, 64-bit computing, PCI Express and multithreading.
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 Gelato is now available in versions running Red Hat Linux 7.2, 7.3, 9.0, and SUSE.
The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000 features unlimited programmability and true 128-bit floating point precision.
The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000 introduces new technologies including:
* Rotated-grid full-scene anti-aliasing increases the visual quality of lines and edges on 3D models without compromising performance.
* High-precision dynamic range technology sets new standards for imaging through extended 32-bit floating point capabilities in shading, filtering, texturing, and blending for unprecedented rendered image quality in visual effects processing such as motion blur and explosions.
* World’s fastest 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface and the industry’s highest memory bandwidth (32GB/sec.) for extremely fast data throughput.
* Two dual-link DVI-I connectors, an industry first, drive multiple very high-resolution displays at up to 3840 x 2400 resolution rates, satisfying demanding medical, satellite and geospatial imaging application requirements.
Available in May, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000 will be sold by original equipment manufacturers like HP and add-in card partners such as PNY (U.S. and Europe), Leadtek (Asia/Pacific), and Elsa (Japan), as well as value-added resellers and system builders.
Based on the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000 architecture, the Quadro FX 4000 SDI integrates graphics and 10-bit uncompressed video output capability. This graphics-to-video-out solution performs realtime rendering, high-precision video color conversion and gamma correction. The unit is complete with analog and digital house sync capability, which ensures high-quality SDI video signal formatting and transmission. This enables broadcast and non-linear editing systems to output true, uncompressed 10-bit SDI video in SMPTE standard formats and directly connects to broadcast monitors for previewing, switchers for on-air broadcasting and SDI projectors for digital dailies.
The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000 SDI features two configurable 8-bit or 10-bit channels of fill or key and allows users to tailor the color conversion to specific requirements. Running on both Windows and Linux operating systems, the product provides operating modes ranging from transparent one, working on top of existing applications, to programmable high-precision modes offering up to 10-bit 4:4:4:4, enabling integration within broadcast or video editing applications through an NVIDIA application programming interface.
NVIDIA Corporation is a market leader in visual computing technology. Its graphics and communications processors have broad market reach and are incorporated into a wide variety of computing platforms, including consumer digital-media PCs, enterprise PCs, professional workstations, digital content creation systems, notebook PCs, military navigation systems, and video game consoles. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and employs more than 1,800 people worldwide. For more information, visit
www.nvidia.com .
