NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, unveiled NVIDIA® Gelato™, the first 3D final-film renderer accelerated by industry-standard graphics hardware. Armed with the full feature set required by film and TV production professionals, NVIDIA Gelato is set to revolutionize digital film production with speed, precision, and productivity increases never before seen in offline, film-quality rendering.
“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.”
Pricing and Availability
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. A Windows XP version will be available soon.
The license fee for Gelato is $2,750 per node plus a $525 annuity for maintenance and support. Bundled pricing with NVIDIA Quadro FX GPUs, facility pricing for license fees and maintenance and support, as well as academic pricing are available upon request.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation is a market leader in visual computing technology dedicated to creating products that enhance the interactive experience on consumer and professional computing platforms. 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 the Company’s Web site at http://www.nvidia.com
