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Nvidia Releases Hardware-Accelerated Film Renderer
snowtigger writes "The day we'll be doing movie rendering in hardware has come: Nvidia today released Gelato, a hardware rendering solution for movie production with some advanced rendering features: displacement, motion blur, raytracing, flexible shading and lighting, a C++ interface for plugins and integration, plus lots of other goodies used in television and movie production. It will be nice to see how this will compete against the software rendering solutions used today. And it runs under Linux too, so we might be seeing more Linux rendering clusters in the future =)" Gelato is proprietary (and pricey), which makes me wonder: is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?
RTFA.
You're the ignorant one. Movie rendering has been done on the CPU forever. This for the first time is doing final movie rendering on the GPU.
This is definitely something new on the market. Point me to another product that does final movie rendering with hardware acceleration provided by the GPU, and I'll eat my hat.
I imagine its still incredibly more profitable to use a CPU than GPU.
Why? Because it's faster? Bzzzt. That's the whole point. Take a look at the transistor counts for the latest and greatest GPU, and then look at the transistor counts for the latest and greatest CPU. GPUs are clearly outpacing CPUs, and for tasks such as rendering, will soon be able to run circles around software renderers (if they're not doing it already.)
Time is money. If it turns out you can render the same frame in 95% of the time using this technology, you'd be an idiot to not buy a quadro. A 5% speed-up over a period of months-to-years adds up.
But for in-game recording...
This has absolutely nothing to do with in-game rendering, let alone in-game recording. This is an offline (read: not real-time) renderer, suitable for such things as rendering final frames of a movie, not in-game rendering in real time.
I wonder if PCI-Express...
Video cards have been capable of sending final renders back to the CPU for a really long time. PCI-Express just makes it faster.
Education is the silver bullet.