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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?
For some possible applications, check out machinima.com - film-making in real time using game engines.
Xenu loves you!
Gelato (Italian) == Ice cream
Alias has Maya for Linux. Newtek has Lightwave rendering node software for Linux. There are a few other 3D packages like AC3D too.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
This is not really correct. The graphics cards Gelato uses are consumer hardware. This doesn't mean that the image is generated directly by the card! The 3D hardware is used as a specialized fast and parallel calculation unit, used especially for geometric calculation (matrix per vertex multiplication, essentially) and other stuff. This (of course) means that the rendering is NOT done in realtime.
It looks like this is what NVIDIA have done with BMRT when they bought it: look at what has become of exluna.com
If anyone's wondering, a couple of the latest releases of BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools) before NVIDIA pulled the plug on them are available here
This might also be interesting: GPGPU /Arvid
Take a look at the Jashaka project. It is a real time video editing suit and the designers have been working with and have supposedly been getting support from Nvidia, so they may have had access and I would imagine certainly will have access to these video cards. I can't imagine them not taking advantage of this technology.
The other nice thing is if memory serves me correctly this program is being designed to work on Windows, Linux and OS X, so good news all around.
"Napalm is nature's toothpaste" - Chef Brian
is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?
A quick Googling revealed the following:
- BrookGPU
- GPGPU
Insightful my ass.
Maya, Houdini and XSI are all available for Linux, and they work well.
For those who don't remember, BMRT was a really cool RenderMan based renderer that Pixar had some sort of love/hate relationship with. IIRC, they used it, yet they sued the company. At the end nVidia bought them, though it wasn't clear why at the time.
Pinnacle have been doing graphics card assisted effects for a long time under Adobe Premier see
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http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPage_n.asp?Prod
for details
Check out www.jahshaka.com. It's an open source video compositing / FX package that leverages the 3D accelerator chip on your graphics card to do incredible things. This is one to watch, it's definitely going places.
You can download binaries for linux and windows (and MAC), and source tarballs are available for the savvy.
I know, it's not strictly a "renderer", but it employs many of the fuctions of a renderer to create realtime effects and transitions.
"By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings."
I hope you know that all high-end 3d packages are available on Linux: XSI, Maya, Houdini, Real3d. And then you have some cool open source, like wings3d, that can cover some a lot of ground on the modeling field. Combine that with blender & yafray, and (theoreticly) you have a complete open source animation studio!
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
I think that indeed there is free software to do movies and rendered animations using raytracing. First, Cinelerra can use a linux cluster for movie rendering. Second, there's a whole bunch of modellers/raytracers out there that perform very well: Povray is the oldest and most advanced, and can run on a pvm cluster, yafray is relatively recent and can use an openmosix cluster for networked rendering, Blender now integrates a raytracer AND exports to yafray. Those are the 4 programs I know of that I use, but there are more, I just haven't looked for more. So, yes, there is free software for movie rendering already!
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
ART, OGL assisted, now gelato. Sure there is a place but how do I stick a FX card into my several hundred 1U racks either physically or financially. Have you seen the size of these cards anyway ? Sure some vendors (mental images) are leveraging GPU power and have done the same with OGL for some time but unless the GPU calls are handled by calls to the renderer so you hide behind a consistent API it's a waste of your hard earned time getting your pipeline into shape in the first place. Long live GPU but I don't want to be aware of it's presence. PS. I think ATI are actually the smart kids on the block but chose the wrong colours for their marketing hype.Maybe they can get their chips straight onto the motherboard (much smarter).
I think the point is not that it can render just like other engines, but that it can do so at a far greater speed (with a lot more flexibility and features than the PURE card). That would indeed be worth the money to all but the smallest studios - much faster feedback at full quality is an artist's dream, quite apart from the (more expensive) option of using it to accelerate your render farm.
What they don't really say anywhere is *how much* faster it is. There are many factors involved, but if you basically have 16 * 4 * 2 FP execution units running at 400 MHz in a highly parallel configuration, backed by 32 GB/s of bandwidth, there is quite a bit of potential there (~50 GFLOPS vs P4's ~2 GFLOPS?).
For a farm... If, say, it renders 5x faster than a given render machine, then that's 4 machines (and engine licences) you don't have to buy, which would easily cover the cost.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You're right. Hence PCI Express.
"You heard the man, Tubbs.. get undressed."
Some people are already using GPUs for things like Seti@home and collision detection in games, so yeah, why not?
See here and here. More and more pieces of the moviemaking toolchain are available Openly, only a matter of time before someone adds a GUI wrapper to integrate it all. Will they dare call it Raxip? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
PRMan is a fine product, but it has its limitations, as well as its price. There are numerous competitors, many of which use the same Renderman interface but offer more speed and/or more features at a lower price (BMRT and Entropy are[were] notable, and relevant, until Pixar squashed them with the threat of an expensive court case). Brazil, AIR, etc - these RIB-based renderers drop into the same place in the workflow.
Please explain to me why a dedicated rendering device from NVidia would be any better than your average UNIX or Linux machine?
Only if you explain why your average UNIX or Linux machine is better than a Commodore 64 or a PDA, which is also "in essence nothing but processor operations" etc :-) If you listed SPEED in there, you're on the right track.
A modern GPU has far more floating-point hardware than any general-purpose CPU, and it's all geared towards the process of rendering pixels. For certain tasks, one of those expensive dedicated rendering devices from nVidia could be better than FIFTY of your "average" UNIX or Linux machines! Is that enough of an advantage to consider?
Dang, I went and fed the troll, didn't I...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Correct, there aren't any advantages, only disadvantages. (More expensive, proprietary hardware, unproven etc.)
And, apparently, orders of magnitude faster.
Personally, I'd put that rather firmly into the advantage column, and for a number of reasons. You could either render your movie with a smaller farm (always a plus) or you could render even more complex scenes in the same time period--which is probably what most people would use this technology for. On the commentary track of Monsters Inc, the guys from Pixar note that despite having MUCH faster hardware (and alot more of it) the average time to render a single frame of Monsters Inc was just as long as a single frame of Toy Story. Why? Because the frames were FAR more complex.
I think this is a Good Thing(tm) at least for the people who have the imagination to use it.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Admittedly it's not exactly the same things as NVIDIA's solution, but the main component of breaking big movie quality shaders into multiple passes is in ATI's Ashli (http://www.ati.com/developer/ashli.html). The big plus is instead of costing thousands of dollars it's free. Also I noticed everyone is saying agp read backs make this sort of thing useless. The fact is that most of the scenes rendered will take seconds to hours on the graphics card (vs. minutes to days on a CPU). The slow agp reads aren't going to be much of a performance impact in these situations.
How do you know this? Did you perform benchmark comparing it to a real Quadro?
A couple of years ago I got a GeForce4 4800 and a Quadro4 900 XGL. I performed the required resistor mod and flashed the GeForce4 with the Quadro4's BIOS.
Sure the GeForce4 got recognised as a Quadro4 900 XGL in the Windows display control panel, but when you run benchmarks like SPECViewPerf it was obvious the modded-GeForce4 did NOT perform like a real Quadro4 900 XGL. Capabilities like the HW-accelerated clip planes did not seem to present in the GeForce4, and this made a big difference to the scores I was getting.
At least I have never seen it before.
Look at the AMD 64 ("Opteron", etc) CPU. Linux support is here, but native versions of Microsoft Windows are still yet to be released.
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