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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?
The AGP bus has assymetrical bandwidth. Upstream to video card is like 10x faster than downstream to the CPU. So you can dump tons of data to the GPU but you can't get the data back for further processing fast enough, which defeats the purpose.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
"Gelsto is proprietary (and pricey)"
A company that wants to be payed for their work, weird !
You will see more, allot more, of this for the Linux platform in the near future.
Software may be released with source code, but no way that it will be released under GPL, most ISV's can't make a living releasing their work under GPL.
And please the "but you can provid consulting services" argument is not valid, it dont work that way in the real world.
Perhaps you should read the Nvidia FAQ? This topic is covered. From what I can tell, they don't use the GPU in the traditional way, they just use it as a co-processor.
I bet the type of people that buy this are like big time architects that have a few machines set up to do renders for clients, and want to perhaps do some additional effects for promo/confidence value, that likely already have people running that type of hardware.
Then again all those Quadro users could be CAD people and they've got no audience. =)
Not only with hardware manufacturers/drivers, but also general software. ISV's are getting annoyed by Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market, and through that, their (heavy) influence on desktop software. It's not inconceivable that in a decade, Microsoft could control every aspect of the standard desktop PC and desktop software market. At the moment some of the only really strong ISVs in their respective areas are Adobe, Corel, Intuit, Macromedia, Oracle, and a few specialized companies. Expect a big ISV push towards a "neutral" platform, like Linux or FreeBSD. Windows is too big to stop supporting, but ISVs will be smart to at least try and carve out a suitable alternative and avoid being completely dominated by Microsoft. All that most ISVs might be able to hope for in a decade is being bought out by Microsoft or making deals with Microsoft, if things don't go the way of creating a vendor-neutral platform.
Software, like much technology, follows a classic cycle from rare/expensive to common/cheap as the knowledge and means required to build it get cheaper.
"Moore's Law" is simply the application of this general law to hardware. But it applies also to software.
Free software is an expression of this cycle: at the point where the individual price paid by a group of developers to collaborate on a project falls below some amount (which is some function of a commercial license cost), they will naturally tend to produce a free version.
This is my theory, anyhow.
We can use this theory to predict where and how free software will be developed: there must be a market (i.e. enough developers who need it to also make it) and the technology required to build it must be itself very cheap (what I'd call 'zero-price').
History is full of examples of this: every large scale free software domain is backed by technologies and tools that themselves have fallen into the zero-price domain.
Thus we can ask: what technology is needed to build products like Gelato, and how close is this coming to the zero-price domain?
Incidentally, a corollary of this theory is that _all_ software domains will eventually fall into the zero-price domain.
And a second corollary is that this process can be mapped and predicted to some extent.
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For 3D rendering, especially non-realtime cinematic rendering, you have large source datasets - LOTS of geometry, huge textures, complex shaders - but a relatively small result. You also generally take long enough to render (seconds or even minutes, rather than fractions of a second) that the readback speed is not so much an issue.
Upload to the card is plenty fast enough (theoretical 2 GB/s, but achieved bandwidth is usually a lot less) to feed it the source data, if you're doing something intensive like global illumination (which will take a lot more time to render than the upload time). Readback speed (around 150 MB/s) is indeed a lot slower, but when your result is only e.g. 2048x1536x64 (FP16 OpenEXR format, 24 MB per image), you can typically read that back in 1/6 of a second. Not to say PCIe won't help, of course, in both cases.
Readback is more of an issue if you can't do a required processing stage on the GPU, and you have to retrieve the partially-complete image from the GPU, work on it, then send it back for more GPU processing etc, but with fairly generalised 32 bit float processing, you can usually get away with just using a different algorithm, even if it's less efficient, and keep it on the card.
Another issue might be running out of onboard RAM, but in most cases you can just dump source data instead & upload it again later.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Almost every FX house worth its salt in the CG business uses Pixar's Renderman on UNIX or Linux machines. The reasons behind this choise are very simple.
Renderman is proven technology and has been so since the early '90s. Renderman is well known, its results are predictable and it is a fast renderer. Also, current production pipelines are optimised for Renderman.
UNIX and Linux are quite good when it comes to distributed environments (can anyone say Render Farm?) and handle large file sizes well (Think a 2k by 2k image file, large RIB files).
And last but not least, renderman is available with a source code license.
Hardware accelerated film rendering is in essence nothing but processor operations, some memory to hold objects and some I/O stuff to get the source files and output the film images. Please explain to me why a dedicated rendering device from NVidia would be any better than your average UNIX or Linux machine? Correct, there aren't any advantages, only disadvantages. (More expensive, proprietary hardware, unproven etc.)