Nvidia® Gelato™ 1.0 Hardware

NVIDIA GELATO PRODUCT OVERVIEW APRIL04v01

NVIDIA® GELATO™ 1.0 HARDWARE- Key to this doctrine of no compromises is Gelato’s new shading language incorporates a ACCELERATED FINAL-FRAME RENDERER Gelato’s use of NVIDIA graphics hardware. simple and streamlined syntax based on C, Gelato is breakthrough, rendering software Gelato uses the NVIDIA Quadro FX as a second making it familiar and easy for most from NVIDIA, designed with a new architecture floating-point processor, taking advantage of programmers to learn and allowing for state- that leverages advances in mainstream graphics the 3D engine in ways far beyond gameplay. of-the-art shader-specific types and hardware to accelerate film-quality rendering. Gelato is one of the first in a wave of software functions. Gelato ships with an extensive This software renderer takes advantage of the applications that use the graphics hardware as set of shader libraries and examples. programmability, precision, performance, and an off-line processor, a “floating-point Gelato is available with a world-class quality of NVIDIA Quadro® FX professional supercomputer on a chip,” and not simply to support package, backed by NVIDIA, graphics solutions to render imagery of manage the display. the global leader in 3D graphics. uncompromising quality at unheard-of speeds. FAST AND GETTING FASTER The annual support package includes Gelato offers all the features film and television all product updates and upgrades. customers demand today and is flexible and Gelato unleashes the processing power of the extensible enough to satisfy their future graphics hardware that currently sits idle on LOOKING TO THE FUTURE requirements. studio workstations and will soon become The NVIDIA Digital Film Group and standard in the server farm. Through its its partners are helping to shape unique hybrid design, Gelato accelerates the evolution of the digital film rendering functions on the graphics hardware, production, and Gelato is one while carefully managing and optimizing other its chief tools for making this system resources such as memory footprint, transition. As new generations multithreading, and multiple CPUs. of graphics hardware emerge And Gelato does not begin to approach the along with innovations like limits of how fast the system can get. The speed 64-bit computing and PCI of graphics hardware is increasing at a faster Express, integrating and rate than that of CPUs, providing rapidly managing change in the improving performance, especially when digital production pipeline factoring in advances in bus speeds that will will become increasingly come with PCI Express. intimidating. The combination of Gelato, NVIDIA QuadroFX, PRODUCTION READY By developing more and the latest generation servers and server interactive tools and Gelato was designed for easy integration into blades opens up powerful new hardware techniques built on any production pipeline, whether using configurations to film production. NVIDIA is mainstream hardware and standard off-the-shelf tools or proprietary leading this revolution in digital graphics standards our clients will be systems. It ships with a simple, but powerful technology. able to advantage of the C++ API that is used to integrate it into existing ever changing hardware NO COMPROMISES ON IMAGE QUALITY production pipelines and to create plug-ins for environment, maintaining Gelato is built on one fundamental principle: other pipeline products. a competitive edge in a fast never compromise on the quality of the rendered Gelato is also scene file format agnostic, changing market. image. Featuring smooth antialiasing, adaptive shipping with plug-in interfaces for industry- tessellation, beautiful motion blur, layered standard scene formats. With the API, users and shaders, and the full range of geometric product manufacturers can create plug-ins for primitives, it delivers to the most rigorous other formats and products. Gelato ships with demands of the film industry. It also provides for a plug-in that allows Alias® Maya® users to use flexible shading and lighting, including layered Gelato for final frame rendering. This plug-in shaders, global illumination with ray-traced eliminates the need to translate the Maya reflections and shadows, indirect illumination, output to meet the renderer’s specification. and ambient occlusion.

NVIDIA GELATO 1.0 FEATURES AND SPECIFICATIONS

QUALITY IMAGES PRODUCTION-READY COMPREHENSIVE SUPPORT • Antialiasing • Efficiently handles complex scenes • Technical Reference Manual • True displacement on all geometric • Unlimited image resolution • Source code examples of plug-ins & shaders primitives • Fully selective lighting • Online support forums • Motion blur • Holdout matte objects to combine CG • Enterprise support available from NVIDIA • Automatic adaptive tessellation with live action PLATFORM REQUIREMENTS • Ray tracing and global illumination • No eyesplits—ever • Intel Pentium III, AMD Athlon, or better • Image output 8-bit, 16-bit, and float (per • Runs on both Linux and Windows XP • NVIDIA Quadro FX 700 or better channel) • Floating licenses available • Windows XP or Linux • Output image channels for any value • All formats are open, documented, computed in shaders and royalty-free GEOMETRY PERFORMANCE • NURBS, bicubic, and bilinear patches • Hardware accelerated by commodity • Polygon meshes graphics hardware • Subdivision surfaces • Support for multithreaded CPUs • Hair • Efficiently handles complex scenes • Particles • Efficient memory use • Procedural geometry plug-ins • Selective ray tracing SHADING & LIGHTING EXTENSIBLE TOOLSET • Programmable shading and lighting • Simple but powerful C++ API • No uniform or varying • Python binding • Layered shaders • Plug-ins for image I/O—read and write • Anti-aliased texture, environment, and from any format shadow mapping • Plug-ins for reading geometry—read any • Atmospheric effects scene format • Vertex variables • Plug-ins for procedural geometry • Unlimited number of lights • Plug-ins callable from shaders • Global illumination • iv - image viewer • Ambient occlusion • gslc - shader compiler • Ray-traced reflections, refractions, shadows • maketx - convert image files to textures • Example shaders and shader function library • Shader developer libraries

© 2004 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, Gelato, and NVIDIA Quadro are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation. All company and/or product names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective manufacturers. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.