Nvidia hits film rendering and HD broadcast

Post, May, 2004

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Nvidia, best known for its high-end graphics processing boards, displayed two new graphics cards at NAB. The Quadro FX 4000 and Quadro FX 4000 SDI, and a software render engine Gelato that brings them head-on into the film and HD television markets.

Beth Loughney, Gm of Nvidia's digital film group, says Nvidia decided to build a product that would take full advantage of the capabilities of the Quadro FX series.

The Nvidia FX 4000 features a true 128-bit floating point graphics pipeline with 12 bits of sub pixel precision, parallelized vertex engines, an on-chip vertex cache, a programmable 8-pixel pipetine, occlusion culling, lossless depth Z buffering, and color compression capabilities. The processor achieves up to 100 million lit and textured triangles per second and a 3.3 GB-per-second fill rate. The card will sell for $2,199.

Gelato is optimized out-of-the-box for multithreading and it's scaleable to take advantage of Intel's PCI express. The software features accelerated scaline and ratraced rendering, global illumination, ambient occlusion, and support for the full range of geometric primitives. NURBS, bicubic and more. Gelato renders 2 to 5 times faster than CPU-bound rendering software.

A new shading language written to take advantage of the Quadro FX family enables layered shaders to be built. Purchase price is $2,750 per node. Plug-ins for Maya, Python binding, and others will be available in May. Gelato is already being tested at VFX house ILM.

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Nvidia's Quadro FX 4000 SDI adds to its graphics capabilities the additional technology of dual-link HD SDI, which allows the easy processing of 4:4:4 10-bit RGB uncompressed 1920 X 1080i. The card converts composited video and graphics to uncompressed 8-bit or 10-bit SDI and provides two channel output--either two fill channels or a fill and a key channel. There is full support of SMPTE HD and SD formats as well as analog or digital genlock. The board will be available for $5,999 in July.