NVIDIA Gelato now free; merges with Mental Ray (+NaturalMotion)
Monday 02nd June 2008, 09:20:00 AM, written by Arun
NVIDIA's Gelato software, an offline GPU-accelerated final-frame renderer, is now completely free even in its 'Pro' version as the company stops developing it and focuses on adding GPU acceleration to mental images' mental ray as well as improving it further. There are two strategic aspects to consider: first, it's obviously a wonderful trojan horse to get GPUs into many places they weren't before; second, it's also an effective way of slightly reducing the importance of the CPU.
Rendering is a classic CPU benchmark, and it obviously loses its importance if you realize you can improve your perf/$ by 5-10x by using a GPU-based solution. The only way to commoditize a piece of hardware is to kill its selling points, one after the other, until they're all gone. It is fairly clear that this is the direction NVIDIA is taking here with mental ray, PhysX and their CUDA Coding Contests (plus other in-house R&D, of course). Such a strategy can be highly effective, but it does require brilliant execution so nothing is set in stone just yet.
Moving on, Gamasutra also got an interview with NaturalMotion and it's focused on their new partnership with NVIDIA and their recent PhysX acquisition. For those that don't know, NaturalMotion is primarily a middleware company focused on animation solutions, including euphoria (dynamic run-time generated animations) and morphene. In this case, the partnership is about morphene, and it focuses on improving interaction between the ragoll system and classic animations, as well as PhysX-generated clothes etc. - developers will still be able to use other solutions, but the integration level is sure to make them very seriously consider the PhysX/Morphene combo.
Further details are relatively light, but it is said that the solution is slated to ship in August. Even more intriguing is the official press release, which claims: 'In addition, PC titles will benefit from GeForce GPU acceleration for both PhysXand future versions of morpheme, bringing additional motion fidelity to the PC gameexperience.' - clearly implying animation itself would eventually be accelerated through CUDA. If that is what it means, then it remains to be seen when that will be the case - and it'd arguably be much more interesting for euphoria anyway!
One thing is clear though: NVIDIA is getting very serious about using its vast cash supplies to invest in middleware solutions and CUDA applications outside the realm of High Performance Computing. We can't really imagine what their next target, if any, will be however - any thoughts?
Tagging
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