Tuesday, 28 June 2011

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SPY Makes Visual Effects Invisible with NVIDIA Quadro

Posted: 28 Jun 2011 10:00 AM PDT

SPY, a San Francisco-based visual effects studio, is devoted to ensuring its work looks seamlessly realistic. As its web site states: In the world of espionage, the best spies go unnoticed. The same can be said of post-production and visual effects, where doing our job well often entails making the work appear invisible.

To achieve this mission, SPY turns to NVIDIA GPUs.

The studio's most recent work can be seen on the big screen in "Priest," the new post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller from Screen Gems, in which a warrior man of the cloth ventures out from hiding when his niece is kidnapped by a pack of murderous vampires.

To bring this story to life, SPY helped create 125 visual effects shots, including a major sequence involving a high-impact train collision. Key to this work were NVIDIA's Quadro professional GPUs, which delivered speed and flexibility.

 

“Before” image courtesy of Sony Screen Gems “After” image courtesy of Sony Screen Gems

"One of the things we did extensively in our shots for 'Priest' was blow stuff up," Mike Janov, SPY's VFX supervisor, explains. "Without Quadro cards, we wouldn't have been able to interactively manipulate and display shaders, particles and detailed CG effects elements necessary in developing the look of our sequences."

SPY's work on "Priest" illustrates their ability to integrate photo-realistic set extensions and scene enhancements that appear as if they were shot in-camera. Accelerated with Quadro GPUs, SPY's special-effects pipeline consists of Autodesk Maya for hard surface modeling; NVIDIA mental ray for rendering; Autodesk 3ds Max for dynamics and effects; and Thinkbox Software's Krakatoa for particle effects.  Compositing is done using The Foundry's NUKE and Autodesk Flame.

Avatar, image courtesy of 20th Century Fox

SPY is currently putting its Quadro-accelerated pipeline on two features and several commercial spots including one for Sprint and the launch of the new HTC EVO stereoscopic 3D phone. Other recent projects include visual effects shots for "Avatar", "Iron Man," "The Rite," starring Anthony Hopkins, and commercials for Exxon, Activision's "Call of Duty", and National Geographic's Feature length documentary, "Collapse."

SPY has been building CG workstations since the 1990s and relies on optimizing VFX pipeline performance across all of its projects.

"There are a lot of hurdles to overcome when multiple artists are collaborating to produce photo real shots," said Eric Hanson, co-founder of SPY and SVP at FotoKem Creative Services, which now owns the studio. "We have always been able to overcome those hurdles with NVIDIA GPUs in all of the platforms we deploy. We work with Quadro graphics cards because of what the technology brings to our VFX pipeline and the confidence that we'll be properly supported by NVIDIA."

Official Priest movie trailer (in HD):

Get Duke Nukem Forever FREE with NVIDIA 3D Vision Kits

Posted: 28 Jun 2011 09:00 AM PDT

If you've been on the fence about upgrading your GeForce PC to add 3D Vision support, we have a treat for you.

Starting today, and for a limited time, NVIDIA 3D Vision wireless glasses kits include a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever.  You can purchase the 3D Vision Duke Nukem Forever special edition today for $149 (USD MSRP) at these North American etailers: TigerDirect.com, Newegg.com and NCIX.

Or, look for the 3D Vision Duke Nukem Forever special edition bundle at your local retail store.

The game has sparked some controversy for its decidedly political incorrectness. But I've always been fond of Duke. Even with the cheesy lines, the bathroom humor and overly patriotic tones, Duke just has a way of winning your heart while you laugh at the over-the-top ridiculousness of the game.

Now, Duke Nukem looks better than ever. Once limited only to MS-DOS graphics, today Duke bursts out of the screen with full 3D Vision support, NVIDIA Surround support and HD graphics.  Imagine hunting down aliens at up to 5760×1080 resolution in a completely immersive experience. You can't beat the experience!

Some reviewers have been playing the game and they love the 3D experience. Here's what they had to say:

"The Duke Nukem Forever experience in 3D Vision was a treat. Experiencing real 3D graphics makes the “flat” 3D we’ve grown used to seem primitive and limiting"

"Duke Nukem Forever gets two big thumbs up from this reviewer on the implementation of 3D Vision and also 3D Vision Surround – which is just "more is better" – the widescreen view adds to the game although fortunately most of the action takes place right in front of you."

If you have a 3D Vision PC and want to get a quick look at how cool Duke Nukem Forever looks in 3D, visit the 3D screenshot gallery at 3DVisionLive.com.

KQED Warns Of Supercomputing ‘Energy Wall’ – NVIDIA Helps Scale It With GPUs

Posted: 27 Jun 2011 05:46 PM PDT

Lauren Sommer wrote a great blog over the weekend on KQED about how supercomputers have hit the "energy wall” – a decidedly real supercomputing problem that NVIDIA’s GPU technology can help to overcome.

This is what 1,000 homes looks like.

The blog post mentions the Hopper supercomputer, located at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL). The system consumes 3 megawatts of electricity (enough to power 2,000-3,000 homes a year) and has performance of 1 petaflop per second (equivalent to about 68,000 laptops).

It’s hard to imagine these numbers scaling to exascale systems – the “energy wall” here would just be too high to reasonably surmount. In fact, I just got back from the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, where the running joke was that power companies would soon be giving supercomputers away for free if you sign up for a five-year power contract with them.

Here at NVIDIA, we've been working on a solution to the supercomputing power crisis for several years. Supercomputers can use NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to dramatically accelerate supercomputing applications. Like a turbocharger on your car, GPUs kick in to boost your standard Intel or AMD CPUs when you need the extra oomph.

Using GPUs is a much more energy efficient way of supercomputing.  You choose the right processor to the do the right job.  When I edit pictures of my kids, for example, my computer's sequential Intel or AMD x86 CPU is used to access the hard disk, retrieve the file, and open it.  Once the picture is open, and I want to do red-eye reduction or remove the blur, the GPU kicks into gear to accelerate the job.

Three of the Top Five supercomputers in the world are accelerated by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. One of these is the Tsubame 2.0 system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Like the Hopper system at LBNL, it delivers 1 petaflop per second of performance. But thanks to its GPUs, it consumes less than half the power of the Hopper system.  To be exact, Tsubame achieves 1.19 Petaflop/sec and sips a "mere" 1.4 megawatts of electricity.

Half the power for the same performance is a big leap forward. But we have a long road ahead, especially as we move towards exascale supercomputers that will be 1,000 times more powerful than the current petaflop supers. Otherwise, the power companies will indeed start giving away supercomputers away for free!

 
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