Monday 27 February 2012

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And the Oscar Goes to Hugo, Rango…and NVIDIA Quadro

Posted: 27 Feb 2012 10:39 AM PST

Rango and Beans

Coming off of last night's Academy Awards ceremony, it was a great year for animation and visual effects. And another great year for the NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions that powered many of this year's nominees and the winners in both categories.

Congratulations to longtime NVIDIA customer Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for their work on their Oscar-winning animated feature film Rango, directed by Gore Verbinski. ILM used a proprietary GPU-accelerated fire and dust tool called Plume to create the fire and dust that permeates the worlds of Rango. ILM uses NVIDIA Quadro GPUs across all of their artists' workstations.

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures. Center to right, foreground: Rango (Johnny Depp) and Beans (Isla Fisher) in RANGO, from Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies. © 2011 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

"Whenever you're approaching a film of this scale you need to make your production pipeline operate as efficiently as possible — especially when it comes to character animation work," said Tim Alexander, VFX supervisor for Rango. "By using NVIDIA Quadro processors and building GPU-accelerated processes into our workflow, we saved a huge amount of rendering time."

Check out these videos to see ILM's outstanding, and very entertaining, CG work on Rango:

Pixomondo's Ben Grossmann and Alex Henning were also awarded with statuettes for their magical visual effects contributions to Martin Scorsese's Hugo. This 3D movie is homage both to early filmmaking and to visual effects pioneer Georges Meliés. NVIDIA Quadro pro graphics are an essential component of Pixomondo's visual effects pipeline.

Images ©2011 GK Films, LLC, All Rights Reserved.

Congrats to the company on its first Oscar win.

While Hugo was the winner, all of this year's nominees produced great visual effects work. And they join a running list close to our heart — every film nominated over the past three years for best visual effects was made using NVIDIA technology.

HTC Launches Tegra-Powered One X Phone on Eve of MWC

Posted: 27 Feb 2012 02:22 AM PST

HTC One X @ MWC 2012

HTC got off to an early start Sunday night, on the eve of Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

With acres of plastic sheeting still on the floors of the Fira de Barcelona Conference Center, ground zero for MWC, the world's 5th largest phone maker used the event to launch its HTC One X phone. The sleek offering, HTC's first with NVIDIA, is powered by the Tegra 3 mobile processor, the world's only 4-PLUS-1 quad-core processor with a fifth battery saver core.

The packed press conference, with more than 500 attendees in a coliseum-size mall opposite Fira, kicked off at 9pm – not so odd in a city where dinner often doesn't start until 10pm. It featured HTC's CEO Peter Chou, who described the One X, which features Android Ice Cream Sandwich, a 1.5GHz Tegra 3 processor, 1GB RAM, 4.7-inch SuperLCD 2 screen with 1280×720 resolution and Gorilla Glass, 32GB inbuilt storage and an 8-megapixel camera, as a whole new way to record the world around us.

"You each have your own memory, interests and relationships that define who you are," Chou said, speaking under a dome amid a multi-colored light show set to music. "These memories are key to who we are and how we chronicle our lives."

He said the phone’s camera has a boot-up times of just 0.7 seconds and auto focuses in a mere 0.2 seconds, faster than the blink of an eye. Its image sensor is equipped with larger pixels, which allows it to collect more light, with the camera's flash automatically adjusting to the distance of the subject.

The HTC One series, including the One X with Tegra 3, will be available, come April, through some 144 phone operators virtually worldwide.

We go hands-on with the HTC One X in the video below:

HTC One X @ MWC 2012 HTC One X @ MWC 2012 HTC One X @ MWC 2012 HTC One X @ MWC 2012 HTC One X @ MWC 2012 HTC One X @ MWC 2012

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