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Remember the restoration of the lost Apollo 11 moon footage we discussed a few weeks ago?  A new press release is out from NVidia with the news that the bulk of the video restoration algorithms were run on NVidia Tesla GPU’s with CUDA algorithms.

Enhancing each frame of the video on a CPU-only system would have taken Lowry Digital between 20 to 45 minutes to complete. Tesla GPUs deliver a 100-times boost in performance, cutting the restoration time for a single frame to seconds. The final Apollo 11 video will feature two and half hours of HD video.

A big win both both NVidia and NASA on this one.  Read the full release after the break.

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Hardware, Science cuda, nasa, nvidia

BFG has just announed a pair of new NVidia cards, a GTX285 and GTX295, which self-contained cooling systems.

BFG Technologies, which currently holds the greatest name for a graphics card company ever, has today introduced its GeForce GTX 285 H2O+ and GeForce GTX 295 H2OC cards, both of which boast ThermoIntelligence Advanced Cooling Solutions (read: self-contained liquid cooling systems). BFG swears that both cards are completely maintenance free, with the GPUs kept around 30°C cooler under load as compared to standard air cooled models.

via BFG gifts GTX 285 and GTX 295 cards with self-contained liquid cooling.

Hardware bfg, nvidia

NVidia is showing a new toy on the SIGGRAPH Show Floor, their new quadro-plex solutions.  The Quadro-Plex itself is not new, but they’ve implemented some new systems that allow you to connect multiple QuadoPlex’s together for even more awesome number-crunching power.

These flexible solutions are built on the award-winning NVIDIA Quadro Plex visual computing system, featuring two Quadro FX 5800 GPUs and 8 GB of memory. By connecting two Quadro Plex systems to a single workstation, users can view images at a resolution of 36 megapixels, span visuals across two 4K projectors or eight auto-synchronized displays, and drive stereoscopic 3D content for a truly immersive experience.

In the NVidia booth at SIGGRAPH, they’ve got a single desktop hooked to 2 QuadroPlex’s and 8 monitors (4×2 configuration) running Google Earth.  The system, running Windows, sees it as a single massive GPU device and display, meaning no modification of software required. I spoke briefly with NVidia and the hardware framebuffer is limited to 8k resolution in a single dimension (up from the usual 4K), but that fits in pretty nicely with the 4×2 layout.

See the full press release after the break.

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Hardware nvidia, quadroplex, siggraph

Check out the SIGGRAPH Exhibition floor as we see the booths from Pixar and FusionIO, and get some time with Intersense’s newest gadget, the VCam Lite.

Podcast Podcast, siggraph

Ocarina today announced that they’ve picked up a new customer for their storage optimization system in Zoic Studios.  We’ve talked about the magic black-box Ocarina solution before, and this press release comes with some actual numbers from customers:

Production data from existing Ocarina customers indicates that capital expense for new storage may drop 70% per production, even when the data is media file types that are already compressed, and reduce the overall cost of storage by as much as 80%. Ocarina’s solution combines object deduplication with an industry-specific set of compression algorithms that can quickly and losslessly shrink key post-production file types.

Ocarina is on the show floor here at SIGGRAPH, so I hope to get some more details for you.  Read the full press release after the break.

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Hardware ocarina, zoic

Pixar has announced some new changes in RenderMan including some new tools like RenderMan Pro Server 15 and Tractor 1.0.  Most importantly, new versions of RenderMan (Starting with Pro Server 15.0) will have support for unlimited threads, meaning that pricing is no longer dependent on the core count, but on the node count.

Unlimited threading will enable studios and artists to maximize the power of their render farms, allowing each license of RenderMan to utilize any number of threads on the latest multi-core platforms. RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 will be the first product to introduce unlimited threading when it is released in the fall of 2009. This will be followed with unlimited threading for RenderMan Studio and RenderMan for Maya.

via Pixar Announces unlimited threading, RenderMan – Software News.

Graphics pixar, renderman, software

A new product offering from NVidia boasts to be the first interactive ray-tracing engine.  The claim is a bit overblown for PR reasons, but interesting nonetheless.

The NVIDIA SceniX scene management engine provides the interactive core for demanding real-time, professional 3D graphics applications. Whether used in leading products such as RTT DeltaGen, Autodesk Showcase and Anark Media Studio, or in scores of in-house tools used for advanced visualization, simulation, broadcast graphics, medical imagery, and energy exploration, developers look to the SceniX engine for the interactive framework to manage 3D data and convey results in real-time at high fidelity.

Read the full press release after the break.

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Graphics, Science nvidia, raytracing, siggraph

Recognizing the economic slump, Autodesk has announced a new set of Product Suites that gives you a collection of Autodesk tools at a discount of over 35% compared to buying the products individually.

“Autodesk is introducing affordable Suites of its popular 3D tools to better help artists create innovative entertainment in today’s tough economic conditions,” said Stig Gruman, vice president, Autodesk Digital Entertainment Group. “The Suites significantly expand artists’ capabilities by providing them with an amazing range of creative tools – from highly-detailed modeling and sculpting to advanced real-time animation – so that they can tackle creative problems in new ways.”

via Autodesk – Press Room – Press Releases.

Graphics autodesk, software

You can head on over to CGSociety for the list of the 2009 SIGGRAPH CAF winners, with stills from the winning films.

“This year’s accepted films really overwhelmed us with the level of technical expertise and expert storytelling, which made the awards decision process extremely difficult,” Carlye Archibeque, SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival Executive Producer. “The winners not only exemplify what makes excellent animation today, but also provide a glimpse into the great things we have awaiting us in the future.”

via CGSociety – SIGGRAPH 2009 Diary.

Graphics animation, siggraph

ATI has announced two new products at SIGGRAPH this morning.  The first is a new video card, the v8750 (shown above).  Using 55nm process technology, it comes with 2GB memory onboard and 800 shader units.  It supports stereo 3D outputs, connectors for displayport (2), Dual Link DVI, and HD component, runs at 2560×1600, and uses a max power of 154W.

But that’s not all, grab a few of these and toss them in a machine with the new S400 system and you can get full framelock and genlock support.  The S400 is an internal card that requires a PCI or PCI-Express slot (for mechanical reasons only), and draws power from the V8700/V8750.  It can synchronize 4 cards within the system, and supports an external sync pulse so that you can synchronize it with another PC for even larger displays.  Unfortunately, it does not support CrossFire, but will with a future software update.

Pretty impressive stuff! Check back with VizWorld later tonight for video of the system running in ATI’s booth.

Press release on V8750, and Press Release on S400 .

Hardware amd, ati, siggraph