[Dave Baumann]

NVIDIA(R) Sorbetto(TM) Brings a Fully Interactive Lighting Tool to the Film Industry
Gelato(TM) 2.0 Rendering Software With Sorbetto Lighting Technology Allows Artists to Create High-Quality Imagery in a Fraction of the Time

SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 28 - NVIDIA Corporation, a worldwide leader in graphics and digital media processors, today announced three new additions to the Company's suite of professional software products for the film industry.

• Gelato 2.0 rendering software, the latest major release of this product for film studios
• Amaretto, an Autodesk 3ds Max rendering plug-in for Gelato developed by Frantic Films
• Sorbetto lighting technology, an interactive tool that significantly accelerates the creation of realistic lighting

"We are seeing orders of magnitude speedup in relighting with Sorbetto compared to the alternative of launching full renders for each iterative change," said Larry Gritz, chief architect of the NVIDIA Gelato renderer. "This translates to final render quality imagery in several seconds rather than several minutes, at full film quality, complete with antialiasing, motion blur, and all the usual rendering effects. This is unprecedented in the film industry."

Along with these new products, NVIDIA is introducing a new pricing structure designed to make these tools more accessible to both large and small studios. Gelato with a choice of the Mango plug-in for Alias Maya or Amaretto plug-in for 3ds Max is now priced at only $1500, which includes the first year of maintenance and support. When using these plug-ins, users have access to all the features found in Gelato. Amaretto is currently in beta testing with availability planned for this fall.

"NVIDIA has done a great job of understanding the needs of film studios," said Mark Wiebe, director of research and development at Frantic Films. "Sorbetto is a perfect example of a powerful tool which can truly revolutionize the way lighting is done. By speeding up the lighting process, thus accelerating the creative process, these new products will help change the way studios like ours make movies."

NVIDIA will be demonstrating Gelato 2.0 and Sorbetto at SIGGRAPH 2005 (Booth #1714) as part of a digital production pipeline that provides a snapshot of how NVIDIA professional products help address the various workflow issues that customers have to deal with.

About the products
Gelato 2.0 brings performance improvements and major new features including volumetric shadows for hair and smoke, simultaneous rendering of stereo images, shader metadata, physical units in shaders, and API support for 3rd parties to write lighting tools based on Sorbetto.

Sorbetto lighting technology allows you to add, delete, or move lights (including recomputation of shadows), or modify any light parameter, and see the changes interactively. At all times you are viewing final pixels, including full antialiasing, motion blur, and transparency. This saves artists time and allows them to adjust lighting in a scene to get the exact look they are trying to create. For Maya users, Sorbetto features are exposed directly in our Mango plugin for Maya. For developers, all relighting features are exposed through extensions to the Gelato APIs.

Amaretto allows 3ds Max users to select Gelato to render existing scenes, and access Gelato's extensive feature set including fast sub-pixel displacement, analytical sub-division surfaces and shader programming language to enhance the quality of their artistic output.

NVIDIA digital film products are available from authorized resellers by region, and evaluation copies of the software are available. For more information, please visit http://film.nvidia.com.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation is a worldwide leader in graphics and digital media processors. The Company's products enhance the end-user experience on consumer and professional computing devices. NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), media and communications processors (MCPs), and wireless media processors (WMPs) have broad market reach and are incorporated into a variety of platforms, including consumer and enterprise PCs, notebooks, workstations, PDAs, mobile phones, and video game consoles. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and employs more than 2100 people worldwide. For more information, visit the Company's Web site at www.nvidia.com.