NVIDIA Quadro powers all five Academy Award nominees for Best Visual Effects

This year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expanded the Best Visual Effects category to five nominated films, and it was another clean sweep for films that relied on NVIDIA technology—all Oscar nominees in this category were created by studios using NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions. 

Double Negative (DNeg) created visual effects for several of this year’s nominated films including “Inception,” “Iron Man 2,” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.” Central to DNeg’s effects workflow is their proprietary fluid simulation system, known as “Squirt,” a component of which was recently rewritten to leverage the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture and Quadro graphics processing units (GPUs). 

“Iron Man 2” features spectacular visual effects work, much of which was delivered by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). “Working with NVIDIA Quadro, we’re able to work faster and iterate more frequently, which hugely benefits our artists, and ultimately the quality of our project work on films like “Iron Man 2,” notes Ben Snow, ILM visual effects supervisor. ILM works closely with NVIDIA on GPU development to accelerate both effects creation and rendering pipelines. 

Scanline VFX utilized its proprietary simulation software, called “Flowline,” to create natural phenomena, such as the spectacular tsunami recreation in “Hereafter.”  Scanline is now writing its next generation of “Flowline” as a CUDA-based, GPU-optimized application.  

Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI) completed the majority of the visual effects work on “Alice in Wonderland,” creating 1,700 shots in total. Effects accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs include the mist and lightning emitted by Jabberwocky the dragon, the appearing and disappearing effects of the Cheshire Cat, and the dust and destruction caused by the hot-tempered Bandersnatch. 

The winner will be announced at the 83^rd annual Academy Award ceremony on Sunday, February 27, 2011. 

For more information about NVIDIA Quadro Professional Graphics Solutions, please visit: www.nvidia.com/quadro. 

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