SIGGRAPH — LOS ANGELES, CA — AUGUST 9, 2004 — NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) today expanded its support for the digital production tools developer community by announcing the NVIDIA® Gelatoä Developer Program. When joining the Gelato Developer Programme, developers and artists get:

· Free Gelato licence;
· Royalty-free access to all application programming interfaces (APIs) for NVIDIA’s final-frame software renderer;

· Discounted prices on NVIDIA Quadro® FX professional graphics solutions;
· Participation in beta programmes for advance insight into new features;
· Access to and assistance from the Gelato development team;
· Marketing support from NVIDIA;
· Developer community tools, such as e-mail lists, discussion forums, and NVIDIA extranet access.

“Our goal is to foster a community of developers that shares our desire to drive innovation in digital production pipelines,” said Beth Loughney, general manager of the Digital Film Group at NVIDIA. “We believe everyone wins when NVIDIA encourages and supports the development of plug-ins and utilities that extend Gelato’s capabilities. Developers gain a market opportunity, and users have more production tools at their disposal. Last, but not least, a broader range of production pipelines can take advantage of Gelato.”

Gelato was designed to be easily extended with a plug-in style architecture and royalty-free licensing policy. The renderer can take advantage of multiple input and output formats, and interface with any tool or utility used in production pipelines. The licensing policy allows developers to use the API and the shading language, and create tools and products that call on the Gelato API, all without cost. Tools created under the Gelato Developer Program may be for internal use or for commercial sale.

Loughney continued, “We made this programme official because we had been working closely with a number of developers interested in creating plug-ins and conversion tools, who have since released some excellent solutions for film production.”

Available today, for example, are a RIB-to-Gelato plug-in and a Renderman shader converter. These utilities may be downloaded from third-party Web sites. Links to them are also listed at http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/gelato_uk.html. In addition, a new Gelato-compatible plug-in for Discreet 3ds max® has been developed by one of North America’s most creative and talented studios, Frantic Films.

“Gelato’s flexible shader networks and the strength of its API provided the inspiration to develop Amaretto, our new 3ds max plug-in for Gelato,” said Chris Bond, president of Frantic Films. “We’re used to taking on tough projects. But developing for Gelato was not one of them. NVIDIA was extremely supportive and the extensibility of Gelato is remarkable.”

For more information on the Gelato Developer Program and its membership criteria, please go to http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/gelato_uk.html.

About Gelato
A winner of the coveted Millimeter magazine “NAB Pick Hit 2004” award for innovation and importance to the motion picture, television production, and post-production industries, Gelato is a photorealistic, final-frame software renderer that is accelerated by industry-standard NVIDIA Quadro FX professional graphics hardware. Gelato is armed with the full feature set required by digital production professionals, including scanline and raytraced rendering, global illumination, ambient occlusion, multi-threading, network rendering, and support for the full range of geometric primitives for film-quality images. Using an innovative shading language, Gelato is also built to scale in performance with improvements in the entire system.

Gelato is now available for Red Hat Linux 7.2, 7.3, 9.0, and SUSE. A version for Microsoft® Windows® XP and a Maya® plugin for exporting to Gelato for both Windows XP and Linux are expected to ship later this month.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation is a market leader in visual computing technology dedicated to creating products that enhance the interactive experience on consumer and professional computing platforms. Its graphics and communications processors have broad market reach and are incorporated into a wide variety of computing platforms, including consumer PCs, enterprise PCs, notebook PCs, professional workstations, handhelds, and video game consoles. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and employs more than 1,900 people worldwide. For more information, visit the Company’s Web site at http://www.nvidia.co.uk.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to the features and benefits available to program members, NVIDIA’s role in the innovation of digital production pipelines, product release and shipment dates, and the result of NVIDIA’s support of plug-ins and utilities that extend Gelato’s capabilities are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the development community not adopting Gelato Developer programs, manufacturing and other delays relating to NVIDIA Gelato products, the continuing emergence of the digital film industry, difficulties in the fabrication process and dependence of the Company on third-party manufacturers, general industry trends, the impact of competitive products and pricing alternatives, market acceptance of NVIDIA’s new products, and the Company's dependence on third-party developers and publishers and other risks detailed and from time to time in NVIDIA’s reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended April 25, 2004 and other filings made from time to time with the SEC. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof. NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.