NVIDIA brings about Armageddon
There's nothing NVIDIA likes more, apparently, than a good disaster; at least when it comes to action films, which is why the firm says it was really excited to work on Armageddon flick 2012, which has already raked in over $600 million at the box office as people flock to watch earth's impending doom.
Director Roland Emmerich , also responsible for the likes of such cheery films as "Independence Day," and "Day After Tomorrow" apparently decided to use NVIDIA's Quadro GPUs for the film's visual effects, which include a rather spectacular destruction of the White House.
Working on the film too were computer graphics shops Scanline VFX and Uncharted Territory, with Scanline - experts in the simulation of water and fire - crafting most of the 100 + Tsunami like water scenes, whilst Uncharted Territory took the brunt of the earthquake sequence and the annihilation of Las Vegas. Unsurprisingly, NVIDIA boasts its Quadros were used for those too.
So compute intensive was the film that Scanline is said to have generated 1.2 petabytes of simulation data for its scenes alone, spread across 125 NVIDIA outfitted workstations running Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max software applications.
NVIDIA is also crowing that Uncharted Territory completed 422 of its 1315 visual effects using over 100 Quadro powered workstations, custom built for 2012. Marc Weigert, co-founder of Uncharted Territory said in a statement that Quadro was chosen due to its "high reliability and ultra-high performance."
Also, because the graphics gurus were set up right next to the production offices, director Roland Emmerich purportedly took time every day to review the daily screenings of shots-in-progress using NVIDIA's Quadro SDI (serial digital interface) video output.
NVIDIA reckons Quadro's faster rendering means film producers can come up with their hyped up death and destruction films that much faster, and Scanline VFX's president, Stephan Trojansky, agrees.
"We plan to replace nodes in our render farm with NVIDIA Tesla GPU computing servers," he said adding that "based on our early tests, we expect this will speed up our production timeline by at least ten fold."
