Gelato (from

Italian language Italian (''italiano'' or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 m ...

: "Frozen", or "Icecream") is a hardware-accelerated, offline renderer created by

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

manufacturer

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

. It was originally intended for use with its Quadro FX

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

, although a Quadro class GPU is no longer a requirement, as it now also supports

GeForce GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia. As of the GeForce 40 series, there have been eighteen iterations of the design. The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for add-on graphics boards, inten ...

cards. Designed to produce

film A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...

-quality images, Gelato uses a

shading language A shading language is a graphics programming language adapted to programming shader effects (characterizing surfaces, volumes, and objects). Such language forms usually consist of special data types, like "vector", "matrix", "color" and "normal". ...

very similar to RenderMan's. Gelato was first released in April 2004. NVIDIA stated in May 2008 that it will no longer be developing or supporting the Gelato software products . With the release of Gelato 2.0, and in a push to popularize GPU accelerated rendering (as opposed to the traditional CPU rendering), Nvidia released a free version of Gelato for

PCs A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or techn ...

. Some of the more advanced features on this version were locked out, such as those used for production rendering. This was done to encourage more professional users to purchase the full product. However, on 23 May 2008, Nvidia released Gelato Pro as a free download without any additional license. It does not come with support from Nvidia, but there are user forums.

History

The original renderer was priced at several thousand

United States dollar The United States dollar ( symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the officia ...

s (USD) per node. In order to boost the adoption of the product by a wider user base, in late 2006, Nvidia decided to split the product up into two versions, a free version called Gelato and a professional version called Gelato Pro, which sold for US$1,500 per render node. Gelato Pro is now also offered as a free download. The professional version includes the following extra features. *Nvidia Sorbetto interactive relighting technology *DSO shadeops *Network

parallel rendering Parallel rendering (or distributed rendering) is the application of parallel programming to the computational domain of computer graphics. Rendering graphics can require massive computational resources for complex scenes that arise in scientific vi ...

*Multithreading *Native 64-bit support *Maintenance and support The whole 'Gelato Zone', including Gelato Pro 2.2, was removed from Nvidia's website around the end of July 2008, in favour of the new

CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ca ...

-based

OptiX Nvidia OptiX (OptiX Application Acceleration Engine) is a ray tracing API that was first developed around 2009. The computations are offloaded to the GPUs through either the low-level or the high-level API introduced with CUDA. CUDA is only avai ...

ray tracing engine.

Notes and references

External links

Official website

Nvidia Gelato Blog
3D rendering software for Linux Freeware 3D graphics software Nvidia software Proprietary freeware for Linux {{compu-graphics-stub

History

See also

Notes and references

External links