wow!!!
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_31053.html
NVIDIA Expands Suite of High-Quality Rendering Software and Releases Free Version of Gelato Renderer
Gelato is now free

yay, free ice cream!!!!

Wow Icecream where? I want some.

This stuff is really promising.

I always felt since the early days of 3D graphic chips that they should have been designed to help with the rendering process cause I though that if they were it would have accelerated it a lot. Rendering has always been something that seemed to beg for dedicated hardware chips to help with the task.

Nowadays that is starting to become a reality and the first experiments and things done with this show that I was right about it and it's very exciting because the rendering acceleration obtained with things like this and Open Cl and the like shows to be very substantial.

I mean, we are not talking of just a little bit of acceleration here, we are talking about a whole lot and in rendering that is exactly what we need. Take a look at how people are starting to experiment with this GPU acceleration stuff in things like unbiased rendering which is typically very time consuming and now is starting to go very fast.

It's also interesting to see also talk of software programs that take advantage of both the available CPU and GPU power on a PC combined to render even faster.

And think about something like Bunkspeed's Hypershot which is already a next generation rendering system that is very fast and now it can use CUDA and by using precisely both CPU and GPU computing power it goes even faster than it already did.

Terrific stuff. I wonder if in a few more years or perhaps in a decade or two we will get to see the day when waiting for a scene to render has become a thing of the past. I hope so.

From what i know in some big production houses they already use GPUs to make rendering faster.
So this technology indeed has a future.
_________________
Andyba, 3d artist
skills: 3d modeling, texturing, rendering, 3d character animation, compositing
3d software experience: 3ds max, Maya, Softimage XSI, Deep Paint 3d, Body Paint 3D, Wings 3D, Z Brush
2d software experience: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After effects, Macromedia Flash, Freehand

You are right about that. I heard of it too. I read about some 3D production companies starting to use that to accelerate animation enormously. I read about a company that was using some sort of near real-time rendering methods to obtain quality that was much better than with real-time graphics and the results that I saw were comparable to pre-rendered graphics in many ways.

They talk about huge time savings and also about big hardware savings due to the fact that they don't need very large rendering farms anymore for what they do.

thanks for your sharing.
wow, i will join this.

Well... after some searching on the internet I have found that Gelato is now dead.
It was canceled by Nvidia, and all of the pages about gelato including the gelato download page were removed from the nvidia website. Why it happened, I have no Idea.
Now nvidia offers "optiX" instead of Gelato. It's a ray tracing engine that can use the GPU, but it's not directly connectible to the major 3d applications.
At least I tried to find out how to do it and stumbled on some hard core programming talk that was above me.
_________________
Andyba, 3d artist
skills: 3d modeling, texturing, rendering, 3d character animation, compositing
3d software experience: 3ds max, Maya, Softimage XSI, Deep Paint 3d, Body Paint 3D, Wings 3D, Z Brush
2d software experience: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After effects, Macromedia Flash, Freehand