Professional graphics solutions from Nvidia, a global leader in computer graphics, were used in all five films nominated for best visual effects for this year’s Academy Awards.

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,” said 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 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 83rd annual Academy Award ceremony on February 27. – TradeArabia News Service