Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within rendered in real time on Nvidia GPUS. News

The graphics industry took a quantum leap forward today at SIGGRAPH 2001 when NVIDIA® Corporation rendered Columbia Pictures’ computer-generated (CG) animated motion picture, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, in real-time. <br /> <br /> This groundbreaking demonstration takes place in the NVIDIA booth (no 1701) and Square booth (no 1927) using NVIDIA’s Quadro™ workstation graphics technology, the industry’s leading workstation 3D solutions. Square USA Inc. research and development division developed the software for the technology demo. The real-time demonstration was made possible by NVIDIA’s nfiniteFX™ shading technology, including vertex and pixel shaders, to overcome the technical challenges presented in creating realistic skin, hair, clothing and other organic attributes. <br /> <br /> “This interactive demonstration of Final Fantasy is a major achievement for the 3D industry. The realism and subtleties of the images demonstrate the power of the programmable GPU that NVIDIA pioneered,” stated Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. “We’ve taken a giant step in visual computing. The work done by Square and NVIDIA is a glimpse of the future of video games and other interactive story telling experiences. We had a great time working with the talented team at Square. Their artist vision is inspiring.” <br /> <br /> The Quadro-based workstation renders a single frame in four-tenths of a second, allowing for an interactive, real-time CG scene. For comparison, a single frame from the original movie took over 90 minutes to render. NVIDIA’s GPU enables over 100,000 speed-up over software renderers running on a farm of the fastest supercomputers. <br /> <br /> “It has long been an artist’s dream to render CG animation in real-time,” stated Kazuyuki Hashimoto, CTO at Square USA. “This technology demonstration represents the future direction of digital 3D entertainment, simulating human emotions, movements and characteristics through the use of computer-generated graphics.”