The secret weapon of ILM’s wizards effects: NVIDIA GPUs, especially the Quadro line. ILM developed several tools that take adavantage of Quadro GPUs and the last one is Plume, a tool used to simulate the movements of fluids. Computing routines of Plume are coded in CUDA. Plume allows ILM’s artists to work almost in real time instead to wait for a day to see the results. Plume is now used on every film currently in the works at ILM.
Plume runs on 12 Quadroplex 2200. Each Quadroplex 2200 features 960 CUDA cores (four Quadro FX 5800 per Quadroplex 2200) for a total of 12*960 = 11520 CUDA cores.
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Here they are guys. The people that make us hate our computer games! 😀
So when we reach 2048 CUDA cores on our graphics cards (that would be at 18nm hopefully) then we could be somewhat 1/5 of the way of graphics like these!
I can play Crysis 2 with this?^^
hahahahahahahahaha
Nearly 11 grand for each of these (1200W running power each) and they needed 12 of these networked to render in real-time – does this mean an increase in image quality too?
Another use for these – apart from gaming – would be Folding@Home. I’m sure ILM could spare one these beasts for a good cause. 🙂
this is ridiculous!