Pixar using Nvidia acceleration for near realtime lighting

Pixar demonstrate Nvidia GPU acceleration

Nvidia have made a presentation from this year's Siggraph available, showing how Pixar is using its OptiX GPU accelerated lighting to speed up previewing of scenes

We have seen how GPU acceleration has been adopted by software companies to leverage the power of the hardware and provide faster rendering. One example is Nvidia's latest version of its OptiX CUDA based rendering system which is being integrated into software from Adobe and others.

At this year's Siggraph conference Jean-Daniel Nahmias, technical director at Pixar, gave a presentation showing how OptiX speeds up its workflow in a pipeline based around Katana from the Foundry.

Using full scenes and assets from Monsters University he demonstrated the difference between how they used to rig the lighting and how it was now possible using OptiX and also how responsive and accurate the previews were compared to previous systems using OpenGL.

Check out the video below: