Gelato (software)
| Gelato | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer | Nvidia |
| Release | April 19, 2004 |
| Final release | 2.2 Release 1
/ May 2008 |
| Operating system | Windows, Linux |
| Predecessor | Blue Moon Rendering Tools, Exluna Entropy |
| Successor | mental ray |
| Type | 3D computer graphics |
| License | Proprietary, freeware |
| Website | Nvidia Gelato Zone at the Wayback Machine (archived 2008-05-01) |
Gelato is a discontinued CPU/GPU-accelerated offline rendering software product first released in April 2004 by Nvidia, at the time known mainly as a graphics card manufacturer. Designed to produce film-quality images, Gelato uses a shading language very similar to the RenderMan Interface Specification (RISpec). Gelato originally supported Quadro FX GPUs, later adding support for GeForce cards.
It was initially priced at several thousand US dollars (USD) per node. In 2006, Nvidia added a free limited-functionality version. In May 2008 Nvidia announced that it would no longer be developing or supporting Gelato software, releasing a last full-featured version as a free download.
Gelato is notable for being one of the first software applications to use GPU hardware as a compute resource (as opposed to realtime display rendering). It marked the culmination of the BMRT family of RISpec systems, ultimately becoming a freely-available, feature rich rendering package. At the same time, it was a key step in supporting Nvidia's goal to become a leading provider of high-performance compute hardware, and an early move toward providing 3rd-party developers with a standardized API for developing software to use this technology via its CUDA platform.