HOLLYWOOD — Inception, which took home the Oscar for “Best Visual Effects,” features VFX created by Double Negative  ( www.dneg.com). The studio relied on its proprietary fluid simulation system — Squirt — while working on the film. A component of Squirt was rewritten to leverage the Nvidia CUDA parallel computing architecture and Quadro graphics processing units (GPUs).
 
“Moving our fluid solver onto the GPU allows our artists to get back the results of their simulations much faster,” explains Dan Bailey, lead GPU developer doe Double Negative. “Fluid simulations are now sent to a specialized GPU farm, giving artists more time to iterate and ramp up the complexity of a shot to achieve a more believable result for the big screen.”

Inception also took home Oscars for “Best Cinematography,” “Best Sound Mixing,” and “Best Sound Editing.”