Videogames and movies are practically kissing cousins these days. Many games look like movies, and the two are relentlessly marketed the same way, and often together.

Soon the two could be getting even closer.

Nvidia, the company known for giving gamers great graphics, wants to become a player in Hollywood with its Nvidia Digital Film Group.

Tonight on "Tech Live" we take you behind the scenes of the Silicon Valley-based company. We show you what the group has already done and how the folks behind it hope to one day help create eye-popping movie and game effects.

Busting time, boosting budgets

One of the more memorable effects in "Pirates of the Caribbean" is when the pirates turn into ghosts. But few of us have any idea of just how awesome a task that is to pull off.

Nvidia helped make it happen by lending its hardware to the effort. It has done the same for other films, including "Stars Wars Episode II" and "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World."

It's an agonizing process that takes time, patience, and technical know-how.

"I've heard anecdotal instances of final renders that took 40 hours -- four-zero. Four times 10 hours for one frame," general manager Beth Loughney says. "At 24 frames a second you're talking about a very long process."

To speed things up, Nvidia, known for its computer graphics hardware in the videogame industry, now has some new software for Hollywood moviemakers.

It's a solution to a problem that became obvious to the company. "We found that everybody had our hardware already," Loughney says. "But what they were doing was, they were playing videogames while they were waiting for their renders."

Filmmakers slobber for Gelato

Now those visual-effects experts will only have to wait about half as long, thanks to Gelato. No, not the Italian ice cream. It's the name of Nvidia's new 3-D digital film-rendering software.

Larry Gritz is Gelato's chief architect and a senior software engineer for Nvidia. "Time is money," he says. "And that has a direct impact on the budgets."

He adds that for filmmakers, being able to do more in a fixed amount of time makes for better, more realistic graphics effects.

"This is the first product of any kind that is using the new programmable graphics hardware for something other than interactive, real-time graphics as you would find in games," Gritz says. "We're using [Gelato] to solve computational problems. In this case the computational problem we're solving is computing the high-resolution and really high-quality, high-complexity images you would see on film for special effects and animation."

Computational problems in movies? Who knew?

Loughney says that the images coming out of Gelato can be as photorealistic as the director wants them to be, and it can all be done faster.

"We're not giving them enough gameplay time, 'cause they can get their work done faster," Loughney says with a smile.

Greedy gamers want the goods

That's bad news, sort of, for the visual-effects guys and gals who like to game while they render. But it's good news for you, the movie fan. And as Gritz explains, it's also a bonus for gamers.

"Whatever we're doing in film today, that's what we want to be doing in real time in games a couple of years from now," he says. "We want to be ahead of the curve when that comes. We're working on things for the films, but aspects of that technology are going to trickle down to the videogames. People want the games to look more visually rich, be more like the moviegoing experience. People in both those industries have been waiting for years for some kind of convergence, and we're starting to take steps in that direction."

Loughney adds that the film industry is the driving force behind what we expect in other visual-entertainment areas, such as videogames. So it's only natural, then, that the innovations developed with new technologies such as Gelato will cascade through the rest of the consumer space, eventually reaching games and the handheld devices they're played on.

And once again, that's great news for gamers.