The rendering software behind such hit animated movies as The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Monsters Inc. should become even more powerful when it becomes available on Microsoft's most advanced operating systems later this year.

At the Siggraph 2008 computer graphics conference in Los Angeles this week, Pixar Animation Studios said that a new RenderMan Pro Server 14.0 release will be the first version of the software that runs on Windows HPC Server 2008, the upcoming new release of Microsoft's OS for high-performance computing clusters and supercomputers. RenderMan 14.0 will also support the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, according to Pixar's announcement.

Pixar, which now is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Co, was founded and long run by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. But previous versions of the 20-year-old RenderMan software have long run on Windows, going back at least to Windows NT and Windows 2000. The software also runs on Mac OS X and Linux.

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