Turing, NVIDIA’s newly launched GPU architecture, was unveiled by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the annual SIGGRAPH conference in the US. It brings together dedicated hardware acceleration of four core elements: artificial intelligence (AI), ray tracing, programmable shading and simulation.
NVIDIA also announced an expansion of its RTX development platform to allow developers to easily incorporate these functions in their applications. This reinvention of how a GPU processes information means that some things like real-time ray tracing that were thought to be five or more years away are now possible with a standard workstation when equipped with a Turing-class GPU, like those in the new Quadro RTX family.
Designers can now iterate their product model or building and see accurate lighting, shadows and reflections in real time. Previously, they would have to use a low-fidelity approximation to get their design more or less right, then ship files out to a CPU farm to be rendered and get the results back in minutes or even hours, depending on complexity. Only then could they determine what it was truly going to look like in the real world. Now, all this can be done interactively on a Quadro RTX-powered desktop. For artists in the entertainment world, the same is true for visualising animation or visual effects.
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| Source: NVIDIA. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, unveils the Turing GPU. |
NVIDIA also announced an expansion of its RTX development platform to allow developers to easily incorporate these functions in their applications. This reinvention of how a GPU processes information means that some things like real-time ray tracing that were thought to be five or more years away are now possible with a standard workstation when equipped with a Turing-class GPU, like those in the new Quadro RTX family.
Designers can now iterate their product model or building and see accurate lighting, shadows and reflections in real time. Previously, they would have to use a low-fidelity approximation to get their design more or less right, then ship files out to a CPU farm to be rendered and get the results back in minutes or even hours, depending on complexity. Only then could they determine what it was truly going to look like in the real world. Now, all this can be done interactively on a Quadro RTX-powered desktop. For artists in the entertainment world, the same is true for visualising animation or visual effects.
NGX, new NVIDIA technology for bringing AI into the graphics pipeline, is part of the RTX platform. NGX technology brings capabilities such as taking a standard camera feed and creating super slow motion, what was previously possible only from a US$100,000+ specialised camera. NGX also enables increased resolution and clarity of archived images through AI, and removing wires from a photograph and automatically replacing the missing pixels with the right background. The company is providing a software development kit (SDK) that makes it easy for developers to incorporate these AI-powered effects into their apps.
The new technologies are capable of:
Advanced rendering for games and film
Application developers have been jumping at the chance to bring to their customers these new capabilities and up to 30x speed increases for rendering:
Photorealistic, interactive rendering
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| Source: NVIDIA blog. This concept Porsche Roadster 911 is created in Epic Games' Unreal Engine. |
This trailer of a Porsche prototype created to celebrate Porsche's 70th birthday is built in Unreal Engine, with the Microsoft DXR API used to access the NVIDIA RTX development platform. It runs two Quadro RTX GPUs. DXR is ray tracing technology for Microsoft's DirectX, the core Windows technology that drives high-speed multimedia and games on the PC.
Real-time ray tracing on a single GPU
This Star Wars-themed demo runs on a US$70,000 DGX Station powered by four Volta GPUs. The same interactive, real-time ray tracing using Unreal Engine is now possible running on the NVIDIA RTX platform on a single Turing Quadro GPU.
Advanced rendering for games and film
Also built on Unreal, this demo shows how real-time ray tracing can bring complex, action-packed scenes to life. Powered by a single Quadro RTX 6000, it shows real-time ray-traced effects effects such as global illumination, shadows, ambient occlusion and reflections.
Advanced rendering for games and film
An interaction between a man and his robotic assistants is powered by the Quadro RTX 6000, showcasing production-quality rendering and cinematic frame rates.
Application developers have been jumping at the chance to bring to their customers these new capabilities and up to 30x speed increases for rendering:
Adobe Dimension CC: Intuitive new 3D creative tool built for all aspects of design and marketing is supporting NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL).
“Turing is a technological leap forward that will help Adobe shape the future of creative design. The powerful new ray-tracing features of NVIDIA RTX will make 3D more accessible to designers and marketers through intuitive tools like Dimension CC. We look forward to leveraging the enhanced AI capabilities of RTX as we extend our Sensei machine learning capabilities to democratise 2D/3D compositing,” said Ross McKegney, Director of Engineering, Adobe Dimension CC.
Allegorithmic Project Alchemist: New Substance tool integrating AI-powered features with over 100x speedup when running on NVIDIA Turing GPUs compared with CPUs.
Allegorithmic Substance Designer: Worldwide reference material editor, integrating RTX through DXR for light baking. Light baking pre-integrates lighting information for an object so that there are no runtime overheads later on. This means however that the object cannot be reused with other lighting situations. RTX gives a speed increase of 800% compared with previous CPU-based technology.
“RTX technology tightly integrates ray tracing into the real-time graphics pipeline. It enables new rendering techniques that will greatly improve the quality of real-time graphics, and the performance of graphical tools overall. In the case of substance ray-traced bakers, we can observe an increase in speed of around 800% when compared with CPU-based ray tracing,” said Cyrille Damez, CTO, Allegorithmic.
Altair Thea Render: New SketchUp and Cinema 4D plugins, along with the upcoming Rhino plugin release, will help a broad range of markets get a ray-tracing performance boost by one order of magnitude using NVIDIA OptiX denoiser technology.
“Altair Thea Render v2.0 integrates NVIDIA OptiX denoiser, dramatically accelerating production of final renders. Users can take advantage of this optimised workflow, creating out-of-the-box, stunning photorealistic images in a fraction of previous render times,” stated Ioannis Pantazopoulos, VP Rendering Technology, Altair.
ANSYS Optis VRXPERIENCE and Speos: Simulation software leveraging NVIDIA OptiX for faster convergence and high frame rate deterministic ray-traced simulation for complex optical systems, with a 30x speedup compared with CPU legacy technology.
Autodesk Arnold: The Arnold GPU, which is currently in beta, is one of the first production renderers to utilise NVIDIA OptiX.
“Autodesk is committed to bringing the highest quality photorealistic rendering to our users and we look forward to a GPU version of the Arnold renderer that could leverage the NVIDIA RTX platform. We are super excited to see the performance gains while maintaining the great look our Arnold customers love,” said Chris Vienneau, Senior Director of Media & Entertainment Products, Autodesk.
Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve: The popular colour-grading application uses Turing Tensor Cores in Resolve 15 to accelerate AI inferencing for graphics enhancement.
“Our customers are always looking for large performance gains and we are seeing a significant leap with NVIDIA RTX,” said Dan May, President of Americas Operations, Blackmagic.
Blender Cycles: An open source renderer using NVIDIA CUDA to accelerate performance.
Cebas finalRender: A GPU-accelerated ray tracer for Autodesk 3ds Max that uses NVIDIA OptiX AI denoiser for 5x+ acceleration.
Chaos Group: The company has a preview of Project Lavina using Microsoft’s DXR to deliver 3-5x real-time ray-tracing performance over NVIDIA's Volta generation for scenes exported from Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya. The Chaos VRAY GPU uses NVIDIA RT Cores in Quadro RTX for substantial acceleration over the NVIDIA Pascal generation.
“DXR on Turing enables us to explore workflows for real-time visualisation that were not possible before. We estimate that Turing hardware is 3-5x faster than earlier GPU generations for the real-time ray tracing of our Project Lavina,” said Vlado Koylazov, co-founder and CTO, Chaos Group.
Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA: The industry-reference design and engineering solution plans to leverage RTX for rendering with life-like quality materials to accelerate VR rendering for immersive experiences and design validation.
Dassault Systèmes HomebyMe: A web portal for interior design that leverages OptiX denoiser to boost render times by 10x.
Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS Visualize: This visualisation tool for 3D CAD data uses NVIDIA's OptiX denoiser for instant life-like rendering.
EA SEED: Cross-disciplinary team within EA Worldwide Studios whose Project PICA PICA is a real-time ray-tracing experiment featuring a mini-game for self-learning AI agents in a procedurally assembled world. The approaches inspire developers and provide a glimpse of a future where real-time ray tracing powers the creative experiences of tomorrow.
Epic Games’ Unreal Engine: A complete suite of tools for the creation of games, visualisations, interactive product designs, movies, broadcast entertainment and immersive experiences. Unreal Engine is using NVIDIA RTX technology through DXR to achieve industry-leading real-time ray-tracing performance.
“With its Turing architecture, NVIDIA have shattered the photorealism barrier that current-generation rasterising techniques have presented until now. Just as we saw with the movie business over a decade ago, ray tracing is going to revolutionise the realism of real-time applications, cinematic experiences and high-end games. Now, we will see artists and designers using Unreal Engine technology to create, view and interact with content that is indistinguishable from reality,” predicted Kim Libreri, CTO, Epic Games.
ESI Group IC.IDO: An immersive virtual reality (VR) solution for engineering virtual prototyping, using Quadro RTX accelerated NVIDIA OptiX, potentially supporting real-time ray tracing on Turing GPUs.
“Turing has the potential to be a game-changer for our customers’ workflows. Our preliminary tests with an early Turing-based GPU showed frame rates high enough for our engineering customers to realize ray-traced reflections and their effects on proposed product configurations in real time, for example cockpit or cabin visibility.
"This should significantly advance immersive product and procedural evaluation capability in CAVEs or active stereo displays, and eventually maybe even head mounted displays (HMDs). We are actively exploring how innovations like RTX can be integrated into future versions of our solution,” noted Eric Kam, Solution Marketing Manager, ESI’s IC.IDO. A CAVE or cave automatic virtual environment is an immersive space for experiencing virtual reality.
ESRI ArcGIS Pro: The leading geographical information systems (GIS) application is harnessing the power of deep learning for both training and inferencing, leveraging NVIDIA Turing Tensor Cores in an upcoming release of ArcGIS Pro.
“Increasingly, our customers want to take advantage of all the benefits AI brings to their workflows. We are thrilled that NVIDIA is bringing Tensor Cores to Turing GPU architecture, which will provide a more cost-effective solution for inferencing whether on the desktop or from the data centre,” Jim McKinney, CTO, ESRI Desktop Applications, commented.
Isotropix Clarisse: Physically based rendering engine demonstrating OptiX ray-tracing acceleration on the Quadro RTX 6000, showing a 20x viewport performance improvement over CPUs.
“We’re excited about the hardware acceleration in NVIDIA’s Turing generation because it will enable our customers to enjoy rendering acceleration 20x faster than on CPU. It’s just fantastic!” said Sebastien Guichou, CTO and co-founder, Isotropix.
Kitware ParaView: A scientific visualisation tool, ParaView has been enhanced with a completely new rendering backend using NVIDIA RTX technology. It provides enhanced visual cues to better communicate the content of the scientific datasets while maintaining the speed for data exploration.
“Interactive ray-tracing is a game changer for scientific visualisation and NVIDIA RTX offers improved visual cues for communicating scientific content without disrupting the exploratory workflow,” Berk Geveci, Senior Director of Scientific Computing, Kitware said.
Otoy OctaneRender: GPU-accelerated, unbiased, physically correct renderer is demonstrating performance improvements of 5-8x with Octane 2019’s path-tracing kernel — running at 3.2 billion rays/second on the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000, compared with 400 million rays/second on the Quadro P6000.
“NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing hardware is the future – and will define the next decades of GPU rendering," said Jules Urbach, CEO, Otoy.
Pixar Renderman: The film renderer is announcing support for OptiX AI denoiser in R22.1 due later this year.
PocketStudio: A new tool that allows 3D filmmakers to easily create, play and stream 3D animation sequences using real-time collaborative editing. It leverages Vulkan real-time ray tracing for its advanced quality viewport.
Redshift 3.0: The biased GPU renderer is announcing that Redshift 3.0 will use OptiX to access RTX ray-tracing acceleration. Redshift 2.6 is shipping with OptiX denoising.
Remedy Entertainment: The game maker has been researching how to use NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing technology and the DXR API in its Northlight engine.
Siemens NX: The CAD application supports GPU-based rendering with Ray Traced Studio, and is to include AI denoising and MDL support.
Weta Digital: The visual effects house supports OptiX acceleration in their Gazebo virtual production tool, enabling studio artists to see exactly what final-frame production renders will look like, reducing guesswork and allowing convergence to a desired look more quickly.
“Our long-term collaboration with NVIDIA on advanced rendering continues with Turing. The performance improvements change how artists can work with hero assets throughout the pipeline, improving every creative decision along the way. This is not a speed-up, it’s a step up to a new way of working,” said Luca Fascione, Senior Head of Technology and Research, Weta Digital.
“With Viz Virtual Studio, our customers can easily create complex, interactive 3D virtual sets and immersive graphics. Turing will allow them to overcome the challenges of achieving photorealism in a virtual environment. Real-time ray tracing will usher in a new era for how artists and designers create broadcast graphics and beyond,” predicted Gerhard Lang, Chief Engineering Officer, Vizrt.
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