The Official NVIDIA Blog

We’re wrapping up our coverage from SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles, where we’ve had an incredible time showing off some amazing demos of our new Quadro professional graphics solutions. But our wrap-up wouldn’t be complete without a look at some new capabilities that our Fermi-based Quadro line brings to the tools and application engines for developers.

Redesigning the GPU with the Fermi architecture has brought incredible performance increases to a wide range of applications, right out of the box. With our NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine, we’re seeing up to 4x performance boosts, depending on the ray tracing technique used to create photorealistic images. So designers and engineers benefit, as well as those who want ray tracing without rendering – for uses such as collision detection and acoustical analysis.

By the way, NVIDIA had a technical paper titled “OptiX: A General Purpose Ray Tracing Engine” which was accepted this year at SIGGRAPH. It's a big honor, so we wanted to give kudos to the OptiX team.

Monday at midnight, Blizzard held a number of world-wide launch events for the debut of StarCraft II, the highly anticipated sequel to my favorite game of all time. We were on-site at the official North American launch at Fry’s in Fountain Valley, California – and along with a couple thousand eager StarCraft fans, had an awesome time while we counted down the minutes until midnight when the game went on sale.

The night started at 9PM with performances by White Boy James & The Blues Express, followed by Big Tuna (a band made up of Blizzard employees), and continued with head to head exhibition matches, developer Q&A, contests, never before seen cinematics and a countdown to midnight that got so loud that my ears are still ringing.

SIGGRAPH has always been a major source of incredible visual displays. This year, we're building on that tradition as we unveil the first 100% digital booth at SIGGRAPH. We’re driving multiple, ultra high-resolution wall displays -- all running with NVIDIA Quadro Scalable Visualization Solutions (SVS) utilizing our Quadro Plex systems. Powered by Barco seamless displays and HP workstations, we’ve got some pretty incredible viz walls: 1x6 array of 46” panels, a 2x4 array of 50” rear projection cubes, and an amazine 2x2 array of 70” cubes.

As part of our announcement of the new Quadro solutions, based on the innovative Fermi architecture, the Quadro Plex 7000 is adding more graphics memory and application performance to SVS – something that will benefit anyone who needs a flexible, high-performance solution for large scale visualization.

With the July release of the monthly Verde drivers, NVIDIA has released a new Optimus user interface which provides even more visibility into how Optimus is working and allows you even more control over how Optimus operates. The video below highlights the new customization settings and options made available to you within the latest NVIDIA Control Panel and shows Optimus in action. NVIDIA’s Optimus technology allows users to experience the full performance benefits of a discrete GPU with the battery life of an integrated graphics solution. By default, Optimus is configured to be as transparent to the end user as possible and handles all actions automatically. However, NVIDIA has also engineered Optimus to be fully customizable to suit your specific preferences.

At SIGGRAPH, we’re showing off advancements in professional stereoscopic 3D technology with new Fermi-based Quadro solutions and the newly announced NVIDIA 3D Vision Pro. 

You may already be familiar with our consumer 3D Vision technology, great for gaming or viewing 3D content on your PC – usually by a single user. These active-shutter glasses use infrared technology to connect with your 3D Vision-ready system – similar to how a TV remote control interacts with your TV.

It’s the first day of the 2010 SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, and we’re excited to be surrounded by the new NVIDIA Quadro 4000, Quadro 5000 and Quadro 6000 professional graphics solutions just announced today, plus our new Quadro Plex 7000 and NVIDIA 3D Vision Pro stereoscopic 3D solution. If you’re at the show this week, you’ve got to come by our booth, #717, and check out the demos, and see great solutions from Dell, HP and Barco. You’ll see why we’re calling the new Quadro line, based on the Fermi architecture, the perfect platform  for ‘computational visualization’ — the combination of advanced visualization with computational simulation.

The newest Quadro solutions are by far the biggest single advancement in the professional graphics arena. With the Fermi architecture, we completely redesigned the GPU, and are seeing results that are exponentially better. Here are some of the highlights:

We’re happy to announce that the session catalog and schedule for the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is now live. GTC 2010 is taking place from Monday, Sept. 20 to Thursday, Sept. 23, at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California.This year’s show features over 240 sessions of technical content targeted for researchers, developers, and technologists. Snapshot of our GTC War Room, home to the conference schedule

You can check out the entire agenda by day or by session, and here are a few highlights:

One of the toughest challenges for startups is getting the right advice and investment to grow their business. The good news is that CEOs will have an opportunity to meet with hundreds of technologists, investors, analysts and executives at the GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley this fall.

The GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is the premier event to learn what companies are doing to solve visual and high-performance computing challenges. The Emerging Companies Track of GTC allows start-ups to showcase their GPU-enabled technologies to industry heavy-hitters like Adobe, Google, HP, Microsoft, and Qualcomm as well as major investors like Barclays Capital, CITI Group, Sutter Hill, and UBS.

This year we’re debuting a new session called “CEO on Stage.” A select group of CEOs will be chosen to introduce their company in front of a panel of analysts, investors and technology leaders in a spirited 15 minute session. The audience will include technology executives and members from the venture capital community. The deadline to submit your application is Aug. 1.

I had the pleasure of attending the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference in Aspen this week, both as a presenter and participant. When I wasn’t presenting in the ‘start up idol’ portion of the agenda I had some time to attend a few sessions, and learn from some of the strongest leaders in corporate America.

One session I enjoyed was the "Taking on the goliaths: Competition in a Digital Age" panel, featuring Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, Kevin Johnson, CEO, Juniper Networks, and John Lilly, CEO, Mozilla. From the get-go I was intrigued with this panel because it was reminiscent of the situation my company, Badgeville, finds itself in.

Periodically, we’re using this blog to profile some of the companies that participated in NVIDIA’s Emerging Companies Summit (ECS 2009). ECS 2010 will take place Sept. 20 - 23 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California, during the GPU Technology Conference.

Augmented Reality (AR) technology might soon be hitting a store near you, thanks to some innovative work by metaio, which uses NVIDIA technology to create information overlays that you can see when you look at an object – such as a shoe or car or toy – with a computer or smart phone screen. One of their latest projects is a very cool kiosk for Lego, the Danish toy manufacturer that helps consumers see 3D animations of finished Lego sets, simply by holding up a product box to the kiosk screen. (Check out the video below to see how it works.)