Gamers and content creators were the focus Monday as NVIDIA kicked off Computex, Asia’s largest annual technology trade show, which runs all week in Taiwan, the heart of the global PC ecosystem.
In a brisk hour, NVIDIA Senior Vice President Jeff Fisher and NVIDIA General Manager Jason Paul detailed a raft of innovations targeting gamers and creative professionals.
“Every child born today will be a gamer, and a creator,” Fisher told an audience of 300 at a standing-room only press event in the sprawling shadow of Taiwan 101, Taipei’s iconic, post-modern, pagoda-shaped skyscraper. “These two markets represent a huge opportunity today and well into the future.”
Separately, NVIDIA also announced NVIDIA EGX, an accelerated computing platform enabling industries such as manufacturing, healthcare and transportation to quickly harness real-time AI at the edge, and all new Quadro RTX mobile GPUs delivering AI, ray tracing and VR to mobile form factors.
The announcements come as the world’s 40 million creators are fueling an explosion of digital media. PC gaming, meanwhile, continues to thrive, even as it becomes increasingly mobile.
100+ Gaming Laptops Coming to Market
Fisher began his talk by detailing how some of the major investments NVIDIA continues to make are paying off.
NVIDIA’s thin-and-light Max-Q design is steadily driving laptop gaming forward. Gaming laptops alone are now a $15 billion market, Fisher explained, up 10x in five years, with more than 100 gaming laptops hitting the market this year.
NVIDIA launched the gaming-monitor market six year ago with G-SYNC. Now on track for more than $3 billion in sales this year, the momentum continues with the world’s first 4K mini-LED display and a 35-inch curved display, as well as new laptops, Fisher said.
Undergirding it all: Turing — NVIDIA’s latest GPU architecture. It boasts as many as 18 billion transistors and unrivaled power efficiency. And it reinvents graphics with Tensor Cores, which bring AI to graphics and real-time ray tracing with RT cores, Fisher explained.
“Gamers get it,” Fisher said, noting that there are now more than 100 developers working on games that feature real-time ray tracing. “Turing is outshipping Pascal, to date we have millions of gamers using RT-accelerated hardware, and this is growing every week.”
Ray Tracing Comes to Wolfenstein, Quake II, Sword and Fairy 7
Innovations like these result in better gaming experiences than ever on games both old and new.
Fisher announced that Wolfenstein: Youngblood, the next installment in the storied Wolfenstein franchise, will support real-time ray tracing and other advanced technologies.
Ray tracing also brings new life to another classic: Quake II. NVIDIA recently built on the work done in the open source community to bring ray tracing to the classic shooter. The result: Quake II RTX.
The game’s completely updated look has been achieved through path tracing. The ray-tracing technique unifies all lighting effects — shadows, reflections, refractions and more — into a single ray-tracing algorithm.
“This is going to be one beautiful game and a lot of fun, not just for legacy gamers but today’s gamers,” Fisher said as he compared the graphics on the original game with the path-traced version remastered by NVIDIA’s Lightspeed Studios.
Fisher announced that, starting June 6, gamers can download Quake II RTX. They’ll get the first three single-player levels free. And if they already own Quake II — as many gamers do — they can experience the game in its entirety.
Fisher also announced that ray tracing will be coming to Sword and Fairy 7, the Chinese role-playing blockbuster that has inspired a pair of live-action TV series. The latest in the The Legend of Sword and Fairy series, Sword and Fairy 7 will use ray tracing for reflections and shadows to help create a landscape filled with Chinese mythology and ancient legends.
Step into NVIDIA Studio
To boost the capabilities of the world’s 40 million online and studio-based content creators who depend on high-performance PCs, NVIDIA unveiled NVIDIA Studio.
“Our studio platform and laptops provide a great opportunity for us to go after a whole new market,” Fisher said.
Supported with rigorous testing for top creative applications and workflows, NVIDIA Studio combines RTX GPUs and the NVIDIA Studio Stack of specialized SDKs and dedicated Studio Drivers.
Creators will have plenty of options to choose from. Seven of the world’s leading PC manufacturers are introducing 17 RTX Studio laptops at Computex, including GPUs from either Quadro or GeForce product lines.
All meet the hardware and software requirements needed to get the new RTX Studio badge, allowing creators to identify the right laptops to power their creative workflows.
Getting to Work
In the high point of the event, three creators in artist studios erected along the sidelines of the keynote hall quickly demonstrated the power of NVIDIA Studio, untethered from their office, and all using new RTX notebooks:
- Leo Chou, a Taiwan designer, furnished a high-end Chinese-style living room in real time, moving furniture, lighting and objects in a scene made photorealistic through ray tracing.
- Juan Salvo, a prominent New York City finishing artist, edited video, using AI inside his workflow to make adjustments to a single frame and then applied them to all the frames in the scene.
- Daniel Gregoire, of Hollywood effects director, made edits to scenes of the film Aquaman where two titanic armies clash, changing the focal point and perspective in real time using ray tracing.
Commenting on the work, Paul said NVIDIA Studio will provide creatives with freedom, enabling them as individuals to carry out work previously done by an entire facility.
“Much of what we’ve shown here has been done before, but in large studios over time,” Paul said. “We’re now showing how it can be done on individual laptops in real time. This will change how 40 million creators works.”
NVIDIA Quadro RTX Mobile Workstations Deliver More Perf for Every Pro
NVIDIA also announced a new lineup of mobile workstations from the world’s leading OEMs featuring the Quadro RTX 5000, 4000 and 3000 GPUs, which will also appear in NVIDIA RTX Studio laptops.
Quadro RTX-powered mobile workstations bring AI, ray tracing and VR to creative and technical pros while delivering desktop-level performance and capabilities in a mobile form factor.
The new lineup of also features Quadro T2000, T1000, P620 and P520 GPUs, giving professionals the flexibility to choose the right system for their workloads.
EGX Brings Real-Time AI Capabilities to Where Needed Most
Separately, NVIDIA announced its EGX computing platform, enabling low-latency AI at the edge.
With more than 150 billion sensors and other IoT devices expected by 2025, EGX brings real-time AI computing capabilities to where they’re needed most.
The platform gives companies the computing power they need to be able to ingest information from sensors to plan, perceive and reason.
EGX combines a range of NVIDIA AI technologies together with security, networking and storage capabilities from Mellanox, Cisco and others to put AI to work quickly and securely from edge to cloud.