The NVIDIA RTX platform and the NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture have been recognized with a technology award from the Advanced Imaging Society (AIS). The award was first reported last week by the Hollywood Reporter.
Built on NVIDIA’s latest Turing GPU Architecture, Quadro RTX and GeForce RTX GPUs feature new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and new Tensor Cores for AI inferencing. Hybrid rendering enables cinematic-quality interactive experiences, amazing new effects powered by neural networks and fluid interactivity on highly complex models.
This means artists can interact with their scenes in ray-traced photo-realistic detail. And film studios and production houses can now realize increased throughput with their rendering workloads, leading to significant time and cost savings. Also, NVIDIA RTX GPUs are set to make working with 8K files a reality by massively accelerating decode times.
Developers can access these Quadro RTX features through the new NVIDIA RTX development platform that includes APIs for ray tracing, AI, rasterization and simulation, plus support for NVIDIA MDL materials and Pixar USD asset interchange to transform the creative process.
The RTX Server combines eight high-end Quadro RTX GPUs with new Quadro Infinity software (available in the first quarter of 2019) to enable multiple users to access a single GPU through virtual workstations, dramatically increasing the density of the data center. End-users can also easily provision render nodes and workstations based on their specific needs.
With industry-leading content creation and render software pre-installed, the Quadro RTX Server provides a powerful and easy-to-deploy rendering solution that can scale from small installations to the largest data centers, at one quarter of the cost of CPU-only render farms.
“The AIS Technology Award annually acknowledges and celebrates technologies and processes demonstrating both innovation and impact in advancing the future of the entertainment and media industries. The AIS committee felt it important to recognize NVIDIA for its new Turing architecture and RTX platform and the advancements they bring to ray tracing,” said Jim Chabin, president of the Advanced Imaging Society. “This technology allows the lighting of virtual environments to mimic the real world — making our virtual worlds more realistic than ever.”
NVIDIA has been partnering with the film industry for years and collaborated with several partners to test the new solution with film production assets.
“Our long-term collaboration with NVIDIA on advanced rendering continues with Turing,” said Luca Fascione, senior head of technology and research at Weta Digital. “The performance improvements change how artists can work with hero assets throughout the pipeline, improving every creative decision along the way. When we are able to fully take advantage of the new architecture, this will not just be a speed-up, but a big leap toward a new way of working.”
“Cinesite was proud to be an early partner with NVIDIA on the RTX platform, but we never expected to see results this dramatic,” said Michele Sciolette, chief technology officer of Cinesite. “This means we can iterate faster, more frequently and with higher quality settings. This will completely change how our artists work.”
Industry partners and software providers like Adobe, Allegorithmic, Autodesk, Blackmagic Design, Chaos Group, Isotropix, Otoy, Pixar Renderman, REDSHIFT and others representing many of the most important applications for the film industry are praising NVIDIA RTX.
“RTX technology tightly integrates ray tracing into the real-time graphics pipeline,” said Cyrille Damez, chief technology officer of Allegorithmic. “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 percent when compared with CPU-based ray tracing.”
The AIS was formed in 2009 by The Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, DreamWorks Animation (DWA), Sony, Paramount, IMAX, Dolby and others to advance the creative arts and sciences of stereoscopic 3D. Read more about the AIS Award program.
Learn more about NVIDIA RTX.