Creating cinematic-quality visuals has traditionally been a time-consuming, costly process.
But that’s changing, with UNIT, a London-based visual effects company pioneering the use of NVIDIA RTX Servers to dramatically accelerate the rendering workflow for its work on post- production, design, grade, audio, and computer graphics for film, TV and commercials.
In searching for the best rendering solution, UNIT tested Maxon’s Redshift renderer and found that, with NVIDIA Quadro RTX cards, its performance was far faster than CPU-based systems.
So UNIT custom-built a render server with eight NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs and updated each of their artist’s workstations with a Quadro RTX card. The RTX Servers streamline the entire operation, making GPUs easily interchangeable and accessible to all the artists.
“NVIDIA RTX delivers incredible rendering speed, creating a major paradigm shift for UNIT.“ — Nuno Pereira, creative director at UNIT
UNIT Speeds Through Rendering with RTX
Rendering is an important part of the creative process, but throughput for production rendering can be a challenge. UNIT wanted to boost the production pipeline while maintaining the power required for creating rich, cinematic-quality visuals.
In one of the studio’s initial tests of the accelerated rendering performance of NVIDIA RTX Server, the rendering time dropped from 80 minutes on CPU down to 55 seconds.
“Some artists are even using final-frame renders to preview shots, since their render speed is so fast now,” said Nuno Pereira, creative director of 3D and head of VFX at UNIT. “With Quadro RTX, we get the fast, reliable performance we need to push creativity even further.”
The speed of the software made it much easier to get more iterations for a project, so UNIT was able to achieve near-final renders and images much quicker. The render times for the canary scene below, featured in Sky’s Monday Night Football commercial, shrank from 50 minutes per frame down to 2 minutes.
With Quadro RTX powering all its workstations, UNIT’s artists get the fast, reliable and high-quality performance they need to complete creative projects faster than before.
To learn more, sign up for our upcoming webinar, NVIDIA RTX Server for Today’s Mixed Workloads.