VizWorld.com

Huge day for NVidia.  First the amazing Quadro Fermi series (Read our review of the Quadro 5000), and now new 3D Vision Pro and new AXE systems.  First, let’s discuss the impressive new 3D Vision Pro.

NVidia brings their 3D Vision Pro to a new class of applications with one simple change:  Switching from IR transmitters to RF transmitters.  This effectively eliminates line of sight problems, opening the 3D Vision use for crowds of people, multi-screen displays, and VR environments like the CAVE.  Also, this allows them to synchronize glasses to specific displays, as they’ve done in their impressive SIGGRAPH Booth.  3D is a big driver today, and they’ve got around a dozen different 3D displays running different demos all around the booth.  Each display has about 4 3d glasses synced to it, and they don’t interfere with other displays, nor do the glasses work with other displays.  The display can effectively turn the glasses on and off, without messing with other displays.  This kind of managed interface is critical for large-scale professional applications.

“By providing large scale visualization capabilities and remote management capabilities, NVIDIA is pioneering 3D technology for the enterprise, opening the door for professional users and large scale visualization system integrators to utilize 3D in ways not thought of before.”  Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.

The other big announcement coming out right now is the slew of updates in the AXE suite, the Application Acceleration Engines.  These are the various support technologies based around the NVidia brand like OptiX (ray tracer), SceneX (scene graph) and others.  Today they’are announcing major revisions to several of them.

NVIDIA SceniX 6

• New Bezier Patch geometry class, using Cg tessellation programs for the smoothest of surfaces on NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs;
• OptiX 2 support for faster, interactive ray tracing;
• Continued improvements in overall performance and fidelity, and;
• Future support for iray by mental images.

NVIDIA Cg Toolkit 3

• New tessellation programs, allowing displacement and procedural surfaces to dynamically adapt their tessellation in real-time on the latest NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs, and;
• OpenGL 4 and DirectX 11 level of programmability for the latest in portable, cross platform effects.

NVIDIA OptiX 2

• Optimizations for new NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs, delivering up to 4X performance over previous generation (GT200) GPUs and >10X over G92;
• Support for all NVIDIA CUDA™ architecture-capable NVIDIA GPUs (G92 or later) on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, and;
• Direct3D and fast interoperability in Direct3D and OpenGL; for flexible compositing and hybrid rendering opportunities.

Again, Amazing stuff from the NVidia folks.  I look forward to spending some time in their booth later today, and sharing the experience with you all later tonight!

Full press releases on both topics after the break.

Read more…

Graphics, Science nvidia, optix, quadro, scenix, siggraph

If you didn’t believe my comment yesterday about several places demonstrating real-time raytracing solutions at SIGGRAPH, then check out this new press release from NVidia.  If you check out the floor at SIGGRAPH, you’ll see CUDA-powered ray tracing in:

• mental images, showing iray interactive rendering, using CUDA C, at the NVIDIA booth (#717)
• NVIDIA, showing OptiX interactive examples, using CUDA C, at the NVIDIA booth
• Bunkspeed, showing SHOT with interactive iray, at the NVIDIA booth
• Lightworks, showing Artisan, using CUDA C and OptiX, at the Lightworks booth (#225)
• Works Zebra, showing Zeany, using CUDA C and OptiX, at the NVIDIA booth
• cebas Visual Technology Inc., showing Final Render, using CUDA C, at the cebas booth (#314)
• Refractive Software, showing the Octane Renderer, using CUDA C, at the Cubix Corp. booth (#1126)
• Chaos Software Ltd., showing V-Ray GPU, using OpenCL, at the Chaos booth (#313)

And that’s just the ones that NVidia knows about, undoubtedly there will be others.

“What used to be an excuse for a coffee break is now a real-time experience when running on NVIDIA’s newest GPUs”, said Jeff Brown, general manager Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. “The speed up is truly transformative for our customers – giving them interactive insight and dramatically enhancing their creative process in ways that have not been possible on individual workstations before.”

In addition to the exhibition floor, they’ll be in the technical sessions as well as NVidia has 2 papers (one on OptiX and one on PantaRay) in the technical talks, and NVidia is sponsoring a developer session on OptiX.

What is AMD doing at SIGGRAPH, you may ask?  All I’ve heard so far is demonstrations of a new FirePro card and Eyefinity.

See the full announcement below.

Read more…

Hardware, Science nvidia, optix, pantaray, siggraph

While the individual components are nothing new, I hadn’t heard of NVidia calling the whole system “AXE”, for Application Acceleration Engines.

NVIDIA® application acceleration engines are highly optimized software modules enabling developers to take maximum advantage of the GPU with valuable, high performance capabilities that are license free to develop with and deploy.

NVIDIA is committed to ensuring engines continue advancing to take maximum advantage of the latest NVIDIA GPU innovations while also maintaining their leading-edge capabilities. Applications employing acceleration engines can rapidly exploit GPU advancements as consistent engine APIs evolve to leverage new methods. In doing so, NVIDIA is empowering developers to deliver the latest capabilities to their users in the shortest amount of time.

The complete suite consists of SceniX (scene graph), CompleX (GPU scaling system), PhysX (GPU accelerated Physics), and OptiX (ray-tracing), along with the usual CgFX and CUDA.

via NVIDIA® Application Acceleration Engines.

Science axe, complex, gpgpu, library, nvidia, optix, physx, scenix

GPU Ray-tracers, start your engines.. NVidia has just officially released the OptiX CUDA-based Real-Time Interactive Ray Tracer on their website, free.  Announced back at SIGGRAPH, there have been numerous demonstrations on various conferences and venues, but now you can try it for yourself.

Jeff Brown, NVIDIA’s GM for Professional Solutions, explains why OptiX is invaluable: “This opens the door to a new level of interactive realism. Ray tracing’s inherent parallelism makes it a perfect fit for GPU computing. The OptiX engine makes it easy for developers to exploit that power to create an exciting new class of applications. It enables critical design tasks — such as examining reflections, refractions and shadow – to be performed now in real-time.”

Of course, they claim it’s the “World’s First”, but I think the guys at Caustic, Intel‘s Larrabee , and Fryrender would argue that claim.

Go download it in the NVidia Developer’s Zone.

via nTersect Blog – NVIDIA.

Science cuda, gpgpu, library, nvidia, optix, raytracing, software