At SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver, the NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang and his talented crew presented an incredible journey through the history of CGI and the development of the hardware tools for VFX the industry has used, is using and will be using into the future. And the future looks fast. Very fast.
Huang also introduced the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000, Quadro RTX 6000 and Quadro RTX 5000, its first Turing architecture-based GPUs, revolutionizing the work of 50 million designers and artists by enabling them to render photorealistic scenes in real time, add new AI-based capabilities to their workflows, and enjoy fluid interactivity with complex models and scenes. Also announced was the Quadro RTX Server, a reference architecture for highly configurable, on-demand rendering and virtual workstation solutions from the datacenter.
“Quadro RTX marks the launch of a new era for the global computer graphics industry,” said Bob Pette, vice president of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA. “Users can now enjoy powerful capabilities that weren’t expected to be available for at least five more years. Designers and artists can interact in real time with their complex designs and visual effects 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.”
On Wednesday, David Luebke, VP of graphics research at NVIDIA, will describe the company’s vision for the future of virtual and augmented reality. He’ll review some of the “realities of virtual reality” — including challenges presented by Moore’s law, battery technology, optics, and wired and wireless connections. He’ll discuss their implications and opportunities, such as foveation and specialization. He’ll conclude with a deep dive into how rendering technology, such as ray tracing, can evolve to solve the realities of VR.
Below is the link to Jensen Huang’s opening talk, and on Wednesday I’ll also include a link to a feed for David Luebke’s presentation. Love this stuff.
VFX SCIENCE 