NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on Tuesday showed how our Iray technology can create interactive virtual worlds with unparalleled fidelity.
Imagine being able to see any combination of options for a car interior you’re thinking of buying — in photorealistic detail — and from any angle. Or being able to experience the feeling of a new building’s interior — from any corner of a room — before it’s built.
Iray VR capabilities will allow us to create environments that let users strap on a headset and peer around photorealistic virtual environments. With Iray VR, you’ll be able to look around the inside of a virtual car, a modern loft, or the interior of our still unfinished Silicon Valley campus with uncanny accuracy.
“It’s utterly beautiful,” said Huang during a keynote address at our GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Calif., as he showed attendees still-to-be constructed interiors of the campus. “Iray VR is going to be unbelievable for people designing cars, for people architecting buildings and many other areas.”
Yet despite their realism, none of these environments exist outside of our computer models.
It’s the next step with our Iray technology, which taps into the power of our GPUs to let users quickly generate immersive experiences of their designs with amazing accuracy.
Iray Brings Reality to Virtual Reality
[adrotate banner=”4″]Iray lets users refine their designs faster thanks to its host of rendering capabilities, such as interactive ray tracing, the ability to accurately represent materials, and scaling from desktop to datacenter. These capabilities have made Iray an indispensable tool for designers and will become essential for realistic virtual experiences.
In particular, Iray has proven itself to architects and lighting designers, who are using its capabilities to model how light interacts with their designs at any time of day, and any day of the year.
Attendees at our GTC conference, taking place now at the San Jose Convention Center, can experience the full Iray VR experience in our booth in the VR Village. Look for more details on the availability of Iray VR capabilities later this spring.
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While NVIDIA is best known for our hardware platforms, our software plays a key role advancing the state of the art of GPU-accelerated computing.
This body of work — the NVIDIA SDK — today got a significant update, announced at our annual GPU Technology Conference. It takes advantage of our new Pascal architecture and makes it easier than ever for developers to create great solutions on our platforms.
Our goal is to make more of our software capabilities available to even more developers. Over a million developers have already downloaded our CUDA toolkit, and there are more than 400 GPU-accelerated applications that benefit from our software libraries, in addition to hundreds more game titles.
Here’s a look at the software updates we’re introducing in seven key areas:
1) Deep Learning
What’s new — cuDNN 5, our GPU-accelerated library of primitives for deep neural networks, now includes Pascal GPU support; acceleration of recurrent neural networks, which are used for video and other sequential data; and additional enhancements used in medical, oil & gas and other industries.
Why it matters — Deep learning developers rely on cuDNN’s optimized routines so they can focus on designing and training neural network models, rather than low-level performance tuning. cuDNN accelerates leading deep learning frameworks like Google TensorFlow, UC Berkeley’s Caffe, University of Montreal’s Theano and NYU’s Torch. These, in turn, power deep learning solutions used by Amazon, Facebook, Google and others.
2) Accelerated Computing
What’s new — CUDA 8, the latest version of our parallel computing platform, gives developers direct access to powerful new Pascal features such as unified memory and NVLink. Also included in this release is a new graph analytics library — nvGRAPH — which can be used for robotic path planning, cyber security and logistics analysis, expanding the application of GPU acceleration in the realm of big data analytics.
One new feature developers will appreciate is critical path analysis, which automatically identifies latent bottlenecks in code for CPUs and GPUs. And for visualizing volume and surface datasets, NVIDIA IndeX 1.4 is now available as a plug-in for Kitware ParaView, bringing interactive visualization of large volumes with high-quality rendering to ParaView users.
Why it matters — CUDA has been called “the backbone of GPU computing.” We’ve sold millions of CUDA-enabled GPUs to date. As a result, many of the most important scientific applications are based on CUDA, and CUDA has played a role in major discoveries, such as understanding how HIV protects its genetic materials using a protein shell, and unraveling the mysteries of the human genome by discovering 3D loops and other genetic folding patterns.
3) Self-Driving Cars
What’s new — At GTC, we also announced our end-to-end HD mapping solution for self-driving cars (see “How HD Maps Will Show Self-Driving Cars the Way”). We built this state-of-the-art system on our DriveWorks software development kit, part of our deep learning platform for the automotive industry.
Why it matters — Incorporating perception, localization, planning and visualization algorithms, DriveWorks provides libraries, tools and reference applications for automakers, tier 1 suppliers and startups developing autonomous vehicle computing pipelines. DriveWorks now includes an end-to-end HD mapping solution, making it easier and faster to create and update highly detailed maps. Along with NVIDIA DIGITS and NVIDIA DRIVENET, these technologies will make driving safer, more efficient and more enjoyable.
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4) Design Visualization
What’s new — At GTC, we’ve brought NVIDIA Iray — our photorealistic rendering solution — to the world of VR with the introduction of new cameras within Iray that let users create VR panoramas and view their creations with unprecedented accuracy in virtual reality (see “NVIDIA Brings Interactive Photorealism to VR with Iray”). We also announced Adobe’s support of NVIDIA’s Materials Definition Language, bringing the possibility of physically based materials to a wide range of creative professionals.
Why it matters — NVIDIA Iray is used in a wide array of industries to give designers the ability to create photorealistic models of their work quickly and to speed their products to market. We’ve licensed it to leading software manufacturers such as Dassault Systèmes and Siemens PLM. Iray is also available from NVIDIA as a plug-in for popular software like Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya.
5) Autonomous Machines
What’s new — We’re bringing deep learning capabilities to devices that will interact with — and learn from — the environment around them. Our cuDNN version 5, noted above, improves deep learning inference performance for common deep neural networks, allowing embedded devices to make decisions faster and work with higher resolution sensors. NVIDIA GPU Inference Engine (GIE) is a high-performance neural network inference solution for application deployment. Developers can use GIE to generate optimized implementations of trained neural network models that deliver the fastest inference performance on NVIDIA GPUs.
Why it matters — Robots, drones, submersibles and other intelligent devices require autonomous capabilities. The Jetpack SDK — which powers the Jetson TX1 Developer Kit — includes libraries and APIs for advanced computer vision and deep learning, enabling developers to build extraordinarily capable autonomous machines that can see, understand and even interact with their environments.
6) Gaming
What’s new — We recently announced three new technologies for NVIDIA GameWorks, our combination of development tools, sample code and advanced libraries for real-time graphics and simulation for games. They include Volumetric Lighting, Voxel-based Ambient Occlusion and Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows.
Why it matters — Developers are already using these new libraries for AAA game titles like Fallout 4. And GameWorks technology is in many of the major game engines, such as Unreal Engine, Unity and Stingray, which are also increasingly being used for non-gaming applications like architectural walk-throughs, training and even automotive design.
7) Virtual Reality
What’s new — We’re continuing to add features to VRWorks — our suite of APIs, sample code and libraries for VR developers. For example, Multi-Res Shading accelerates performance by up to 50 percent by rendering each part of an image at a resolution that better matches the pixel density of the warped VR image. VRWorks Direct Mode treats VR headsets as head-mounted displays accessible only to VR applications, rather than a normal Windows monitor in desktop mode.
Why it matters — VRWorks helps headset and application developers achieve the highest performance, lowest latency and plug-and-play compatibility. You can see how developers are using what VRWorks has to offer at GTC, where we’re demonstrating these new technologies with partners such as Sólfar Studios (Everest VR), Fusion Studios (Mars 2030), Oculus and HTC.
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At a regional tech briefing in Singapore on Friday, NVIDIA revealed the power of the NVIDIA ProViz computing platform. Leveraging on the parallel computing capabilities of the NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards to power the NVIDIA Iray technology, they are now able to deliver near real-time ray tracing.
In this video, Bob Pette, VP and General Manager of the NVIDIA Quadro team, explains how NVIDIA Iray and MDL (Material Definition Language) allow for predictive design through near real-time ray tracing. Check out how they help cut down the time to render ray traced images from hours to mere seconds!
More importantly, NVIDIA is finally making this available to the end-users via NVIDIA Iray plugins. Starting now, NVIDIA is offering Iray plugins for both 3ds Max 2016 and Maya 2016. The plugins for 3ds Max 2015 and 3ds Max 2014, as well as the plugin for Maya 2016 for Linux will be available in January 2016. There will also be NVIDIA Iray plugins for Autodesk Revit, Maxon Cinema 4D and Rhino in the spring or summer of 2016.
All these plugins will be sold directly by NVIDIA to end-users for $295 per year, with a 90-day free trial. According to Bob Pette, this price will be the upper limit, with these NVIDIA Iray plugins offered by their partners at lower price points in their own bundles.
Ray Tracing & Predictive Design
Ray tracing has been around for decades, and offers the most photorealistic rendering of any 3D image. However, it is computationally intensive which means real-time rendering is not remotely possible. In fact, the workflow is arduously long and more importantly disconnected.
The disconnect is a big problem, because it means the designer cannot immediately see the results of his/her work. Instead, he/she will have to wait for the final render to be delivered before making changes, and the process repeats until the design is accepted.
This capability allows a much quicker “Predictive Design” process, because the designer can now predict what the final output would be. Instead of waiting for a render to be finalised at some off-site location, the designer can almost instantly produce a ray-traced view of the design.
Best of all, this capability does not require the designer to physically have access to a powerful render farm, or even high-powered workstations with multiple NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards. In fact, less capable devices, like the NVIDIA Shield tablet, can remotely access those capabilities.
As far as gaming is concerned, the photorealism derived from ray tracing is not worth the effort and cost. The current “Predictive Design” capability offered by NVIDIA Iray offers a glimpse of what might be possible for PC gaming maybe a decade or two down the line.
[adrotate banner=”4″]What NVIDIA Iray offers now is a much faster and better workflow for designers, whether they are in the engineering or architectural industry. They can now design better products and even buildings faster, because they can see the effects almost immediately.
In his presentation (which we will be posting shortly), he demonstrated how the lack of such ray tracing capabilities have resulted in design faux pas like the infamous Walkie Talkie skyscraper (now nicknamed Walkie Scorchie!), which melted cars in London with its “death ray”.
The remote rendering capability that Bob demonstrated in this amazing video will also be appealing to companies that offer customisation of their products – like cars, apparel and jewellery. Their sales staff can now change colour and material and almost instantly render the final product image for the client to view and approve on-the-spot. Impressive, isn’t it?
NVIDIA today revealed the power of the new NVIDIA Iray “Predictive Design” capability in a regional tech briefing in sunny Singapore. Bob Pette, VP and General Manager of the NVIDIA Quadro team flew in to give us a live demonstration of almost-live ray tracing on an NVIDIA Shield tablet.
Ray Tracing & Predictive Design
Ray tracing has been around for decades, and offers the most photorealistic rendering of any 3D image. However, it is computationally intensive which means real-time rendering is not remotely possible. In fact, the workflow is arduously long and more importantly disconnected.
The disconnect is a big problem, because it means the designer cannot immediately see the results of his/her work. Instead, he/she will have to wait for the final render to be delivered before making changes, and the process repeats until the design is accepted.
This capability allows a much quicker “Predictive Design” process, because the designer can now predict what the final output would be. Instead of waiting for a render to be finalised at some off-site location, the designer can almost instantly produce a ray-traced view of the design.
Best of all, this capability does not require the designer to physically have access to a powerful render farm, or even high-powered workstations with multiple NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards. In fact, less capable devices, like the NVIDIA Shield tablet, can remotely access those capabilities.
NVIDIA Iray Predictive Design Live Demo
In this video, NVIDIA Quadro VP and General Manager, Bob Pette, demonstrates the NVIDIA Iray “Predictive Design” capability on an NVIDIA Shield tablet. The tablet does not actually render the image, but merely acts as a display and interface. The actual rendering work is performed on the workstation you see behind, powered by two NVIDIA Quadro M6000 graphics cards.
Currently, the NVIDIA Iray technology allows this demo setup of dual NVIDIA Quadro M6000 graphics cards to serve up to 3 tablets simultaneously. With some optimisation, Bob says they should have no issues supporting up to 5 tablets at the same time. It can also work with NVIDIA GRID.
When even more powerful graphics cards on the horizon arrive (courtesy of the forthcoming NVIDIA Pascal microarchitecture), he says it’s not inconceivable for a single workstation to support 10 tablets or laptops at the same time.
How Is This Important?
As far as gaming is concerned, the photorealism derived from ray tracing is not worth the effort and cost. The current “Predictive Design” capability offered by NVIDIA Iray offers a glimpse of what might be possible for PC gaming maybe a decade or two down the line.
[adrotate banner=”4″]What NVIDIA Iray offers now is a much faster and better workflow for designers, whether they are in the engineering or architectural industry. They can now design better products and even buildings faster, because they can see the effects almost immediately.
In his presentation (which we will be posting shortly), he demonstrated how the lack of such ray tracing capabilities have resulted in design faux pas like the infamous Walkie Talkie skyscraper (now nicknamed Walkie Scorchie!), which melted cars in London with its “death ray”.
The remote rendering capability that Bob demonstrated above will also be appealing to companies that offer customisation of their products – like cars, apparel and jewellery. Their sales staff can now change colour and material and almost instantly render the final product image for the client to view and approve on-the-spot. Impressive, isn’t it?
