Project Lavina Chaos Group demos the first look at Project Lavina, a groundbreaking new technology designed for photorealistic real-time ray tracing at SIGGRAPH this week. Using the dedicated RT Core within NVIDIA’s Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs, Project Lavina introduces a new level of visual quality for real-time games, VR, and 3D visualization. Project Lavina, named after the Bulgarian word for “avalanche,” debuted as a SIGGRAPH tech demo, depicting a massive 3D forest and several architectural visualizations running at 24-30 frames per second (FPS) in standard HD resolution. Rather than using game engine shortcuts like rasterized graphics and a reduced level of detail, each scene features live ray tracing for truly interactive photorealism. Lavina is able to handle massive scenes at real-time speeds – over 300 billion triangles in one case – without any loss in detail. “We’ve been developing ray tracing technology for 20 years, and this is one of the biggest breakthroughs we’ve ever made,” notes Vlado Koylazov, co-founder and CTO at Chaos Group. “Real-time and ray tracing coming together is the beginning of something big.” The SIGGRAPH tech demo uses 3D scenes exported from V-Ray-enabled applications directly in Lavina. Unlike a traditional game engine which requires assets to be rebuilt and specially optimized, Lavina dramatically simplifies this process with direct compatibility and translation of V-Ray assets. Upon loading the scene, the user can explore the environment exactly as they would in a game engine, and experience physically accurate lighting, reflections and global illumination. Chaos Group is also behind the beta release of V-Ray for Unreal. Seeing a growing demand for real-time applications, Chaos Group has developed a way to tie ray tracing to both kinds of workflows, upping the fidelity of this emerging medium. Users will be able to apply the most realistic style of rendering to every type of interactive project, including 3D configurators, virtual productions and VR, using the toolset they like best. “This breakthrough was made possible by partnering with NVIDIA, whose Quadro RTX GPUs helped unlock the next level of real-time experiences,” says Peter Mitev, CEO of Chaos Group. “From here, Project Lavina’s mission will be to focus on pushing the quality and speed of real-time ray tracing.” See the demo. For more info, visit chaosgroup.com.<doc-sep>Please Enable Cookies www.electronicdesign.com is using a security service for protection against online attacks. The service requires full cookie support in order to view this website. Please enable cookies on your browser and try again.<doc-sep>In recent days, word about Nvidia’s new Turing architecture started leaking out of the Santa Clara-based company’s headquarters. So it didn’t come as a major surprise that the company today announced during its Siggraph keynote the launch of this new architecture and three new pro-oriented workstation graphics cards in its Quadro family. Nvidia describes the new Turing architecture as “the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006.” That’s a high bar to clear, but there may be a kernel of truth here. These new Quadro RTx chips are the first to feature the company’s new RT Cores. “RT” here stands for ray tracing, a rendering method that basically traces the path of light as it interacts with the objects in a scene. This technique has been around for a very long time (remember POV-Ray on the Amiga?). Traditionally, though, it was always very computationally intensive, though the results tend to look far more realistic. In recent years, ray tracing got a new boost thanks to faster GPUs and support from the likes of Microsoft, which recently added ray tracing support to DirectX. “Hybrid rendering will change the industry, opening up amazing possibilities that enhance our lives with more beautiful designs, richer entertainment and more interactive experiences,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “The arrival of real-time ray tracing is the Holy Grail of our industry.” The new RT cores can accelerate ray tracing by up to 25 times compared to Nvidia’s Pascal architecture, and Nvidia claims 10 GigaRays a second for the maximum performance. Unsurprisingly, the three new Turing-based Quadro GPUs will also feature the company’s AI-centric Tensor Cores, as well as 4,608 CUDA cores that can deliver up to 16 trillion floating point operations in parallel with 16 trillion integer operations per second. The chips feature GDDR6 memory to expedite things, and support Nvidia’s NVLink technology to scale up memory capacity to up to 96GB and 100GB/s of bandwidth. The AI part here is more important than it may seem at first. With NGX, Nvidia today also launched a new platform that aims to bring AI into the graphics pipelines. “NGX technology brings capabilities such as taking a standard camera feed and creating super slow motion like you’d get from a $100,000+ specialized camera,” the company explains, and also notes that filmmakers could use this technology to easily remove wires from photographs or replace missing pixels with the right background. On the software side, Nvidia also today announced that it is open sourcing its Material Definition Language (MDL). Companies ranging from Adobe (for Dimension CC) to Pixar, Siemens, Black Magic, Weta Digital, Epic Games and Autodesk have already signed up to support the new Turing architecture. All of this power comes at a price, of course. The new Quadro RTX line starts at $2,300 for a 16GB version, while stepping up to 24GB will set you back $6,300. Double that memory to 48GB and Nvidia expects that you’ll pay about $10,000 for this high-end card.<doc-sep>Start transforming your game’s economy and increase your bottom line. Get the free guide now. Elevate your enterprise data technology and strategy at Transform 2021. Porsche has used Epic Games’ Unreal Engine and Nvidia’s graphics chips to design its own cars. The companies showed a demo, dubbed Speed of Light, of what they’ve done together at the Siggraph computer graphics show in Vancouver, Canada. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, showed off the demo during a keynote speech, as part of a demonstration of what Nvidia’s latest Turing-based Quadro real-time chips can do. Christian Braun, manage of virtual design at Porsche, said in a statement that he has always had a vision for a design pipeline which uses a single technology at its core, and Porsche has frequently experimented with Unreal. “This is the single greatest leap we have ever made in a single generation,” Huang said in the speech. “Porsche’s collaboration with Epic and Nvidia has exceeded all expectations from both a creative and technological perspective,” said Braun. “The achieved results are proof that real-time technology is revolutionizing how we design and market our vehicles.” The ability to do “offline quality” has been a roadblock for real-time technologies (such as Unreal Engine) as the unifying technology. But the Siggraph demo shows real-time ray tracing with dynamic global illumination for a car dubbed the Porsche 911 Speedster Concept. Porsche’s concept car is the first ever visualized with interactive real-time ray tracing. For filmmakers, this has big implications. The real-time ray tracing capability will be built into a forthcoming release of Unreal Engine that will make it possible to have real-time, photorealistic ray traced rendering and interactive lighting as part of virtual production/VFX workflows. This kind of workflow has been a long sought in digital filmmaking. “The Porsche 911 Speedster Concept is the first car to be visualized with interactive real-time ray tracing,” said Francois Antoine, director of HMI at Epic Games, and creative director and VFX supervisor on the project, in a statement. “In concert with Nvidia we’re accelerating the adoption of real-time ray tracing across many industries.” “Nvidia RTX technology is purpose-built to provide a generational leap in the quality of real-time computer graphics, and ‘The Speed of Light’ perfectly demonstrates that we are delivering on our promises,” said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at Nvidia, in a statement. “With Unreal Engine it’s possible to create physically-accurate, realistic scenes that feature a level of fidelity and detail we’ve previously only been able to imagine.” The enabling of real-time ray tracing with ray-traced diffuse global illumination in Unreal Engine has made it possible for Porsche to visualize this latest concept car, which will be made available to consumers. The experimental real-time ray tracing features will be built into a future Unreal Engine 4 release to benefit the entire development community. “When you see the quality of the cinematic, it’s remarkable to note that no baking or lightmaps were required. There is no precomputed lighting. It’s all fully dynamic for both objects and light,” said Antoine. “When we’re designing cars, we have to explore every option from every angle, and having the ability to review fully visualized renders in real time has completely transformed the way we ideate.” Epic said that bringing dynamic global illumination and ray-traced lighting to Unreal Engine is a critical development for users who work with very large datasets, and the advancements will benefit creators in game development, filmmaking, architecture, design, manufacturing, AR/VR and simulation. “The Speed of Light” demo debuted running on two Nvidia Quadro RTX cards. New Unreal Engine features demonstrated include ray-traced translucency, ray-traced rectangular area light shadows, ray-traced reflections, ray-traced diffuse global illumination, and dynamic textured area lights. “With Turing architecture Nvidia have shattered the photorealism barrier that current-generation rasterizing techniques have presented until now,” said Kim Libreri, CTO, Epic Games, in a statement. “Just as we saw with the movie business over a decade ago, ray tracing is going to revolutionize the realism of real-time applications, cinematic experiences and high-end games. Now, we will see artists and designers using Unreal Engine technology to create, view and interact with content that is indistinguishable from reality.”<doc-sep>
NVIDIA Quadro RTX bringing Turing architecture real-time ray tracing As technology evolves, so do users’ tastes and expectations. No longer are they satisfied with crude digital approximations of real-world objects and demand convincing and photorealistic renderings more than what current computing technology can provide. Unless they happen to have one of NVIDIA’s three new GPUs. Boasting to have brought technology that wasn’t expected until at least 2023, NVIDIA is announcing its newest Turing graphics architecture that mixes raw processing power and AI to provide real-time ray tracing capabilities. Real-time ray tracing is the holy grail in computer graphics. Ray tracing, in a nutshell, follows the path that light, and later sound, travels in the real world, how those rays interact with objects and how they bounce back and forth other objects and the viewer. This process yields the most realistic renders but requires extensive computational power and time. That’s why it is often only reserved for cases where rendering can be done ahead of time, like in film and television, and is avoided in real-time simulations. NVIDIA’s new Turing architecture, which it claims is the biggest leap in the graphics industry since it introduced CUDA cores in 2006, aims to change all that. It promises to make real-time ray tracing possible using as much as 4,608 CUDA cores and special RT Cores that can compute 10 GigaRays (1 billion rays) a second. But the Turing architecture doesn’t just offer raw power. Thanks to Tensor cores, it can make processes even more efficient using AI and machine learning. Of course, that also makes NVIDIA’s eighth gen architecture ideal for deep learning uses. The new NVIDIA Turing will be making its way to three new Quadro GPUs designed for artists, creative professionals, and studios. The Quadro RTX 8000, Quadro RTX 6000, and Quadro RTX 5000 also feature Samsung’s latest 16 Gigabit (Gb) GDDR6 memory and, when paired with NVIDIA NVLink, can reach up to 96 GB capacity. If your graphical heart is palpitating, better calm down. These GPUs, which are scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2019, are clearly intended for professionals. Fully-funded professionals for that matter. The Quadro RTX 5000, the lowest of the three, will retail for $2,300 while the beefiest Quadro RTX 8000 will go for a jaw-dropping $10,000.