“We want to make it easier for customers to use Nvidia’s products,” says Pette. Enables GPU compute development in Microsoft’s Visual Studio and has been updated with support for Vulkan and Nvidia Pascal. Enables consistent appearance of physically based materials in design applications. Nvidia has added support for its Tesla-powered DGX-1 “supercomputer in a box” and NVLink, a communications protocol enabling high-speed connections to GPUs and memory. VRWorks also includes SDKs to accelerate 360 capture and enhance VR environments such as caves, immersive displays, and clusters. Nvidia says the leading graphics engine companies including Unity and Unreal Engines are adopting VRWorks to enable developers to take advantage of the SDK in their games and applications. Includes accelerated stitching, calibration, and warping for real-time 360-degree VR experiences. Nvidia has also added support for measured materials using the X-Rite AxF 1.3 format. The latest update for the iRay SDK brings it up to date with Pascal-generation processors, adds stereographic views for a single render, one-step panoramas, support for VR creation using Quadro VCA, or DGX 1. Nvidia is working on software that speeds the process of turning stereoscopic imagery into virtual reality content. Nvidia talked about this so-far-unnamed view as a way to connect different panoramas in portals. They also showed a viewer that allows a person to turn on and off lights, change the time of day, and add actions, all without re-rendering. For instance, they took content from two Black Magic cameras and created a panorama that can be seen in VR. VR was, of course, a major focus for Nvidia at Siggraph, and the company showed technology for working with content from 3D cameras. Taking a jab at their software partners who move more slowly than hardware developers might wish, Pette said that “when the ISV doesn’t step up, then it’s Nvidia’s strategy to get in there and enable it.” The comment is especially pointed considering Autodesk’s acquisition and implementation of the Arnold renderer after a long and not always happy relationship with Mental Ray.Īt Siggraph, Nvidia had a low-key announcement for the press to highlight the work the company has been doing on its SDKs-followed up by big, loud parties. He noted the professional group has identified several major themes including larger datasets, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and photorealism. “’We have to do more than just provide GPUs,” says Nvidia VP and GM ProViz/Quadro Bob Pette. Nvidia has put a concerted effort into software as a bonus and differentiator for customers. SDK updatesĬompanies that build processors will tell you they are as much software developers because a processor is just an expensive hunk of silicon and circuitry. Mental Ray for Maya is available as a beta now, and Nvidia says it will be widely available in the fall. GI Next will also work with all the shaders artists already have. Nvidia’s coming version has a special viewport mode that includes GI acceleration and also fast resolution of the model to give artists the ability to interactively work with a model and update it. Nvidia says taking advantage of the GPU means global illumination runs 20x faster. So, depending on how much global illumination is used in a scene, Nvidia’s GI Next technology can speed up rendering. With Nvidia’s acceleration of Global Illumination, Nvidia says a rendering like the room pictured above with GI turned on can take as long as an hour and 45 minutes to render on the CPU, but Nvidia’s GPU acceleration can reduce the time to around 17 minutes. Nvidia demonstrated its commitment to Mental Ray for Maya with a demonstration of its Global Rendering technology called GI Next, which uses GPU acceleration for global illumination. But Nvidia says GPU acceleration can dramatically cut rendering times. Rendering in the viewport: Nvidia says an image like this room can be considerably enriched with the use of Global Illumination-formerly a costly process in terms of rendering time. Autodesk and Nvidia basically collaborated on Mental Ray while the product was included in Maya. So, for Nvidia’s part, the company is pledging to maintain Mental Ray just like it was their very own, which, of course it is and has been since Nvidia acquired the company in 2007. However, Autodesk also pledged to continue to support other renderers as they have all along. The transition follows Autodesk’s acquisition of the Arnold renderer, and at Siggraph Autodesk demonstrated Arnold running in Maya. The first official announcement is for Nvidia’s upcoming Mental Ray for Maya. This year at Siggraph, Nvidia announced that they are taking over Mental Ray from Autodesk. With Autodesk adding the Arnold render to Maya, Nvidia pledges to maintain Mental Ray for its shared customers.
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