VANCOUVER — At SIGGRAPH 2018, Nvidia (nvidia.com) announced its first Turing architecture-based GPUs, which allow artists to render photorealistic scenes in realtime, add new AI-based capabilities to their workflows, and enjoy fluid interactivity with complex models and scenes. Nvidia founder/CEO Jensen Huang introduced the new products, which include the Quadro RTXTM 8000, Quadro RTX 6000 and Quadro RTX 5000. Also announced at SIGGRAPH 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,” says 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 realtime 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.”
Quadro RTX GPUs are designed for the most demanding visual computing workloads, such as those used in film and video content creation; automotive and architectural design; and scientific visualization. They far surpass the previous generation with groundbreaking technologies. Some of these technologies include new RT Cores to enable realtime ray tracing of objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections, refractions and global illumination. Turing Tensor Cores accelerate deep neural network training and inference, which are critical to powering AI-enhanced rendering, products and services. The new Turing Streaming Multiprocessor architecture, featuring up to 4,608 CUDA cores, delivers up to 16 trillion floating point operations in parallel with 16 trillion integer operations per second to accelerate complex simulation of real-world physics. Advanced programmable shading technologies improve the performance of complex visual effects and graphics-intensive experiences.
The new Quadro RTX products offer the first implementation of ultra-fast Samsung 16Gb GDDR6 memory to support more complex designs, massive architectural datasets, and 8K movie content. Nvidia’s NVLink combines two GPUs with a high-speed link to scale memory capacity up to 96GB and drive higher performance with up to 100GB/s of data transfer.
The new Quadro RTX Server defines a new standard for on-demand rendering in the datacenter, enabling easy configuration of on-demand render nodes for batch and interactive rendering. It combines Quadro RTX GPUs with new Quadro Infinity software (available in the first quarter of 2019) to deliver a powerful and flexible architecture to meet the demands of creative professionals. Quadro Infinity will enable multiple users to access a single GPU through virtual workstations, dramatically increasing the density of the datacenter. End-users can also easily provision render nodes and workstations based on their specific needs.
With industry-leading content creation and render software pre-installed, the Quadro RTX Server provides a powerful and easy-to-deploy rendering solution that can scale from small installations to the largest data centers, at one quarter of the cost of CPU-only render farms.
The makers of some of the world’s most widely used design and creative applications are already working closely with Nvidia to bring the power of Quadro RTX to customers. Developers can access these Quadro RTX features through the new NVIDIA RTX, a graphics platform that includes APIs for ray tracing, AI, rasterization, and simulation plus support for Nvidia MDL materials and Pixar USD asset interchange to transform the creative process. Initially supported by 30 ISV applications and addressing more than 50 million users, RTX can be easily accessed by professionals across industries through a range of creative applications and tools.
Quadro RTX 8000 with 48GB memory has an estimated street price of $10,000. Quadro RTX 6000 with 24GB memory will be priced around $6,300, while the Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB memory will cost $2,300. Quadro RTX GPUs will be available starting in the fourth quarter on nvidia.com.