Nvidia introduces Quadro RTX, world’s first ray-tracing GPU

NVIDIA announced its first Turing architecture-based GPUs, which enables designers and artists to render photorealistic scenes in real time, add new AI-based capabilities to their workflows, and enjoy fluid interactivity with complex models and scenes.

Unveiled by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the annual SIGGRAPH conference, the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000, Quadro RTX 6000 and Quadro RTX 5000 bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing, AI, advanced shading and simulation to creative professionals. Also announced was the Quadro RTX Server, a reference architecture for highly configurable, on-demand rendering and virtual workstation solutions from the data centre.

Quadro RTX Professional GPUs

Quadro RTX GPUs are designed for demanding visual computing workloads, such as those used in film and video content creation; automotive and architectural design; and scientific visualization. They have technologies that include:

• New RT Cores to enable real-time ray tracing of objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections, refractions and global illumination.
• Turing Tensor Cores to accelerate deep neural network training and inference, which are critical to powering AI-enhanced rendering, products and services.
• 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 to improve the performance of complex visual effects and graphics-intensive experiences.
• The first implementation of ultra-fast Samsung 16Gb GDDR6 memory to support more complex designs, massive architectural datasets, 8K movie content and more.
• NVIDIA NVLink to combine 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.
• Hardware support for USB Type-C and VirtualLink, a new open industry standard being developed to meet the power, display and bandwidth demands of next-generation VR headsets through a single USB-C connector.
• New and enhanced technologies to improve the performance of VR applications, including Variable Rate Shading, Multi-View Rendering and VRWorks Audio.

Quadro RTX Server

The Quadro RTX Server defines a new standard for on-demand rendering in the data centre, enabling easy configuration of on-demand to render nodes for batch and interactive rendering.

It combines Quadro RTX GPUs with 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, increasing the density of the data centre. End-users can also easily provision render nodes and workstations based on their specific needs.

With the 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 centres, at one-quarter of the cost of CPU-only render farms.

Industry Support for Quadro RTX

The makers of the world’s most widely used design and creative applications are already working 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, rasterisation, 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 through a range of creative applications and tools.

Quadro RTX 8000 with 48GB memory will command an estimated street price of USD 10,000. The Quadro RTX 6000 with 24GB memory will be priced at USD 6,300 and the Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB memory will cost  USD 2,300 ESP. They will be available starting in the fourth quarter of 2018 on Nvidia’s official website.

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