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September 2018

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www.postmagazine.com 11 POST SEPTEMBER 2018 SIGGRAPH 2018 IN REVIEW THE SHOW MIGHT BE OVER, BUT THE ADVANCEMENTS WILL GO ON! BY LINDA ROMANELLO T he 2018 SIGGRAPH show in Vancouver last month was declared a success. With some 16,500-plus attendees from around the world, the 45 th annual conference also featured nearly 160 exhibitors on the show floor. That's where attendees had a chance to see the latest technologies, products and solutions. Here's a look at some of the highlights and big show news. NVIDIA INTRO'S REALTIME RAY TRACING SANTA CLARA, CA — Nvidia (www.nvidia. com) is truly looking to revolutionize the com- puter graphics industry. At this year's SIGGRAPH show, which took place in Vancouver last month, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang (pictured above) announced to a standing room only crowd (more than 1,200 industry professionals) the "world's first ray tracing GPU" with the introduction of the Nvidia Turing GPU ar- chitecture and the first Turing-based Quadro (top, right) products — the Quadro RTX 8000, RTX 6000 and RTX 5000 GPUs. Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and new Tensor Cores for AI inferencing. Together for the first time, they make realtime ray tracing possible. "This is the greatest leap in computer graphics since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006," said Huang. He continued that the two engines — along with a powerful compute for simulation and enhanced rasteriza- tion — are bringing in a new generation of hybrid render- ing that addresses a "$250 billion visual effects industry." "Turing is Nvidia's most important innovation in computer graphics in more than a decade," said Huang. "Hybrid rendering will change the industry, opening up amazing possibilities that enhance our lives with more beautiful designs, richer entertainment and more interac- tive experiences. The arrival of realtime ray tracing is the Holy Grail of our industry." The new Quadro RTX line brings hardware-accelerat- ed ray tracing, AI, advanced shading and simulation to creative professionals. Also announced was the Quadro RTX Server, a reference architecture for highly config- urable, on-demand rendering and virtual workstation solutions from the datacenter. Quadro GPUs Quadro RTX GPUs are designed for demanding visual computing work- loads, such as those used in film and video content creation; automotive and architectural design; and scientific visualization. They surpass the previous generation with groundbreak- ing technologies, including: 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 ser- vices; new Turing Streaming Multiprocessor architecture features up to 4,608 CUDA cores and 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 programma- ble shading technologies to improve the performance of complex visual effects and graphics-intensive experi- ences; the first implementation of ultra-fast Samsung 16Gb GDDR6 memory to support more complex designs, massive architectural datasets, 8K movie content and more; and new and enhanced technologies to improve performance of VR applications. Quadro RTX Server The Quadro RTX Server addresses on-demand rendering in the datacenter, enabling easy configuration of on-de- mand 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 de- mands of creative professionals. Quadro RTX GPUs will be available starting in the fourth quarter on Nvidia.com. The Quadro RTX 8000

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