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Nvidia Unveils Quadro RTX, a Raytracing GPU
- asparagui 8y ago96GB of RAM with a NVLink connection! It will be interesting to see what happens on the RTX 2080 front next week, am hoping we finally get more RAM!
- LeoNatan25 8y agoYes, need at least 32GB vram to render them console ports.
- boulos 8y agoDisclosure: I work on Google Cloud. You don’t need to wait, you can put together 8xV100s with NVLINK on major clouds including GCE and AWS. That’s 128 GB of densely connected HBM2.
- abledon 8y agoMay I ask... what on earth does one do with 96GB of GPU ram? I mean , what type of model or problem uses this? Pix2pix at 4K resolution?
- TomVDB 8y agoI think it’s used to load all the geometry of really a complex scene with a lot of geometry. (Think Pixar movie.) With ray tracing, if you can’t load the whole scene in memory, it’s simply not going to work. Disney recently released a scene of Moana for public use. It has 15 billion primitives! http://www.cgchannel.com/2018/07/download-disneys-data-set-for-motunui-island-from-moana/ http://www.cgchannel.com/2018/07/download-disneys-data-set-f...
- dahart 8y ago> Disney recently released a scene of Moana for public use. It has 15 billion primitives! FWIW, that’s after instancing, which doesn’t take up much memory. The Moana scene’s data files are mostly ptx textures, the geometry is only a fraction of it. The subd geometry might expand to be larger in memory than the textures, though, depending on if it’s subsivided and how much.
- TomVDB 8y agoDo you by any chance know how much RAM the CPUs in a render farm need? That would help to put the 48GB in context... Answering my own question: http://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/07/08/moana-island-pbrt-1.html http://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/07/08/moana-island-pbrt-1.ht... “...with memory use upward of 70 GB during rendering.” The author is later able to reduce the amount of memory significantly by rewriting small parts of his renderer.
- dahart 8y agoDepends heavily on the production & team tools/workflow, and it’s been a few years since I was in production, but I personally believe hundreds of GBs is reasonably common. The Moana scene data in PBRT form doesn’t quite contain all the data they had in production, and I don’t know, but PBRT might be better about texture caching than some production renderers too.
- dahart 8y agoTextures is a big one. Film rendering sometimes references terabytes of textures.
- tomxor 8y agoIs this path tracing or ray tracing? both seem to be mentioned. The examples look too physically accurate for ray tracing but I know it's often incorrectly used as a synonym for a superset of path tracing (which it's not).
- petermcneeley 8y agoThese terms tend to be used interchangeably. In the context of your original quote I think path tracing is the more accurate term. Even Arnold Renderer is described as a raytracer. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_(software) ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126961
- tntn 8y agoMost resources I've seen refer to the whole class of methods that involve tracing rays as "raytracing," and use "path tracing" to refer to the special case of raytracing with a Monte Carlo integrator. I'm not sure why you are so adamant that it is incorrect; it's fairly common to refer to more than just ray tracing with a Whitted integrator with the term.
- modeless 8y agoIt is not incorrect to use "ray tracing" as a generic term. Path tracing is a kind of ray tracing. The actual process accelerated by the hardware is finding the intersection of a ray with a set of triangles, which can be used for any kind of ray tracing including path tracing.
- tomxor 8y agoI disagree, it's quite a different algorithm, the main difference being ray tracing traces a path to each light in the scene at each intersection which requires far less steps to produce a visually pleasing image but is physically inaccurate, whereas path tracing takes no shortcuts, it traces a new ray at each intersection based only on the BRDF function until it either reaches the recursion limit or hits a light source, this is why it's so accurate but slow... It's not an extension of the ray tracing algorithm. But as others point out I suppose this hardware works at a lower level than either of these algorithms by essentially just accelerating ray intersections.
- jdietrich 8y agoAnandtech have coverage of the SIGGRAPH keynote at the link below. Headline specs for Turing: 754mm^2 die area 18.6 billion transistors up to 16TFLOPs up to 500 trillion tensor ops per second It looks like an absolute beast, but don't expect to see anything remotely like it at a consumer price point. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13215/nvidia-siggraph-2018-keynote-live-blog-4pm-pacific https://www.anandtech.com/show/13215/nvidia-siggraph-2018-ke...
- abkumar 8y agoPricing [1] since the anandtech live blog doesn't list it. * Quadro RTX 8000 with 48GB memory: $10,000 estimated street price * Quadro RTX 6000 with 24GB memory: $6,300 ESP * Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB memory: $2,300 ESP [1] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-unveils-quadro-rtx-worlds-first-ray-tracing-gpu https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-unveils-quadro-rtx...
- TheRealRiane 8y ago$10,000? They'll have people buy the whole lot anyways. Buy NVDA
- samplatt 8y agoYes, they will. Not even counting cryptomining, universities and big-businesses use NVidia-powered supercomputers with 5000+ $10k cards in them, for AI deep learning or for astrophysical modelling or other things. Previously those cards have been the ~$8k-$10k P100 or V100. Not any more.
- jrs95 8y agoWould be nice if they’d unveil the next generation of consumer GPUs instead of sitting on them just to milk more profits out of the current generation.
- athirnuaimi 8y agoTech companies rarely sit on finished engineering work. If they are not released it’s because they are not ready
- pinewurst 8y agoOr because they need to clear the older inventory a bit more
- partiallypro 8y agoI would say that happens normally, but recent reports say Nvidia has a large glut of older silicon. I'm sure they want to clear that inventory.
- 013a 8y agoIt is finished, at least the R&D. The GTX 10xx cards are based on Pascal, since which we've had Volta and now Turing. Both Volta and Turing have only been used in workstation and server class cards. There are a few things in play. - Nvidia has no competition in the consumer graphics card space; AMD is so far behind that Nvidia can release a (completely amazing) architecture in 2016 and have it still be top of class. - Consumer graphics demands are still pretty much met with Pascal, though this could be a chicken/egg problem. 4K monitors are pricey, and >60fps 4K has only now just entering the market, and even then a 1080Ti can drive it alright. At every other resolution, you get a 1070, 1070Ti, or a 1080 and you're set. The demand isn't there on the high-end, the only thing a new arch would help is delivering better performance at a cheaper price. - Every non-consumer application of GPGPUs is exploding. Rendering, AI, Cloud, they all need silicon, and every wafer you "waste" in the low margin consumer segment is a wafer that could have went to one of these markets. I mean, its not that simple, but that's the idea. - The one consumer use that is exploding (less so today, but in months past) is crypto mining, which is highly volatile. Nvidia likely doesn't want to encourage this use. You've got miners in China buying up thousands of consumer cards, and whenever crypto crashes they enter the used market, driving down demand for first party cards. - Much of the rest of the consumer markets are surprisingly dominated by AMD. AMD has consoles and Mac on lockdown. A lot of this is because Nvidia has always been unwilling to play in this space, but let's say you're senior leadership at Nvidia. You have two choices: Play with Apple and ship silicon in the Mac even though Apple themselves clearly isn't committed to the platform, or play with Amazon, Microsoft, etc and ship silicon to the datacenter, which Mac users will often end up using anyway (AI, cloud rendering, etc). And hey, you want that local processing power, just use Windows. No brainer. My guess is that they'll keep Pascal alive for 2018 to clear out inventory, and we'll see a line of Volta-based consumer cards in 2019. The want to establish a completely solid moat in these high growth markets before fishing for pennies in the consumer markets with their older established architectures.
- kayamon 8y agoIt's not the world's first ray-tracing GPU. Imagination Technologies had one ages ago. https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/ https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/
- ShroudedNight 8y agoI also remember ray-tracing being a primary use-case for the Radeon 4870 ten years ago: https://www.techpowerup.com/64104/radeon-hd4800-series-supports-a-100-ray-traced-pipeline https://www.techpowerup.com/64104/radeon-hd4800-series-suppo... Besides the increase in raw compute, what is materially different this time around?
- ah- 8y agoTheir denoising looks interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yy18s-FHWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yy18s-FHWw
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- mattnewport 8y agoHardware acceleration of BVH traversal and tight integration with the shader cores to allow efficient scheduling of shader execution and new ray generation when ray hits are detected.
- ww520 8y agoCan this be used in a VR setting? Is this the first step toward building a viable holodeck?
- shawn 8y agoIs this the first step toward building a viable holodeck? No. Don't be fooled by the marketing. No one knows how to produce realistic-looking 100% CGI. Raytracing is even worse in some respects than traditional raster based graphics, and better in other respects. Here's a heuristic that has never failed: If someone claims to have found a way to make photorealistic graphics, ignore them, because they're lying. (This is true until it isn't, but at no point in history has it ever been true, yet. But that doesn't stop thousands of people and companies from claiming it.)
- mlindner 8y agoPure raytracing sure, but raytracing assisted by other methodologies can get you farther. Imagine doing low resolution ray tracing and then compositing that information with other rendering techniques. If you raytrace then interpolate you can get really really good.
- make3 8y agoafaik raytracing is not worse if given the time
- luckydata 8y agoneeds to be combined with diffusion lighting or it doesn't look right.
- garmaine 8y agoPhoton mapping with physically based quantum BRDFs would be "realistic-looking 100% CGI." Because you'd be doing an exact physics-based simulation of electromagnetic light interacting with physically accurate materials. There's no way in hell you'd be able to do it real-time with models of sufficient detail though. So I presume you mean "... in realtime."
- aidenn0 8y agoI can't decide if the caption writer for the image was incompetent or is putting massive spin on very poor frame rates: "NVIDIA Turing architecture-based GPUs enable production-quality rendering and cinematic frame rates..." Raytracing at 24fps?
- dagenix 8y agoHow exactly is good quality Raytracing at 24 fps not impressive?
- mileycyrusXOXO 8y agoWell it takes Pixar 29 hours to raytrace a single frame, so I would consider this much faster than current methods.
- AboutTheWhisles 8y agoFirst, those render times sound hugely inflated to me. Second, this is apple and oranges. Just look at 'ray tracing' is simple and naive. Pixar uses their own renderer, PRman, which has been developed over multiple decades. There is a big difference in renders for film, including micropolygons, texture filtering, more textures, higher res textures, way fewer lighting cheats, much more customization, motion blur, depth of field, sub surface scattering, multi-layered glossy surfaces that are neither fully specular or diffuse, better area lighting models, etc.
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- prolikewh0a 8y agoWith 29 hours per frame it would take 378 years to render Toy Story 3 with ~144k frames.
- dagenix 8y agoI have no idea if the 29 hour figure is accurate. However, regardless of how long it takes, I would assume that frames are rendered in parallel.
- flipgimble 8y agoIt's important to remember that you can always make it look like you are ahead of Moore's Law curve if you are willing to spend more for silicon and the energy to power it. This appears to be a GPU design for those applications where extreme (by mobile and desktop standards) power consumption and cost can be justified. Correspondingly NVIDIA has been trying to move into the data center for deep learning and rendering. They pushed out a lot of good research on how to do the computationally expensive parts of rendering on the server, and leave the client to do the last interactive part locally. The market allows for this silicon giant because of the current Deep Learning and VR hype. If there were to be another AI and VR winter I'd expect NVIDIA's marketing to re-focus on power efficiency and architecture tweaks once again.
- ethbro 8y ago> The market allows for this silicon giant because of the current Deep Learning and VR hype. One of three things is true: 1) Nvidia has misstepped and no one will buy large, expensive chips 2) Companies are buying large, expensive chips because they're purchasing based on hype rather than use 3) Companies are buying large, expensive chips because even at their prices, their performance delivers greater business value I'd argue that improvements in ML techniques have tipped us into (3). Intel and Microsoft's fortunes weren't built on being faster: they were built on allowing businesses to do new categories of work on computers. Amdahl is the new Moore
- jchw 8y agoYou gotta trace the money, though. I don't think ML is all hype, but if you only look one level deep you can get some silly conclusions. For example, just because Nvidia can sell these things does not mean the purchaser will ultimately recoup their value, but even if they do the clients of that business might not recoup their costs. At the end of the day, a lot of people are investing huge amounts of money into ML, but it is hugely possible that this is in part due to expectations that won't actually be met in the end.
- samstave 8y ago
- gok 8y ago500 trillion tensor ops/sec? So if that’s one chip... 11x faster than a Google TPU (or ~3x faster than the four chip modules)
- p1esk 8y agoNo, that's for INT4 ops
- gok 8y agoSure, I guess I meant: if the task can be run with 4 bit math...
- p1esk 8y agoGoogle TPU does not have 4 bit ALUs.
- gok 8y agoI don’t think that negates my point? If you have tensor ops that can get away with 4-bit precision, this is a great chip for you.
- p1esk 8y agoYes, on INT4 tasks this chip will be faster than TPU. That's a fairly rare use case.
- TomVDB 8y agoIs that a limited use case because not many workloads map to INT4 or has this Avenue simply not been explored because there weren’t any INT4 processors? My understanding is that during inference, precision is often not critical, and that some workloads even work with 1 bit?
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- nielsbot 8y agoSo they're not ray tracing everything, right? If I understand correctly, they're "filling in some of the blanks" using an ML algorithm? Does that really work for general purpose rending?
- brandonjm 8y agoYes they are raytracing some pixels and filling the blanks with ML/DL. I believe you could actually ray-trace everything depending on your target output. In these demos they're targeting many dynamic lights, reflections and refractions. If you were content with less reflection bounces, less lights and lower resolution you could easily ray-trace the whole frame with 166 mil rays per frame available.
- gmueckl 8y agoWhat is your source for the ML claim? I know very decent and fast screen space filters that do kot use any learning and can work with 1spp (pure noise for the hunan eye).
- mattnewport 8y agoML based denoising for various ray tracing applications is a hot topic at SIGGRAPH this year. Here's one NVIDIA paper on the topic from last year: http://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/dnn_denoise_author.pdf http://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/... There are also some impressive new non ML based denoising results too however and it's unclear to me at the moment where NVIDIA is using ML based denoising and where they are using more traditional filters in the demos they've been showing. I think at least some of the real time ray traced ambient occulsion and soft shadow demos have been using more traditional non ML based filtering approaches.
- IshKebab 8y agoThey are ray tracing everything. They use an ML-based filter to reduce sampling noise.
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- josteink 8y agoSo... A GPU for (3D) graphics processing? That hardly sounds unique ;)
- blauditore 8y ago> revolutionizing the work of 50 million designers and artists by enabling them to render photorealistic scenes in real time Is it just me or is this extremely flowery?
- swerner 8y agoSince there's some confusion in a few threads, here a little bit of explanation. I spent the last ~18 months speeding up a production renderer for an upcoming animated feature. 29 hours for a frame is high but not unusual. Referred to as "Blinn's Law", the tendency is that scene assets grow with computing power, eating up any performance gains that you may have gained from newer hardware. Render time for an animated movie today is still in the same order of magnitude as it was in 1995, using state of the art hardware. Now, how can they do that at 25fps all of a sudden? They're not. They're using the same method, but not even remotely the same scene complexity or image fidelity. Ray tracing, and its extension path tracing, scales very well. The same algorithm that works for 500 polygons works for 500 million polygons, as long as you can fit them in memory - it's just going to be slower (building quality acceleration structures is often O(n log(n)). If 10 rays per pixel don't give you the quality you want, you can go up to 100 or 1000 rays per pixel, with render time going up respectively. For film, we're rendering hundreds of primary rays per pixel (tens of secondary rays for each primary ray), with hundreds of millions of polygons per scene. I have no insight about the scene of Nvidia's demo, but it is claimed to run at 5 rays per pixel. So even if scenes were identical, it's already 20-500 times faster just by doing 20-500 times less work. Shading complexity is also a huge difference. Production rendering uses tens of GBs up to the TB range just for textures, on top of procedural shading. Not only does the computing part of that often dominate render times (instead of the ray tracing part), but just paging texture data in and out of memory on demand can become a bottleneck by itself. That Nvidia demo is a simple scene with no I/O overhead, rendered using a fraction of the rays used for film production, on 18 billion transistors of specialised hardware. Of course it's several orders of magnitudes faster, how could it not be?
- gammateam 8y ago> That Nvidia demo is a simple scene with no I/O overhead, rendered using a fraction of the rays used for film production. But if the consumer can't tell the difference, does it matter? Many films - in this example because we are talking about films - use a variety of visual techniques to reduce the complexity. Horror films for example rarely show the antagonist. The creature is shown in the dark, for split seconds, until a final expensive moment, leaving your brain to fill the rest in. Although YOU can't unsee it, the audience, nor the studio, should care that the stormtroopers are rendered on a simple set with the snowstorm being used solely to avoid the necessity of rendering. The sound of the creature gave the effect of a complex monster lurking in the midst and I don't need a raytracing demo to show that.
- miffe 8y agoFree sync support yet?
- lagadu 8y agoHow is that relevant for professional hardware?
- _ph_ 8y agoIf any product presentation should be accompanied by lots of high quality demo videos, then this.
- agumonkey 8y agoI find this product anticlimactic. I'm gonna go back to my 8bit grayscale console.
- John_KZ 8y agoThe fact that will have reasonably priced, real-time unbiased global scene rendering within 5-10 years really blows my mind. I knew this was coming for a long time, but seeing it actually happen is so odd. After seeing the bright potential of an AI-powered future turn into a sad totalitarian reality it's nice to see a "futuristic" technology materialize with little potential for malevolent use.
- gspetr 8y agoLittle? How about ever more realistic deepfakes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake
- John_KZ 8y agoFake video is happening regardless (and a lot better) with generative neural network architectures. Also fake video was already possible, we just see its usage ""democratized"", in a way. Empowering everyone to be able to make Hollywood-grade feature films with like $10k in hardware has a lot of negative side-effects, but also a lot positive. The only problem is that video is no longer hard evidence for justice. It's a huge loss, but it happened already.
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- bhouston 8y agoUnreal and Unity are already used in TV production. This will continue. They will add some ray tracing features in the future. Real-time TV production is here and it will get more popular. The main reason isn't because of RTX but because Unreal and Unity just look amazing using current real-time techniques.
- acd 8y agoHow can you trade mark Turing the surname of Alan Turing the inventor of the Turing machine? Is this trademark violating the Lanham act 15 U.S. Code § 1052 section? Lanham act "Consists of or comprises immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute; or a geographical indication which, when used on or in connection with wines or spirits, identifies a place other than the origin of the goods and is first used on or in connection with wines or spirits by the applicant on or after one year after the date on which the WTO Agreement (as defined in section 3501(9) of title 19) enters into force with respect to the United States." "A mark that is primarily a surname does not qualify for placement on the Principal Register under the Lanham Act unless the name has become well known as a mark through advertising or long use—that is, until it acquires a secondary meaning. Until then, surname marks can only be listed on the Supplemental Register." https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1052 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1052
- tntn 8y agoHow is this any different than Tesla?
- JohnBooty 8y agoAlways irks me that nVidia claims they invented the GPU. Graphics hardware, including hardware T&L, existed long before nVidia was around. From the press release: > NVIDIA's (NASDAQ:NVDA) invention of the GPU in > 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, > redefined modern computer graphics and revolutionized > parallel computing. Errrrr, okay. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_256 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_256 > GeForce 256 was marketed as "the world's first 'GPU', > or Graphics Processing Unit", a term Nvidia defined at > the time as "a single-chip processor with integrated > transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and > rendering engines that is capable of processing a > minimum of 10 million polygons per second."[2] That's a bit like Honda claiming they invented the automobile because they came up with their own definition of "automobile" that just happens to fit one of their autos. Certainly, the Geforce series did some things first. It was the first to cram certain things onto a single chip and target it at the consumer market. But their claim to have "invented the GPU" is just silly.
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