Vancouver, BC - At SIGGRAPH, Nvidia delivered tech demos and a line-up of theater presentations from industry luminaries on the latest trends and concerns of graphics professionals, as well as showcasing upcoming technologies: Quadro Virtual Graphics Technology and Project Maximus.
The Quadro Virtual Graphics Technology, also known as Project Monterey, moves the Quadro graphics card from the desktop to a remote server. This allows a user to take advantage of a Quadro graphics card via a network connection, essentially boosting the resources available to that user.
Many of the demos at the Nvidia booth were powered by Project Maximus technology. With a Quadro 6000 graphics card mated to a Tesla GPU, upcoming Maximus-powered workstations allow graphics and modeling processes to be tasked to the Quadro graphics card, with final rendering and animation tasks handled by the Tesla GPU. This decreases the time it takes to render scenes, allowing for faster turnaround times and higher-quality production.
In addition, there was a preview of Autodesk 3ds Max 2012, incorporating Nvidia iray in ActiveShade. Thanks to the collaborative efforts between Nvidia and Autodesk, 3ds Max subscribers will soon be able to interactively edit their scenes while iray renders live in the 3ds Max ActiveShade viewport. By reducing the need to continually render a scene to ensure accuracy, the next generation of 3ds Max will give graphics professionals a more efficient workflow.
Adobe was also at the Nvidia booth to show off their latest research project on 3D compositing. The demonstration showed off the power of an interactive raytraced 3D renderer within a compositing framework that allows for raytraced reflections, refractions, and accurate lighting leveraging the power of CUDA and Nvidia GPUs. Armed with this technology, a compositing expert could render 3D effects without having to learn a new tool.
To help improve remote project collaboration, the firm showcased its Quadro Virtual Graphics Technology, based on our ongoing Project Monterey research, allowing multiple production seats to be accessed remotely from mobile devices such as tablets so professionals can share and integrate their work collaboratively, without the need for individual desktop workstations for each user.