NVIDIA

5 Reasons to Choose NVIDIA GPUs For Stunning Performance in Adobe Creative Cloud

2013-06-19T16:29:33Z

Adobe has just released its most powerful set of professional desktop applications for digital content creation with the new Adobe Creative Cloud. For creative pros looking for the fastest performance across Adobe’s offerings, there’s no question the latest NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs set the standard.

Here is a quick rundown on how NVIDIA GPUs provide ultra-fast acceleration for five important new Adobe applications.

Premiere Pro CC – Smooth, Real-Time Video Editing

Adobe Premiere Pro has used NVIDIA GPUs for many years to enable smooth, real-time, interactive video editing with the Mercury Playback Engine, jointly developed by Adobe and NVIDIA. Now with multi-GPU support, it delivers up to 18x faster rendering and compression than a competing CPU for today’s most challenging video and D-Cinema formats, including DSLR, RED 4 and 5K native footage.

In addition, the integration of the GPU-accelerated Lumetri Deep Color Engine simplifies the workflow by allowing SpeedGrade layer-based color grading and “Looks” to be easily accessed directly from within Premiere Pro CC. If you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber, be sure to upgrade to the new Lumetri-optimized NVIDIA Quadro Performance Driver to accelerate Quadro performance by up to 200% compared to the pre-release version of Premiere Pro CC.

After Effects CC – Motion Graphics Simplified and Accelerated

Adobe After Effects CC 3D Ray Tracing

Adobe After Effects CC simplifies and accelerates motion graphics workflows with its powerful 3D ray-traced rendering engine. Based on NVIDIA OptiX technology, the 3D ray tracing enables realistic geometric text and shapes to be designed quickly in 3D space, eliminating the traditional time-consuming back and forth with external 3D tools.

This feature is accelerated only with NVIDIA GPUs, performing up to 23x faster than a high-end CPU or any competitive GPU. In addition, artists can now smoothly interact between 3D ray tracing and Adobe’s newly integrated Live 3D pipeline for Cinema 4D Lite.

SpeedGrade CC – Living Up to its Name

NVIDIA Quadro GPUs accelerate Adobe SpeedGrade CC for real-time professional color-grading performance in the Lumetri Deep Color Engine, including quick and intuitive real-time grading of RAW, HDR or stereo 3D content. Also, professional colorists can use the new Look Manager to easily organize and access grading presets.

Photoshop CC – Even Better Than The Real Thing

Whether you’re a professional designer or a consumer photo enthusiast, Photoshop CC provides the speed and power to stretch your photographic imagination. Along with 30 other GPU-accelerated features in the Mercury Graphics Engine, some of the most popular improved GPU-accelerated tools include the Blur Gallery, with its simple, on-canvas controls for immediate results; and the all-new Smart Sharpen feature for better responsiveness in creating images with precisely controlled shadows, highlights and noise reduction. And with Quadro GPUs, subtle transitions and gradients can be faithfully reproduced with 30-bit Deep Color support.

Adobe Anywhere – NVIDIA Tesla GPU-Accelerated Video Workflow Collaboration

Although not a part of Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Anywhere promises to be a great tool for collaborative video productions. It integrates Adobe Premiere Pro, Prelude and future versions of After Effects to enable editors, visual effects artists and other broadcast professionals to work together seamlessly using centralized media across virtually any network. Adobe and NVIDIA worked together to deliver the ultra-fast performance and smooth remote accessibility required in the Adobe-recommended servers – all accelerated exclusively by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.

Create Without Boundaries. What’s Next?

With NVIDIA, creative pros get the fastest acceleration across the broadest choices of Adobe offerings. So what do you need most out of your professional video and imaging software and hardware tools? Let us know what matters most and what you’d like to see next.

And to learn more about how NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla products enable Adobe’s leading creative tools, click here.

Visual Computing’s Ascent Gives NVIDIA Room to Expand Its Business Model

2013-06-18T21:06:18Z

The IT world is being upended.

PC sales are declining with the rise of smartphones and tablets. High-definition screens are proliferating, showing up on most every machine. Android is increasingly pervasive. Yesterday’s PC industry, which produced several hundred million units a year, will soon become a computing-devices industry that produces many billions of units a year. And visual computing is at the epicenter of it all.

The consequences of these changes are apparent everywhere. New industry leaders are emerging. Companies differentiate not only on products but on business models. Some create systems from industry-standard chips. Others are vertically integrated and build their own chips, systems, software and even services. Some do both.

For chip-makers like NVIDIA that invent fundamental advances, this disruption provides an opening to expand our business model. Not so long ago, we only made and sold GPU chips, albeit the world’s fastest ones. Five years ago, we introduced Tegra, a system on a chip. More recently, GRID – a complete system that streams cloud games and other graphics-rich content – as well as the SHIELD gaming portable have been unveiled.

But it’s not practical to build silicon or systems to address every part of the expanding market. Adopting a new business approach will allow us to address the universe of devices.

So, our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market.

The reality is that we’ve done this in the past. We licensed an earlier GPU core to Sony for the Playstation 3. And we receive more than $250 million a year from Intel as a license fee for our visual computing patents.

Now, the explosion of Android devices presents an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate this effort.

NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture is the world’s most advanced, most efficient GPU.

We’ll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world’s most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores. Through our efforts designing Tegra into mobile devices, we’ve gained valuable experience designing for the smallest power envelopes. As a result, Kepler can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers.

Kepler is the basis for currently shipping GeForce, Quadro and Tesla GPUs, as well as our next-generation Tegra mobile processor codenamed Logan. Licensees will receive all necessary designs, collateral and support to integrate NVIDIA’s powerful graphics cores into their devices.

We’ll also offer licensing rights to our visual computing portfolio. This will enable licensees to develop their own GPU functionality while enjoying design freedom under the best visual computing patent portfolio in the world.

This opportunity simply didn’t exist several years ago because there was really just one computing device – the PC. But the swirling universe of new computing devices provides new opportunities to license our GPU core or visual computing portfolio.

As the world leader in visual computing technology, we believe we’re uniquely positioned to benefit. We invest more in R&D in this area than any other company in the world – over $1 billion annually and more than $6 billion since our founding. The vast majority of our 8,500 employees are engaged in these efforts, and we have more than 5,500 patents issued and pending – the industry’s best visual computing patent portfolio.

But more importantly, more devices will have the potential to take advantage of our investments. That means more of the planet’s users will be able to enjoy our advanced graphics technologies. And that’s what really gets us excited here at NVIDIA.

How GPUs Help Machines Understand What You’re Saying

2013-06-19T16:46:31Z

People talking to machines figure in nearly every sci-fi movie and TV series.

From “Knight Rider” to “Lost in Space” to “Star Trek,” Hollywood has long envisioned a future where people interact naturally with computers and other devices.

This anticipated future isn’t that far off, thanks to Nuance, the leader in speech recognition technology.

An age of ubiquitous “intelligent systems” is coming, according to the company’s CTO, Vlad Sejnoha, in a recent story in Forbes magazine. It’s one where computers will “communicate with people through voice, text, vision, touch and gestures, and will factor in ambient information like location or motion to understand context, giving greater relevance of every interaction,” he wrote.

Sejnoha isn’t talking about advances 5, 10 or 20 years down the line. You can already see them right now.

Training these systems to run accurate speech recognition software takes a massive amount of computational power, which is why the company has turned to NVIDIA’s GPUs.

Training Neural Networks Using GPUs

Nuance’s speech recognition software has already been adopted by companies across a broad number of industries, including the entertainment, financial, healthcare, and mobile markets.

Powering 12 billion customer service calls, 5 billion mobile cloud transactions and 25 million voice-enabled cars each year, Nuance uses NVIDIA GPUs to train models that mimic the structure of the human brain, called “artificial neural networks.”

Neural network models learn in a manner similar to the way children learn new words by being presented with lots of examples.

Nuance trains their neural network models to recognize different words by using vast quantities of audio data.

The larger the training set and the greater the size of the neural network, the better the speech recognition. But teaching these large neural networks to identify meaning from the variability introduced by differing environments and accents can take many weeks on a traditional CPU-only computer. With GPUs, Nuance cuts this time to days.

“GPUs are significantly speeding up the training on very large amounts of our data, and allow us to rapidly explore novel algorithms and training techniques,” said Sejnoha. “The resulting enhanced models deliver improved accuracy across all of Nuance’s core speech technologies used in healthcare, enterprise and mobile-consumer markets.”

Nuance wants to fundamentally change how technology adapts to people. And, Sejnoha envisions a day soon in which giving a voice command to your phone will be like having your own personal assistant standing by.

Couple this with speech recognition technology and self-driving cars and “Knight Rider” will become a reality.

I am a big science fiction fan. I’d love to hear from other sci-fi fans on what new capabilities they think this will enable.

Where Will You Play SHIELD? E3 Attendees Confess

2013-06-13T22:01:41Z

In the backyard. In bed. In the bathroom. In the office while the boss isn’t looking.

Thousands of gamers at the annual E3 videogame conference in Los Angeles are filing through our booth this week to get hands-on time with SHIELD, NVIDIA’s portable gaming device.

Playing with SHIELD.

And they’re already thinking about where they’ll use the device to sneak in some gaming. About two dozen SHIELDs loaded with more than twenty games were placed out for the show attendees to play with.

“I’m going to play this on my couch, while my son is watching Sesame Street,” Tiffany Marshall said, as she used a flamethrower to toast zombies. “He doesn’t need to see this kind of thing – but I love zombie games.”

Bruno Vlasky wasn’t afraid to say what other attendees merely hinted at. Where does he plan to use his? “In the bathroom,” he said with a grin.

SHIELD doesn’t just offer up a complete roster of Android games – but the ability to stream PC titles, giving gamers the ability to play titles like Borderlands 2, Metro: Last Light, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in places few PC gamers have gone before.

More than a few attendees were transfixed, merely grunting – eyes locked on the action — when asked what they thought of SHIELD as they blasted zombies or maneuvered through Shadowgun or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Others had no trouble talking and gaming at the same time. “I think this is great,” Dave Birt, who works at Fry’s Electronics, said as he slashed away at virtual enemies in Blood Sword.

His daughter, who was playing with a SHIELD alongside him, agreed. “This is going in my purse,” she said.

One gamer even said he saw SHIELD as the perfect way to relax when taking time off – from his job in the gaming industry.“It’s cool,” said Dan Raimondi, who works at a videogame developer. Where would he use it? “While on vacation,” he said.

Now that’s a man who likes his work.

NVIDIA staff at E3 answering questions about SHIELD.

Undercover with NVIDIA’s Guerrilla Marketing Team (Video)

2013-06-14T05:15:09Z

We can’t say who they are. We won’t say what they look like. But we can say they’re good at their job.

As show attendees crowded into bars and night clubs, a team equipped with powerful projectors roamed the streets, throwing thirty-foot high images of SHIELD gameplay onto buildings around downtown Los Angeles.

How do you tell the world about a gaming platform unlike any other amid the noise at the annual E3 video game conference at Los Angeles? You get creative.

Images of SHIELD gameplay were projected onto walls every evening at E3.

And SHIELD, our new open gaming portable, was everywhere at E3 this week.

Gamers wandered the show floor wearing black and green t-shirts bearing the SHIELD logo. Green chalk drawings of the SHIELD logo appeared on the sidewalks around the convention center and throughout the downtown LA city streets.

And at night, the specter of SHIELD hung above the heads of the show’s attendees, drawing curious looks.

It was worth the effort. That’s because even at one of the world’s biggest gaming industry gatherings, few attendees knew what SHIELD was – or what it could do.

To tell that story, gamers were lured to our booth with free t-shirts. The moment a gamer wearing the shirt stepped in front of a high-definition screen at the front of the booth, they were shown on the screen with images of SHIELD gameplay projected onto their chest.

A few won SHIELDs or our latest GeForce GPUs. The rest were ushered into our booth for hands-on time with one of roughly two dozen SHIELDs.

Word seemed to be getting out. “I had no idea what it was,” said Charlie Chiapetta, an Android game developer who stopped by NVIDIA’s booth for a t-shirt.

Now not only is he going to buy a SHIELD (“definitely”). But he’s going to add controller support to his latest Android game so that he can play it on SHIELD.

One down, thousands more to go.

Step right up: attendees who walked up to NVIDIA’s booth wearing a t-shirt with the SHIELD logo would see images of SHIELD gameplay superimposed on their chests.

7 Reasons Game Developers Rely on NVIDIA

2013-06-13T19:43:23Z

This year’s biggest upcoming games – including Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Watch Dogs, Splinter Cell: Black List, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Batman: Arkham Origins – are being built with technology from NVIDIA.

No surprise, given NVIDIA’s investment in game development, Tony Tamasi, NVIDIA’s senior vice president of content and technology told an audience of press, game developers, and industry analysts at E3 this week.

NVIDIA has more than 200 dedicated gaming engineers. Their inventions are woven into more than 56% of AA or better games. And NVIDIA now owns more than 66% of the market for the discrete GPUs powering the most sophisticated PC games.

With the latest generation of consoles adopting more ‘PC-like’ technologies, such as DirectX 11, Tony argued NVIDIA is more relevant to game developers than ever, 48% of whom are building games for the PC, more than any other platform.

Tony brought a group of them on stage to talk about what they’re building with NVIDIA technologies now:

Weirder Weapons – Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox Software showed off an upcoming downloadable content (DLC) pack for Borderlands 2 that transforms the offbeat sci-fi world of Borderlands 2 into a dungeon crawler that pits players equipped with futuristic weapons that go bang in amazing ways against armies of creepy critters.
Wider Worlds – Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, will be set in a world ten times the size of any earlier Assassin’s Creed installments, said Carsten Myhill, lead content manager at Ubisoft. Players will explore environment alive with rolling seas, roaring waterfalls, lashing rain, and exotic landscapes. “We wanted to push the visual technology as far as imaginable,” Myhill said. “Our relationship with NVIDIA helps us do that.”
Sneakier Sneakiness – Visual effects are a central part of Splinter Cell’s action, Andy Wilson, a producer at Ubisoft Toronto, said, allowing the franchise’s stealthy hero, Sam Fisher, to flit through shadows undetected. To build Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Wilson invited NVIDIA engineers to work alongside Ubisoft’s own. The result is a demo packed with lightning that illuminates darkened rooftops, slick rain-soaked walls, and characters who fog the cold London air as they exhale.
Nicer Threads – Limin Lu, senior technical director at Snail Games explained that NVIDIA’s PhysX technology lets his developers create outfits that shake and shimmy as characters move through Snail’s virtual worlds. The result: selling new clothes to players has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in Age of Wushu a game set in ancient China.
Quicker Development – Steve Sinclair, creative director for Digital Extremes, isn’t shy about it. His small studio dug deep into NVIDIA’s technology toolbox to build a game packed with big effects. Warframe which Sinclair describes as “Ninjas in Space,” is a free to play game filled with frenetic action. And, for gamers using NVIDIA’s GPUs, it’s also full of clever visual touches that give the free-to-play game a big-budget sheen.
Explodier Explosions – Everyone likes stuff that goes boom, and there’s plenty of that in the Planetside 2 a PC game coming to the PlayStation 4 later this year that pits thousands of players against one another on sprawling battlefields. Tramell Isaac, a senior art director with Sony Online Entertainment credited NVIDIA for a host of visual flourishes – among them, spectacular explosions. “The NVIDIA guys are really great to work with,” Isaac said. ‘They actually knew our game.”
Visions of What’s Next – Epic — which builds game engines for a host of cutting-edge titles — is known for gameplay demos that set the tone for each new generation of games. And Epic didn’t disappoint when it unveiled its Infiltrator demo earlier this year. The technology behind the demo: NVIDIA GPUs, said Alan Willard, senior technical artist with Epic. “Our development workstations are NVIDIA machines,” Willard said. “NVIDIA allows us to do things we wouldn’t have thought possible.”

Gamers Get Hands on with SHIELD and Our Latest GeForce GPUs at E3

2013-06-13T17:49:58Z

If you’re at E3 2013 in Los Angeles, you’ll want to swing by the Los Angeles Convention Center South Hall to check out the triangle-inspired NVIDIA booth (#2323). For those of you experiencing E3 vicariously through us, join us for a tour of the booth that is serving as our home for the entirety of the show.

The inspiration for our new booth design comes from the foundation upon which all 3D graphics technologies are built – triangles, millions upon millions of triangles. As a company dedicated to innovations in visual computing, we believe there could be no better way to connect with the gamers visiting our booth.

Attendees tried out NVIDIA’s newest GeForce GPUs, the GTX 770 and GTX 780.

Walk into the booth, and the first thing you’ll notice is the centrally located SHIELD gaming station. Dozens of SHIELD demo units stand ready to showcase some of the hottest Android gaming titles available, including Tegra 4-optimized games like Dead Trigger 2, Riptide GP 2, Blood Sword and Dead On Arrival 2.

On either side of the booth, you’ll find PC Game Streaming stations serving up high-end PC games – with all graphics settings cranked up – to SHIELD.

We’re also showing off our new GeForce GTX 770 and GTX 780 GPUs. The GeForce gaming demo stations feature games like Metro Last Light, Splinter Cell Blacklist and a new Borderlands 2 DLC called Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep.

And, if you’re at the show, make sure you stop by the NVIDIA booth and try your luck in our augmented reality (AR) t-shirt contest. When you arrive at our booth, grab a shirt and find an AR station. The SHIELD logo will morph into a video showing game trailers — unless you’re one of four lucky winners, who will win either a GeForce GTX 780 or a SHIELD.

Find the NVIDIA Booth in South Hall #2323.

How Cloud Gaming Means You Can Take It With You

2013-06-17T20:39:27Z

If you had come to me 12 years ago when I started working at NVIDIA and told me that one day I would be able to play my PC games anywhere I wanted, I would not have believed it. It seemed technologically impossible.

Flash forward to today and that is exactly what we are doing with NVIDIA GRID cloud gaming. With GRID technology, playing video games will soon be as quick and easy as watching Netflix. No more disks to shuffle or waiting for long digital downloads and patches before playing.

Two great tastes: Our GRID cloud-gaming platform and SHIELD gaming portable are a powerful combo.

As a gamer who has many different devices in my home – PC, Mac, Android – boxes, clam shells, tablets and phones – cloud gaming has always been a dream of mine. I love first-person shooters and many times, the game may only be available on Windows. My laptop happens to be an Apple, so when I travel I can’t enjoy the same games I can at home.

The beauty of cloud gaming is you can take your games anywhere, and now with NVIDIA SHIELD, you literally can take it with you. I was lucky enough to do early prototype testing of SHIELD open-platform gaming portable and being able to lie in bed and play BioShock Infinite or Metro Last Light is amazing.

Pair SHIELD with GRID and it’s a perfect marriage of portability, performance and gaming. And since it’s all in the cloud, your saved games are always available to you. You can start playing your game at home, save it and pick up again right where you left on your SHIELD. You are going to love this feature.

This year at E3 2013, we are showing off GRID streaming to a variety of devices including SHIELD, Windows PC, Android Tablets, Ouya game consoles and Apple MacBooks. It’s the future of game streaming in one location.

Showing off GRID at NVIDIA’s E3 booth.

The brains behind our cloud gaming servers are the GRID K520 and K340 boards. Both are available now for cloud gaming operators to purchase, install and deploy on the world’s first dedicated cloud gaming platform.

To expand the availability of GRID technology around the world, we are partnering with leading server manufacturers to build GRID cloud gaming servers. SuperMicro, Cirrascale, ASUS and Quanta are all working with NVIDIA. Through these partnerships, we can build a single cloud gaming server, which can stream more than seven-hundred 720p HD quality games all running from a single rack.

Our GRID software partners are also supercharging our ecosystem, building an amazing platform for streaming games. These partners – Agawi, Playcast, Ubitus and G-Cluster Technology – all are working on building cloud gaming services around the world.

It’s an exciting time to be a gamer, and I for one am proud to be working at a company that is helping define the intersection of technology and entertainment.

5 Things You Can Learn About Open Gaming at E3 in Just 5,000 Square Feet

2013-06-12T19:21:57Z

Games you can’t resell or share with your friends. Devices that don’t work with the games you’ve already purchased. Closed ecosystems that don’t work with the content services you enjoy on your tablet, smartphone, or TV without tacking on additional fees. There’s a lot of grumbling about where gaming is going.

But here’s the good news: PC gaming – the most powerful, open gaming ecosystem around – is thriving. And a new generation of mobile devices and cloud services are putting more powerful experiences into a ridiculous variety of portable devices.

We’re going to be at E3 this week in Los Angeles. And we plan to do more than just talk about where open gaming is headed. We plan to show you. Here’s five things you can learn about the future of gaming by spending a little time with us in the 5,000 square-foot black and green temple of triangles we’ve erecting on the show floor.

It’s Portable – We built SHIELD, our open, portable gaming device around Android because it’s one of the most powerful open-computing ecosystems on the planet. That means we can show our devices working with dozens of different games even before the first unit has shipped. And that you’ll be able to download the apps you already enjoy on your other Android devices – whether they involve streaming TV shows or blasting zombies — onto SHIELD the moment you open the box.
It’s Powerful – The most powerful gaming device on the planet is the PC. That’s true this year, and it’s going to be true next year thanks to GPUs that can be plugged into practically anything with a PCI slot. Our latest flagship, the GTX 780, features 2,304 Kepler GPU cores and 3 GB of GDDR 5 memory. The result: gaming machines with the kind of power once possessed only by supercomputers.
It’s Going to Be Pervasive – You rely on cloud-based services to manage email and stream movies and television shows. Next up: our GRID servers will pour next-generation games into tablets, smartphones, notebooks, and gaming portables.
Plenty More Is Coming – We can’t wait to see what entrepreneurs plug our GeForce GPUs and Tegra mobile processors into next. Take Razer, which is building mobile – and open – gaming products using our mobile GPUs. Or Ouya, which has mixed funding from fans, via Kickstarter, with our Tegra mobile processor to build a new kind of open gaming console.
It’s Pointy – Step inside NVIDIA’s booth and you’ll notice a lot of sharp edges. Here’s why: Our GPUs can pour billions of polygons onto the screen, many times each second. These polygons, in turn, are the building blocks for the computer-generated images in videogames. They’re used by scientists to visualize viruses, predict our world’s climate, and simulate the collision of galaxies. So, we figured they’d be good enough for our booth.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Pixomondo Chooses to Boldly Go with NVIDIA Quadro

2013-06-10T20:44:24Z

Faster workstations make for happier artists. Just ask Pixomondo. They labored over nearly 300 shots for the film Star Trek Into Darkness, which opened last month, grabbing strong reviews and more than $200 million in U.S. box office sales.

Prior to installing NVIDIA Quadro K4000 GPUs, the visual effects company’s systems were pushed to the brink of collapse by the immense amount of data used to make the film’s vivid sci-fi scenes. With Quadro on the job, Pixomondo artists were able to accomplish more each day without enduring long waits.

Pixomondo runs a 24-hour production cycle for feature film, television and commercial projects using its global network of facilities. Their artistic chops have been recognized with an Academy Award for HUGO and an Emmy Award for the second season of Game of Thrones.

The team there faced a whole new challenge with Star Trek Into Darkness, given its scenes of unprecedented scale. In one action-packed sequence — composed of about 80 different visual effects shots — an alien planet slowly comes into view as seen from an aircraft. The vehicle then descends through clouds and lands in an alien city.

Visual effects scene from Star Trek Into Darkness

Director J.J. Abrams wanted to be able to move the camera through scenes with maximum flexibility. So Pixomondo had to build incredible depth into the entirely computer-generated city. Each scene burst with detail — 3D images with 130 million active polygons and up to 32GB of textures.

Pixomondo’s systems did the best they could, but frustrated artists encountered response times of more than an hour. Systems frequently froze. And a 3D digital paint tool ran so slowly that artists spent nearly twice as long waiting as they did working.

Enrico Damm, who managed 25 Pixomondo CG artists on the project, described how it became impossible to navigate the massive 3D scenes: “All this data required way more power to process than was available on our workstations. And other programs started running slowly, too.”

Darkness Turned To Light

After Pixomondo tapped NVIDIA Quadro K4000 GPUs to accelerate their Autodesk 3ds Max workflow for modeling, animation and rendering, the artists could process assets much faster and work in full detail.

They could turn on shadows and move light sources around within a scene with real-time feedback. And, they no longer had to split data-heavy scenes into separate files, which would double the amount of effort and time needed to make edits.

In the end, Pixomondo had the K4000-accelerated workstations running practically 24/7. When one artist would leave for the day, another could take over on the same system.

Most importantly, they could create more accurate previews of how a scene was taking shape — and quickly fulfill the director’s vision for the shot. “Before we got these cards, I would run to the producer and scream for better machines,” said Damm. “It turns out our machines just needed a K4000 boost.”