Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Exciting News for AEC from NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2018 - Quadro RTX Series

At SIGGRAPH 2018, NVIDIA's fearless leader and entertaining guy, Jensen Huang, announces a new and improved line of Quadro graphics cards; Quadro RTX 8000, Quadro RTX 6000 and Quadro RTX 5000 due to ship later this year!

These cards bring to market, the new VirtualLink, single USB-C connector, to simplify and improve Virtual Reality (VR) and Samsung DDR6 memory. The new line also boasts direct support for real-time ray-tracing via new RT Cores and accelerated AI via new Turing Tensor Cores.
"First implementation of ultra-fast Samsung 16Gb GDDR6 memory to support more complex designs, massive architectural datasets, 8K movie content and more."

Image courtesy of NVIDIA
Our friends at Autodesk are working with NVIDIA to leverage this new technology. I am guessing...
they are not talking about Revit here, but who knows... we will have to wait and see.
“AI and real-time ray tracing are transforming the way designers and artists work,” said Amy Bunszel, senior vice president of Design & Creation Products at Autodesk. “Autodesk and NVIDIA are working together to deliver these advancements to the market and we look forward to the new tools and capabilities Quadro RTX will deliver to our customers.”
Check out these Quadro RTX specs:

GPUMemoryMemory with NVLinkRay TracingCUDA CoresTensor Cores
Quadro RTX 800048GB96GB10 GigaRays/sec4,608576
Quadro RTX 600024GB48GB10 GigaRays/sec4,608576
Quadro RTX 500016GB32GB6 GigaRays/sec3,072384

The Quadro RTX 6000 has 20% more CUDA Cores compared to its predecessor, the Quadro P6000. I previously wrote about the Quadro P5000 here: NVIDIA Quadro P5000 for AEC VR; Best Architectural Experience Yet.

"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."

Pricing 
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

For more information, check out these links:


To watch Jensen's SIGGRAPH 2018 keynote presentation: click here.

Here are a few images associated with this announcement...

Image courtesy of NVIDIA

Image courtesy of NVIDIA

Image courtesy of NVIDIA

Image courtesy of NVIDIA

Image courtesy of NVIDIA
I am not at SIGGRAPH, but have seen Jensen Huang give a keynote earlier this year at NVIDIA's 2018 GPU Technology Conference (GTX) in Silicon Valley, where I presented on VR in AEC. Here is a related NVIDIA customer story: How VR Is Helping Revitalize Downtown Duluth.

I am excited to see how this new hardware will be leveraged by software, hardware and VR companies over the next year or so. In Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) our projects are only getting more complex and improving our ability to do simulations, visualize in real-time and lean on deep learning and AI will only make our design product, i.e. buildings, more efficient and sustainable!

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