Monthly Archives: July 2022

More than 160 years after the legendary Pony Express delivery service completed its first route, a new generation of “Pony”-emblazoned vehicles are taking an AI-powered approach to long-haul delivery.

Autonomous driving company Pony.ai announced today a partnership with SANY Heavy Truck (SANY), China’s largest heavy equipment manufacturer, to jointly develop level 4 autonomous trucks. The vehicles will run on the Pony.ai autonomous driving controller (ADC), built on NVIDIA DRIVE Orin.

The joint venture plans to produce a mixed fleet of new energy and internal combustion engine vehicles, with the goal of increasing the share of alternative powertrains over time.

Long-haul trucks play a vital role in the global economy. Around the world, companies delivered a total of 257 billion packages in 2021 — a number expected to nearly double in four years, according to Guidehouse consultancy.

The addressable market for trucking is substantial. In 2021 alone, heavy truck sales in China exceeded 1.3 million units, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers reported.

At the same time, persistent worker shortages are putting pressure on the industry, with drivers making up 25-30% of the total cost of long-haul trucking.

Companies are beginning to turn toward autonomous trucks to help ease these bottlenecks —  Guidehouse estimates that, by 2032, more than 1.2 million automated trucks and buses will be deployed worldwide each year, with more than half of those vehicles operating in China.

Pony.ai and SANY are working to deliver automated solutions even sooner, with small-scale deliveries beginning this year, and mass production planned for 2024. Within a few years, the venture will reach an annual production of around 10,000 trucks.

From Horsepower to AI Power

The new joint venture is able to achieve near-term deployment by building these autonomous trucks on the high-performance, automotive-grade NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip.

In June, Pony.ai unveiled its latest generation ADC, designed for the low-latency and real-time deep neural network (DNN) performance necessary for safe autonomous driving. The AV platform includes both single and dual DRIVE Orin configurations, achieving 254 and 508 trillion operations per second (TOPS), respectively.

As a software-defined compute platform, DRIVE Orin is designed to handle large numbers of applications and DNNs simultaneously, while achieving systematic safety standards, to ensure safe, highly advanced intelligent driving.

With DRIVE Orin, Pony.ai and SANY’s autonomous trucks can seamlessly handle the demands of long-haul shipping, running around the clock.

Working Together for More Intelligent Delivery

Collaboration is a key driver behind deploying autonomous vehicles in the short term.

In addition to working with SANY, Pony.ai recently formed a joint venture with logistics platform provider Sinotrans, one of the largest logistics companies in China, to develop an intelligent logistics network.

By combining smart fleet management with software-defined vehicles, these joint ventures are poised to revolutionize delivery, creating a powerful standard and framework for future development in the industry.

And with NVIDIA DRIVE Orin at the core, these fleets are redefining horsepower for the long haul.

Take a trip down memory lane this week with an instantly recognizable classic, Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, joining the nearly 20 Electronic Arts games streaming from the GeForce NOW library.

Speaking of remastered, GeForce NOW members can enhance their gameplay further with improved resolution scaling in the 2.0.43 app update. When the feature is turned on, a game’s resolution will match that of the screen it’s being played on, whether PC, Mac or SHIELD TV, for better image quality. Check if your system supports Enhanced mode on this page.

Canadian gamers across British Columbia and Alberta now get a two-year NVIDIA GeForce NOW Priority Membership for free when they sign-up for the TELUS PureFibre Ultimate Gamer bundle at $120 CAD per month for the first two years. For more information and to sign up, visit www.telus.com/gamers.

Plus, explore the nine new titles streaming from the GeForce NOW library this week.

Embark on Your Greatest Exploit

Kane lives! The game that defined the real-time strategy genre is back, remastered in glorious 4K resolution and streaming at GeForce quality from the cloud. Lead one of two playable factions — the Global Defense Initiative or the Brotherhood of Nod — through 100+ campaign missions while building up your base, collecting resources and crushing the competition.

The collection includes the critically acclaimed titles Command & Conquer and Command & Conquer: Red Alert, along with three expansions, rebuilt multiplayer, a modernized user interface, a map editor feature, bonus footage gallery and over seven hours of remastered music.

Developed by former Westwood Studios team members at Petroglyph Games, alongside the Command & Conquer player community, the collection maintains the “easy-to-play, difficult-to-master” quality that fans know and love about the franchise.

Stream the collection across nearly all devices, even on Macs. RTX 3080 members can command up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second from the PC and Mac apps, in the living room on the updated SHIELD TV, and on mobile devices, including the ability to stream at 120 frames per second on 120Hz Android phones. They can also conquer opponents with ultra-low latency for the best gaming sessions.

New Games on the Block

After a dose of revamped nostalgia, members can also check out the new Season 3 ‘Summer Break’ event of Ubisoft’s Riders Republic, or the newest content update for Hunt: Showdown, The Prescient Night. If that’s not enough, here are the nine new games arriving to the cloud this week:

• Sweet Transit (New release on Steam, July 28)
• Fire Commander (New release on Steam)
• Blasphemous (Epic Games Store)
• Command & Conquer Remastered Collection (Steam and Origin)
• Genesis Alpha One (Epic Games Store)
• This Is the Police (Epic Games Store)
• This Is the Police 2 (Epic Games Store)
• Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Storm Ground (Epic Games Store)
• Roguebook (Epic Games Store)

While you’re planning out how you’ll conquer your weekend, we’ve got a strategy question for you. Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter.

When it comes to strategy, the best defense is a good offense: discuss.

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) July 27, 2022

Selecting the right laptop is a lot like trying to pick the right major. Both can be challenging tasks where choosing wrongly costs countless hours. But pick the right one, and graduation is just around the corner.

The tips below can help the next generation of artists select the ideal NVIDIA Studio laptop to maximize performance for the critical workload demands of their unique creative fields — all within budget.

Students face a wide range of creative fields — including 3D animation, video, graphic design and photography — that require differing levels of performance and raise a gauntlet of questions: What laptop specs are needed for specific workflows? How will this laptop perform for the most challenging projects? How can one future-proof their digital canvas?

Studio laptops are the perfect back-to-school tool, featuring NVIDIA RTX GPUs dedicated to accelerating 3D, video and AI features — especially 3D rendering and video editing. The most popular creative apps have been optimized to run on RTX GPUs for faster performance. These purpose-built laptops feature vivid, color-accurate displays and blazing-fast memory and storage to boost creative workflows.

An AI for Animation

3D students create new worlds from scratch — shaping 3D objects and scenes with modeling tools, bringing characters to life with animation features, and creating realistic volumetric effects such as fire and smoke.

Animators routinely work on computationally intensive projects, often across multiple creative apps at once. The right GPU is critical for 3D workflows. Select a less powerful system, and artists will be hustling to wait.

Laptops equipped with a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU or higher — including the MSI Creator z16, available at Best Buy — tackle demanding 3D projects in real time. These high-performance graphics cards prevent slowdowns, even while working on large projects.

Students looking for an added boost can jump to a system with a GeForce RTX 3080 or 3080 Ti GPU and up to 16 gigabytes of graphics memory for extra-demanding, extra-large models. Laptops like the Razer Blade 15 with an RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU, available on Razer.com, provide incredible performance that takes 3D from concept to completion faster.

The benefits of a Studio laptop can be felt in the combination of hardware and software. All essential 3D apps — Adobe Substance 3D, Autodesk Maya, Chaos V-Ray, Unreal Engine and more — feature RTX-accelerated benefits. Real-time ray tracing, AI denoising in the viewport and countless other features empower interactive 3D modeling and animations without the painstaking wait for renders.

RTX GPUs exclusively power NVIDIA Omniverse, a ground-breaking platform that interconnects existing 3D workflows. Replacing linear pipelines with live-sync creation, artists can create like never before, at unprecedented speeds. Best of all, it’s a free download, available on all Studio laptops.

Reel-ey Fast Film Projects

Gone are the endless days spent in dingy university editing bays. Future filmmakers can grasp the same power from NVIDIA GPUs that every visual effects Oscar nominee in the last 14 years has used, in portable form.

Tasked with color grading, editing 8K raw footage, adding visual and motion effects, ordering and fine-tuning content, film students will often need to experiment with styles and techniques.

Studio laptops use NVIDIA technologies — like the NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC) for faster encoding and Tensor Cores for time-saving AI features — to rapidly accelerate video work, giving students the necessary time to hone their craft.

These laptops also feature best-in-class displays with 100% sRGB that’s a perfect match for what most people will see, or 95% DCI-P3 for advanced editing to reach a wider range of colors on UHD and HDR monitors. Most models offer factory calibration and HDR options as well.

Students editing up to 4K footage can pick up from Dell.com the Dell XPS 15 with a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU. Or, they can make the leap to the Dell XPS 17 with a GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU and larger screen.

The proper GPU depends on a project’s needs. Film students will want the power of either a GeForce RTX 3060 or 3070 Laptop GPU to ensure they can comfortably work with up to 6K footage. The ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 is available from Amazon, configured with an RTX 3060, RTX 3070 or RTX 3080 Laptop GPU. The handy ScreenPad Plus 14-inch 4K matte touch screen, the Duo’s secondary display, is perfect for displaying video timelines.

For video work that’s in 8K RAW, or heavy on visual effects, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU is highly recommended. This GPU features 16 gigabytes of dedicated VRAM, like the ones recommended for 3D animation, ensuring smooth production.

RTX GPUs feature a hardware-based encoder and decoder: NVENC and NVDEC. Offloading these compute-intensive tasks from the CPU enables industry-leading render speeds, plus smooth playback and scrubbing of high-res video. Color-correction tools in Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve are GPU accelerated, as well as 30+ visual and motion features in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Students also have access to time-saving AI features like DaVinci Resolve’s Face Recognition for automatically tagging clips and Speedwarp to produce stunning slow motion. AI also improves production quality, like with Topaz Labs Video Enhance AI, which increases video resolution while retaining high-fidelity details with a single click.

Studio laptops with GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs speed up every phase of the video production process.

AI-Accelerated Photography and Graphic Design

Capturing the perfect shot is only the start these days. Photography majors also have to touch up their photos — adjusting lighting and shadows, applying filters and layers, as well as tweaking other fine details. Graphic design students will perform similar tasks, with a greater emphasis on web design, graphics and more.

While many modern computers are capable of accomplishing these tasks, all of the popular applications have AI-accelerated features that can dramatically improve efficiency when paired with GeForce RTX GPUs found in NVIDIA Studio laptops.

The nicely equipped Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio offers an optional GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU, giving it ample power to tackle an ever-growing list of RTX-accelerated apps and AI features. Available at Microsoft.com, the boundary-pushing design lets students flex their creative muscles on the sleek 14.4-inch PixelSense Flow touch screen. Its versatile design ensures photographers can touch up their photos, their way.

Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7i Pro X with a GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU is where powerful performance meets real portability. Great for on-the-go workflows, the laptop handles all photography and graphic design tasks with ease. Its 100% sRGB color space and 100% color-volume display is calibrated for true-to-life Delta E<1 accuracy. The stylish, ultra-slim laptop weighs about three pounds and has an impressive battery life for those long classroom lectures.

AI features reduce repetitious tasks for students on the go. Adobe Photoshop’s RTX-accelerated Super Resolution uses AI to upscale images with higher quality than standard methods. Photoshop Lightroom’s Enhance Details feature refines fine color details of high-resolution RAW images.

Features like Select Subject, which isolates people, and Select Sky, which captures skylines, are massive time-savers. Consider Topaz Lab’s collection of AI apps that denoise, increase resolution and sharpen images with a click.

Systems for STEM

The science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields are growing in just about every way imaginable. More jobs, applications, majors and students are centering on STEM.

Studio laptops are equipped with NVIDIA RTX GPUs that provide acceleration for the top engineering, computer science, data science and economics applications. With real-time rendering for complex designs and simulations, faster image and signal processing, and the ability to develop larger, more accurate AI and data science models, students can spend more time learning and less time waiting.

Ansys Discovery’s Live Simulation mode only runs on NVIDIA GPUs, like the HP Envy 16 available at HP.com and Acer ConceptD 5 Pro from B&H. Both Studio laptops come equipped with a GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU.

Engineering students looking for additional computer power can upgrade to a Studio laptop with an RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU to run SOLIDWORKS up to 8x faster than with the average GPU. The same system is capable of running RAPIDS — GPU-accelerated data analytics and machine learning — up to 15x faster than an average laptop, while TensorFlow and ResNet50 training clocks in at a whopping 50x faster.

Get Your Game On

NVIDIA Studio laptops accelerate coursework, giving students loads of free time back — time that could be spent gaming. And Studio laptops come equipped with all the GeForce RTX benefits for gaming, delivering the most realistic and immersive graphics, increased frame rates with DLSS, the lowest system latency for competitive gaming, and stutter-free, top-quality live streaming.

Live streaming has become all the rage, and having a system that can keep up is essential. Fortunately, GeForce RTX Laptop GPUs scale with dream streams.

Studio laptops with a GeForce RTX 3070 or 3070 Ti Laptop GPU are the sweet spot for live streaming, offering 1080p streams while gaming in 1440p with real-time ray tracing and DLSS. The GIGABYTE AERO 15 is available in a variety of configurations from Amazon, giving creative gamers a range of options.

The NVIDIA Broadcast app, free to download for RTX GPU owners, has several powerful AI features. Audio effects such as noise and echo removal, paired with visual effects like virtual background and auto frame, deliver professional-grade visuals with a single click.

For a break from class, Studio laptops deliver phenomenal PC gaming experiences.

The NVIDIA Studio Advantage 

Studio laptops come with a serious advantage for content creators and students — NVIDIA Studio technology to speed up content creation, including AI tools for editing and exclusive apps that elevate content.

Studio laptops come equipped with the most advanced hardware for content creation, powered by RTX GPUs with dedicated hardware for 3D workflows, video and AI.

The Studio suite of apps, exclusively available and free to RTX GPU owners, includes NVIDIA Omniverse for collaborative 3D editing, Broadcast for live streaming AI tools and Canvas for painting beautiful landscapes with AI.

Studio laptops and popular creative apps are supported by NVIDIA Studio Drivers — which come preinstalled to optimize creative apps and are extensively tested to deliver maximum reliability.

Artists looking to sharpen their skills can also access the NVIDIA Studio YouTube channel, an ever-growing collection of step-by-step tutorials from renowned artists, inspiring community showcases and more, assisting in content-creation education.

And, for a limited time, creators can purchase a Studio laptop and get Adobe Creative Cloud free for three months — a $238 value. This offer is valid for new and existing customers.

Learn how Studio systems take content creation to the next level. Check out the compare GPU page for a deeper dive, including options for professionals.

Check out the weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology accelerates creative workflows.

Follow NVIDIA Studio on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Get updates directly by signing up for the NVIDIA Studio newsletter.

Sports produce a slew of data. In a game of cricket, for example, each play generates millions of video-frame data points for a sports analyst to scrutinize, according to Masoumeh Izadi, managing director of deep-tech startup TVConal.

The Singapore-based company uses NVIDIA AI and computer vision to power its sports video analytics platform, which enables users — including sports teams, leagues and TV broadcasters — to gain performance insights from these massive amounts of data in real time.

Short for Television Content Analytics, TVConal provides video analytics for a variety of sports, with a focus on cricket, tennis, badminton and football.

Its platform — powered by the NVIDIA Metropolis application framework for vision AI — can detect important in-game events, model athlete behavior, make movement predictions and more. It all helps dissect the minute details in sports, enabling teams to make smarter decisions on the field.

TVConal is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a free program that supports startups revolutionizing industries with cutting-edge technology.

Automated Match Tagging

Match tagging — creating a timeline of significant in-game events — is crucial to sports video analytics. Tags are used to generate detailed reports that provide performance statistics and visual feedback for referees, coaches, athletes and fans.

Since plays and other in-game events occur in mere instants, up to 20 loggers work together to accomplish live tagging for some sports matches, according to Izadi. This can be time consuming and labor intensive.

With TVConal’s platform, sports analysts can extract insights from video frames with just a few clicks — as AI helps to automatically and accurately tag matches in real time. This gives analysts the time to dig deeper into the data and provide more detailed feedback for teams.

The platform can also catch critical moments or foul plays that the naked eye might miss.

“If a player does an illegal action that’s beyond a human’s ability to process in a few milliseconds, the platform can detect that and inform the umpires to take an action just in time,” Izadi said.

TVConal’s platform is built using NVIDIA Metropolis, which simplifies the development, deployment and scale of AI-enabled video analytics applications from edge to cloud. Metropolis includes pretrained models, training and optimization tools, software development kits, CUDA-X libraries and more — all optimized to run on NVIDIA-Certified Systems based on the NVIDIA EGX enterprise platform for accelerated computing.

“NVIDIA’s software tools, frameworks and hardware allow us to iterate faster and bring ideas to market with shortened life cycles and reduced costs,” Izadi said.

NVIDIA GPU-accelerated compute resources used in TVConal’s platform include the NVIDIA Jetson platform for AI at the edge, RTX 3090 workstations on-prem and Tesla V100 and A100 in the cloud.  

TVConal uses the NVIDIA DeepStream SDK to simplify video processing pipelines; NVIDIA pretrained models and the TAO toolkit to accelerate AI training; and the NVIDIA TensorRT SDK to optimize inference.

DeepStream enabled the TVConal team to process live video and audio streams in real time — the necessary speed to match video frame rates. In addition, the TensorRT library helped TVConal convert its machine learning models to more quickly process data, while maintaining accuracy.

And as a member of NVIDIA Inception, TVConal has access to technical resources, industry experts and go-to-market support.

The company’s clients include international production company NEP Group, the Pakistan Cricket Board and others.

“There is an increasing volume of sports content to extract value from,” said Izadi, highlighting that the global sports analytics market size is expected to grow over 20% by 2028. “Automated video processing is revolutionary in sports, and we are excited to build more advanced models and pipelines to keep the revolution going.”

More innovative players worldwide are using NVIDIA Metropolis for sports analytics, including startups Pixellot, Track160 and Veo.

Watch an on-demand NVIDIA GTC session about how AI is revolutionizing the sports industry — better predicting competition outcomes, improving performance and increasing viewers’ quality expectations.

Learn more about NVIDIA Metropolis and apply to join NVIDIA Inception.