Posts in category: nVidia AI

From smart factories to next-generation railway systems, developers and enterprises across the world are racing to fuel industrial digitalization opportunities at every scale.

Key to this is the open-source Universal Scene Description (USD) framework, or OpenUSD, along with metaverse applications powered by AI.

OpenUSD, originally developed by Pixar for large-scale feature film pipelines for animation and visual effects, offers a powerful engine for high-fidelity 3D worlds, as well as an expansive ecosystem for the era of AI and the metaverse. Across automotive, healthcare, manufacturing and other industries, businesses are adopting OpenUSD for various applications.

How Developers Use OpenUSD

Developers can use the extensibility of OpenUSD to integrate the latest AI tools, as well as top digital content-creation solutions, into their custom 3D workflows and applications.

At enterprises like BMW Group, in-house developers are building custom applications to optimize and interact with their digital twin use cases. The automaker developed an application that allows factory planners to collaborate in real time on virtual factories using NVIDIA Omniverse, an OpenUSD development platform for building and connecting 3D tools.

Startups like Move.ai, SmartCow and ipolog are also developing groundbreaking metaverse technologies with OpenUSD. Using USD in Omniverse’s modular development platform allows startups and small businesses to easily launch new tools in the metaverse for larger enterprises to use.

In addition, leading 3D solution providers, including Esri, Bentley Systems and Vectorworks, are connecting their technologies with OpenUSD to enable new capabilities in the metaverse and reach more customers. Building on OpenUSD ensures their applications can be continuously expanded to meet the industrial metaverse’s evolving needs.

“USD helps us provide customers with even more flexibility in the 3D design process,” said Dave Donley, senior director of rendering and research at Vectorworks. “By embracing USD, Vectorworks and its users are poised to lead the charge toward a more collaborative and innovative future in industries such as architecture, landscape design and entertainment.”

Why Developers Use OpenUSD

Linear and siloed workflows used to be the norm in 3D content creation. Today, enterprises must integrate their diverse, distributed, highly skilled teams and expand their offerings to remain competitive — most notably in generative AI.

Fluid design collaboration is critical for this, as is the ability for developers to work in open, modular and extensible frameworks. As the pace of AI and metaverse innovation increases, businesses attempting to build new features and capabilities in closed environments are likely to lag behind.

The 3D worlds of the metaverse — which are ushering in a new era of design, simulation and AI advancements — require a common framework to enable scalability and interconnection. As with the 2D web, the success of the metaverse will depend on its interoperability as governed by open standards and protocols.

OpenUSD is well-suited for diverse metaverse applications due to its extensibility and ability to support a wide variety of properties for defining and rendering objects. More than just a file format, the interchange framework connects a robust ecosystem of creative and developer tools.

Cesium, a platform for 3D geospatial workflows, uses USD to enable enterprises building industrial metaverse applications in construction, robotics, simulation and digital twins for climate change.

“Leveraging the interoperability of USD with 3D Tiles and glTF, we create additional workflows, like importing content from Bentley LumenRT, Trimble Sketchup, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk 3ds Max and Esri ArcGIS CityEngine into NVIDIA Omniverse in precise 3D geospatial context,” said Shehzan Mohammed, director of 3D engineering and ecosystems at Cesium.

3D tools interoperate seamlessly with OpenUSD, allowing users to work efficiently across various tools and pipelines. USD’s efficient referencing and layering allows teams to non-destructively edit projects in real time and preserve all source content, enabling iterative, collaborative workflows. Designed to handle large-scale scenes with millions of assets and complex datasets, OpenUSD is ideal for developers building applications to support virtual worlds.

Learn more about the unique capabilities of USD in the video below, as well as in the article, “What You Need to Know About Universal Scene Description.”

Omniverse: The Platform for Building With OpenUSD

NVIDIA Omniverse interconnects diverse 3D tools and datasets with OpenUSD to unlock new possibilities for large-scale, physically accurate virtual worlds and industrial digitalization applications.

Built for developers by developers, Omniverse is open and highly modular. Omniverse Code and Kit enable developers to build advanced, real-time simulation solutions for industrial digitalization and perception AI. They can use all of the platform’s key components, such as Omniverse Nucleus and RTX Renderer, and core technologies to develop solutions designed for their customer needs.

People of all experience levels can build with OpenUSD on Omniverse. Beginners can develop tools with little to no code using existing platform extensions. Experienced developers can use templates or build from scratch with Python or C++ to produce their own powerful apps and extensions — as well as combine them with existing ones to create tools customized for their needs. In addition, visual programming tools like OmniGraph make it easy to set up and perform advanced procedural tasks with just a few clicks.

For example, a warehouse simulation tool can be developed by combining extensions for building layout, warehouse objects, smart object placement and user interfaces that can be fine-tuned for specific needs.

Plus, Omniverse foundation applications like USD Composer and USD Presenter are modular, so users can work with just the functionality they need, and add their own code or extensions to customize apps for different workflows. Developers can easily access and tap into the Python source code of Omniverse extensions in Omniverse Kit.

See What’s Next for OpenUSD

Learn about the latest advancements in design, simulation and AI by joining NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics conference running Aug. 6-10. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote address on Tuesday, Aug. 8, at 8 a.m. PT.

Join NVIDIA for OpenUSD day at SIGGRAPH on Wednesday, Aug. 9, starting at 9 a.m. PT, for a full day of presentations about the framework’s latest developments. NVIDIA will also present award-winning research on rendering and generative AI, as well as host various sessions and hands-on labs for attendees to experience the latest developments in OpenUSD, graphics and more.

Get started with NVIDIA Omniverse by downloading the standard license free, or learn how Omniverse Enterprise can connect your team. Developers can check out these Omniverse resources to begin building on the platform. 

Stay up to date on the platform by subscribing to the newsletter and following NVIDIA Omniverse on Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Threads and Twitter. For more, check out our forums, Discord server, Twitch and YouTube channels.

AI is improving ways to power the world by tapping the sun and the wind, along with cutting-edge technologies.

The latest episode in the I AM AI video series showcases how artificial intelligence can help optimize solar and wind farms, simulate climate and weather, enhance power grid reliability and resilience, advance carbon capture and power fusion breakthroughs.

It’s all enabled by NVIDIA and its energy-conscious partners, as they use and develop technology breakthroughs for a cleaner, safer, more sustainable future.

Homes and businesses need access to reliable, affordable fuel and electricity to power day-to-day activities.

Renewable energy sources — such as sunlight, wind and water — are scaling in deployments and available capacity. But they also burden legacy power grids built for traditional one-way power flow: from generation plants through transmission and distribution lines to end customers.

The latest advancements in AI and accelerated computing enable energy companies and utilities to balance power supply and demand in real time and manage distributed energy resources, all while lowering monthly bills to consumers.

The enterprises and startups featured in the new I AM AI video, and below, are using such innovations for a variety of clean energy use cases.

Power-Generation Site Optimization

Companies are turning to AI to improve maintenance of renewable power-generation sites.

For example, reality capture platform DroneDeploy is using AI to evaluate solar farm layouts, maximize energy generated per site and automatically monitor the health of solar panels and other equipment in the field.

Renewable energy company Siemens Gamesa is working with NVIDIA to apply AI surrogate models to optimize its offshore wind farms to output maximum power at minimal cost. Together, the companies are exploring neural super resolution powered by the NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA Modulus platforms to accelerate high-resolution wake simulation by 4,000x compared with traditional methods–from 40 days to just 15 minutes.

Italy-based THE EDGE COMPANY, a member of the NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI partner ecosystem, is tracking endangered birds near offshore wind farms to provide operators with real-time suggestions that can help prevent collisions and protect the at-risk species.

Grid Infrastructure Maintenance

Energy grids also benefit from AI, which can help keep their infrastructure safe and efficient.

NVIDIA Metropolis partner Noteworthy AI deployed smart cameras powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge AI and robotics on Ohio-based utility FirstEnergy’s field trucks. Along with AI-enhanced computer vision, the cameras automate manual inspections of millions of power lines, poles and mounted devices.

Orbital Sidekick, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups, has used hyperspectral imagery and edge AI to detect hundreds of suspected gas and hydrocarbon leaks across the globe. This protects worker health and safety while preventing costly accidents.

And Sweden-based startup Eneryield is using AI to detect signal anomalies in undersea cables, predict equipment failures to avoid costly repairs and enhance reliability of generated power.

Climate and Weather Simulation

AI and digital twins are unleashing a new wave of climate research, offering accurate, physics-informed weather modeling, high-resolution simulations of Earth and more.

NVIDIA Inception member Open Climate Fix built transformer-based AI models trained on terabytes of satellite data. Through granular, near-term forecasts of sunny and cloudy conditions over the U.K.’s solar panels, the nonprofit product lab has improved predictions of solar-energy generation by 3x. This reduces electricity produced using fossil fuels and helps decarbonize the country’s grid.

Plus, a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and NVIDIA developed a neural operator architecture called Nested FNO to simulate pressure levels during carbon storage in a fraction of a second while doubling accuracy on certain tasks. This can help industries decarbonize and achieve emission-reduction goals.

And Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrated the first successful application of nuclear fusion — considered the holy grail of clean energy — and used AI to simulate experimental results.

Learn more about AI for autonomous operations and grid modernization in energy.

Get ready for Gunfire Games and Gearbox Publishing’s highly anticipated Remnant II, available for members to stream on GeForce NOW at launch. It leads eight new games coming to the cloud gaming platform.

Ultimate and Priority members, make sure to grab the Guild Wars 2 rewards, available now through Thursday, Aug. 31. Visit the GeForce NOW Rewards portal and opt in to rewards.

Strange New Worlds

Kick off the weekend with one of the hottest new games in the cloud. Remnant II from Gunfire Games and Gearbox Publishing, sequel to the hit game Remnant: From the Ashes, is newly launched in the cloud for members to stream.

Go head to head against new deadly creatures and god-like bosses while exploring terrifying new worlds with different types of creatures, weapons and items. With various stories woven throughout, each playthrough will be different from the last, making each experience unique for endless replayability.

Find secrets and unlock different Archetypes, each with their own special set of abilities. Members can brave it alone or team up with buddies to explore the depths of the unknown and stop an evil from destroying reality itself. Just remember — friendly fire is on, so pick your squad wisely.

Upgrade to an Ultimate membership to play Remnant II and more than 1,600 titles at RTX 4080 quality, with support for 4K 120 frames per second gameplay and ultrawide resolutions. Ultimate and Priority members can also experience higher frame rates with DLSS technology for AI-powered graphics on their RTX-powered cloud gaming rigs.

Reward Yourself

Ultimate and Priority members can now grab their free, exclusive rewards for Guild Wars 2, featuring the “Always Prepared” and “Booster” bundles, available through the end of August.

The “Always Prepared” bundle includes ten Transmutation Charges to change character appearance, a Revive Orb that returns a player to 50% health at their current location and a top hat to add style to the character. On top of that, the “Booster” bundle includes an Item Booster, Karma Booster, Experience Booster, a 10-Slot Bag and a Black Lion Miniature Claim Ticket, which can be exchanged in game for a mini-pet of choice.

Visit the GeForce NOW Rewards portal to update the settings to receive special offers and in-game goodies. Better hurry — these rewards are available for a limited time on a first-come, first-served basis.

Grab them in time for the fourth expansion of Guild Wars 2, coming to GeForce NOW at launch on Tuesday, Aug. 22. The “Secrets of the Obscure” paid expansion includes a new storyline, powerful combat options, new mount abilities and more.

Racing Into the Weekend

Remnant II is one of the eight games available this week on GeForce NOW. Check out the complete list of new games:

• Remnant II (New release on Steam, July 25)
• Let’s School (New release on Steam, July 26)
• Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival (New release on Steam, July 27)
• MotoGP23 (Steam)
• OCTOPATH TRAVELER (Epic Games Store)
• Pro Cycling Manager 2023 (Steam)
• Riders Republic (Steam)
• Starship Troopers: Extermination (Steam)

What are you planning to play this weekend? Let us know on Twitter or in the comments below.

It’s up to you to save humanity from the Root. Which Archetype are you choosing:

Challenger
Medic
Gunslinger
Handler
Hunter

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) July 26, 2023

AWS users can now access the leading performance demonstrated in industry benchmarks of AI training and inference.

The cloud giant officially switched on a new Amazon EC2 P5 instance powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. The service lets users scale generative AI, high performance computing (HPC) and other applications with a click from a browser.

The news comes in the wake of AI’s iPhone moment. Developers and researchers are using large language models (LLMs) to uncover new applications for AI almost daily. Bringing these new use cases to market requires the efficiency of accelerated computing.

The NVIDIA H100 GPU delivers supercomputing-class performance through architectural innovations including fourth-generation Tensor Cores, a new Transformer Engine for accelerating LLMs and the latest NVLink technology that lets GPUs talk to each other at 900GB/sec.

Scaling With P5 Instances

Amazon EC2 P5 instances are ideal for training and running inference for increasingly complex LLMs and computer vision models. These neural networks drive the most demanding and compute-intensive generative AI applications, including question answering, code generation, video and image generation, speech recognition and more.

P5 instances can be deployed in hyperscale clusters, called EC2 UltraClusters, made up of high-performance compute, networking and storage in the cloud. Each EC2 UltraCluster is a powerful supercomputer, enabling customers to run their most complex AI training and distributed HPC workloads across multiple systems.

So customers can run at scale applications that require high levels of communications between compute nodes, the P5 instance sports petabit-scale non-blocking networks, powered by AWS EFA, a 3,200 Gbps network interface for Amazon EC2 instances.

With P5 instances, machine learning applications can use the NVIDIA Collective Communications Library to employ as many as 20,000 H100 GPUs.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise helps users make the most of P5 instancesoptimize P5 instances. It’s a full-stack suite of software that includes more than 100 frameworks, pretrained models, AI workflows and tools to tune AI infrastructure.

Designed to streamline the development and deployment of AI applications, NVIDIA AI Enterprise addresses the complexities of building and maintaining a high-performance, secure, cloud-native AI software platform. Available in the AWS Marketplace, it offers continuous security monitoring, regular and timely patching of common vulnerabilities and exposures, API stability, and enterprise support as well as access to NVIDIA AI experts.

What Customers Are Saying

NVIDIA and AWS have collaborated for more than a dozen years to bring GPU acceleration to the cloud. The new P5 instances, the latest example of that collaboration, represents a major step forward to deliver the cutting-edge performance that enables developers to invent the next generation of AI.

Here are some examples of what customers are already saying:

Anthropic builds reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems that will have many opportunities to create value commercially and for public benefit.

“While the large, general AI systems of today can have significant benefits, they can also be unpredictable, unreliable and opaque, so our goal is to make progress on these issues and deploy systems that people find useful,” said Tom Brown, co-founder of Anthropic. “We expect P5 instances to deliver substantial price-performance benefits over P4d instances, and they’ll be available at the massive scale required for building next-generation LLMs and related products.”

Cohere, a leading pioneer in language AI, empowers every developer and enterprise to build products with world-leading natural language processing (NLP) technology while keeping their data private and secure.

“Cohere leads the charge in helping every enterprise harness the power of language AI to explore, generate, search for and act upon information in a natural and intuitive manner, deploying across multiple cloud platforms in the data environment that works best for each customer,” said Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere. “NVIDIA H100-powered Amazon EC2 P5 instances will unleash the ability of businesses to create, grow and scale faster with its computing power combined with Cohere’s state-of-the-art LLM and generative AI capabilities.”

For its part, Hugging Face is on a mission to democratize good machine learning.

“As the fastest growing open-source community for machine learning, we now provide over 150,000 pretrained models and 25,000 datasets on our platform for NLP, computer vision, biology, reinforcement learning and more,” said Julien Chaumond, chief technology officer and co-founder of Hugging Face. “We’re looking forward to using Amazon EC2 P5 instances via Amazon SageMaker at scale in UltraClusters with EFA to accelerate the delivery of new foundation AI models for everyone.”

Today, more than 450 million people around the world use Pinterest as a visual inspiration platform to shop for products personalized to their taste, find ideas and discover inspiring creators.

“We use deep learning extensively across our platform for use cases such as labeling and categorizing billions of photos that are uploaded to our platform, and visual search that provides our users the ability to go from inspiration to action,” said David Chaiken, chief architect at Pinterest. “We’re looking forward to using Amazon EC2 P5 instances featuring NVIDIA H100 GPUs, AWS EFA and UltraClusters to accelerate our product development and bring new empathetic AI-based experiences to our customers.”

Learn more about new AWS P5 instances powered by NVIDIA H100.

The world increasingly runs on code.

Accelerating the work of those who create that code will boost their productivity — and that’s just what AI startup Codeium, a member of NVIDIA’s Inception program for startups, aims to do.

On the latest episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz interviewed Codeium founder and CEO Varun Mohan and Jeff Wang, the company’s head of business, about the company’s business, about how AI is transforming software.

Codeium’s AI-powered code acceleration toolkit boasts three core features: autocomplete, chat and search.

Autocomplete intelligently suggests code segments, saving developers time by minimizing the need for writing boilerplate or unit tests.

At the same time the chat function empowers developers to rework or even create code with natural language queries, enhancing their coding efficiency while providing searchable context on the entire code base.

Noah spoke with Mohan and Wang about the future of software development with AI, and the continued, essential role of humans in the process.

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NVIDIA DGX Cloud — which delivers tools that can turn nearly any company into an AI company —  is now broadly available, with thousands of NVIDIA GPUs online on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as NVIDIA infrastructure located in the U.S. and U.K.

Unveiled at NVIDIA’s GTC conference in March, DGX Cloud is an AI supercomputing service that gives enterprises immediate access to the infrastructure and software needed to train advanced models for generative AI and other groundbreaking applications.

“Generative AI has made the rapid adoption of AI a business imperative for leading companies in every industry, driving many enterprises to seek more accelerated computing infrastructure,” said Pat Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Generative AI could add more than $4 trillion to the economy annually, turning proprietary business knowledge across a vast swath of the world’s industries into next-generation AI applications, according to recent estimates by global management consultancy McKinsey.

Industry Pioneers Transforming Business With Generative AI

Nearly every industry can benefit from generative AI, with early pioneers already leading transformative change across their markets.

Healthcare companies use DGX Cloud to train protein models to speed drug discovery and clinical reporting with natural language processing.

Financial service providers use DGX Cloud to forecast trends, optimize portfolios, build recommender systems and develop intelligent generative AI chatbots.

Insurance companies are building models to automate claims processing.

Software companies are using it to develop AI-powered features and applications.

And others are using DGX Cloud to build AI factories and digital twins of valuable assets.

Dedicated AI Supercomputing With Immediate Availability

DGX Cloud instances provide dedicated infrastructure enterprises rent on a monthly basis, ensuring customers can quickly and easily develop large, multi-node training workloads without having to wait for accelerated computing resources that are often in high demand.

“The availability of NVIDIA DGX Cloud provides a new pool of AI supercomputing resources, with nearly instantaneous access,” Moorhead said.

This simple approach to AI supercomputing removes the complexity of acquiring, deploying and managing on-premises infrastructure. Providing NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputing paired with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, DGX Cloud makes it possible for businesses everywhere to access their own AI supercomputer using a web browser.

NVIDIA AI Supercomputing and Software in a Browser

Each instance of DGX Cloud features eight NVIDIA 80GB Tensor Core GPUs for 640GB of GPU memory per node. A high-performance, low-latency fabric ensures workloads can scale across clusters of interconnected systems, allowing multiple instances to act as one massive GPU. High-performance storage is integrated into DGX Cloud to provide a complete solution.

Enterprises manage and monitor DGX Cloud training workloads using NVIDIA Base Command Platform software. The platform provides a seamless user experience across DGX Cloud and on-premises NVIDIA DGX supercomputers, so enterprises can combine resources when needed.

And DGX Cloud includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the software layer of the NVIDIA AI platform, which provides over 100 end-to-end AI frameworks and pretrained models to accelerate data science pipelines and streamline the development and deployment of production AI.

Learn more about how to get started with DGX Cloud.

Editor’s note: This post is part of our weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology improves creative workflows. We’re also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.

We’re gonna need a bigger boat this week In the NVIDIA Studio as Alessandro Mastronardi, senior artist and programmer at BBC Studios, shares heart-stopping shark videos and renders.

The shark-themed series was conceived during the artist’s recent impromptu trip to Iceland, where he saw a huge basking shark up close. “I was eager to know all about its anatomy, the way it moves and feeds,” said Mastronardi.

After deep-diving on the sharks — including great whites, hammerheads and the Elasmobranchii subclass of rays and the like — he was ready to create. Learn more about his creative journey below — there’s no-fin to lose.

His incredible visuals — alongside extraordinary shark-themed artwork from creators Maggie Molloy and Hypertaf — are featured below in the latest Studio Standout video, which spotlights incredible artists and their work.

Plus, the NVIDIA Studio #StartToFinish community challenge runs through the end of August. Use the hashtag to submit a screenshot of a favorite project featuring its beginning and ending stages for a chance to be featured on the @NVIDIAStudio and @NVIDIAOmniverse social channels.

Jaw-some Creativity

Mastronardi, based in Florence, Italy, works to bring the awe-inspiring beauty of mother nature to the masses.

“The satisfaction of studying nature in all its forms — then transforming that information and reference material into art and content used in several productions and scopes — has been my greatest pride and joy,” he said.

He starts the process by sketching ideas and concepts on paper. “This is something I’ve done since my first years, as it helps to have a clear vision of what I want to achieve,” said Mastronardi.

“Simply put, GeForce RTX GPUs are the most reliable, highest-performing, advanced graphics cards that any 3D professional can use.” — Alessandro Mastronardi

Next, Mastronardi uses ZBrush to model all of his characters. “I like to define a base shape, carefully tune proportions and anatomy, and add detail and resolution until I have a high-polygon, fully detailed, featured character that’s finely sculpted and textured,” he said. “This stage isn’t complete until I’m fully satisfied with how the character looks from every angle, and it has its own personality, so to speak.”

The artist exports characters to Blender to retopologize the high-polygon mesh into low-poly, highly optimized characters. “The key is to reproject the highest possible level of detail onto the character, so that all the details will be maintained.”

Next, Mastronardi rigs the character and sets up a skeleton, configuring all digital bones and inverse kinematics, which determine the motion of objects in the scene.

Here, Mastronardi’s PC — equipped with two GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 24GB GPUs — does the heavy lifting. Blender Cycles RTX-accelerated AI-powered OptiX ray tracing in the viewport ensures interactive, photorealistic rendering for modeling and animation.

This rigorous process delivers lifelike animations. “A lot of care has to go into the control-rig stage,” said Mastronardi. “All controls must allow for plausible and realistic deformations, with proper anatomy limits and characteristics, so that the character’s movement will look and feel realistic.”

Also using Blender, the artist sets up shaders and materials, and conducts test renders to evaluate how the characters look in different poses. When satisfied, Mastronardi prepares promotional images — built in an environment that matches the characters — and assembles a scene with added effects and props.

Often, Mastronardi inspects his models with NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting and building custom 3D tools and applications with Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). “Omniverse is my preferred platform to inspect scenes very quickly,” he said. “I like how agile and effective the interface is, as well as the quality it can deliver.”

Mastronardi exports final files using RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing in Blender Cycles for the fastest final frame render. “I love the Cycles render engine, all its features, and the quality and speed that it’s able to deliver,” he added.

Mastronardi plans to use the NVIDIA Broadcast app — from the NVIDIA Studio suite of AI-powered tools — for a new series of 3D art lectures on wildlife, coming soon. Check out Mastronardi’s animal-themed portfolio on ArtStation.

To other artists, Mastronardi would say, “Discard and forget about naysayers, those who tell you ‘No, it can’t be done.’” He added that “growing up, this was a lesson I taught myself: to believe in my own skills, and not to let negativity affect my work or vision to become a wildlife 3D artist.”

There’s some-fin special about those words.

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Learn about the latest with OpenUSD and Omniverse at SIGGRAPH, running August 6-10. Take advantage of showfloor experiences like hands-on labs, special events and demo booths — and don’t miss NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s  keynote address on Tuesday, Aug. 8, at 8 a.m. PT. 

It’s a party this GFN Thursday with several newly launched titles streaming on GeForce NOW. Revel in gaming goodness with Xenonauts 2, Viewfinder and Techtonica, among the four new games joining the cloud this week.

Portal fans, stay tuned — the Portal: Prelude RTX mod will be streaming on GeForce NOW to members soon.

Plus, find out how members can score an upcoming Guild Wars 2 premium reward.

Get ‘Em While They’re Hot!

Choose from over 1,600 games in the GeForce NOW library, starting off with the titles making their cloud debut. Be among the first to experience Xenonauts 2, Viewfinder and Techtonica from a high-performance GeForce RTX gaming rig in the cloud, without worrying about download times or system specs.

Take on a different perspective in Viewfinder, the new single-player game from Thunderful Publishing. Gamers can challenge perception, redefine reality and reshape the world around them with an instant camera. Capture pictures and bring them to life by placing them into the scene in this mind-bending reality adventure.

Those looking for something out of this world can check out Fire Hose Games’ Techtonica, set in a strangely beautiful, bioluminescent, mysterious subsurface alien universe. Play solo or with a buddy to build factories, gather resources, research new technologies and uncover long-forgotten secrets.

Fans of the Xenonauts series can look forward to the second entry in the franchise from Hooded Horse. In Xenonauts 2, work as the head of a multinational military organization tasked with eliminating an extraterrestrial threat. Play from the shadows to seek out and engage a growing alien presence.

Catch these titles fresh out of the oven and upgrade to a premium membership for faster access over free members.

Exclusive GeForce NOW Rewards

Starting next week, Ultimate and Priority members get an exclusive reward for the hit MMORPG Guild Wars 2. The “Always Prepared” and “Booster” bundles will bring premium members a combo of helpful tools, cosmetic items, a mini pet and more.

Upgrade to an Ultimate or Priority membership today, and visit the GeForce NOW Rewards portal to update the settings to receive special offers and in-game goodies. Better hurry — these rewards are available for a limited time on a first-come, first-served basis.

Grab them in time for the fourth expansion of Guild Wars 2, coming to GeForce NOW at launch on Tuesday, Aug. 22. The Secrets of the Obscure paid expansion includes a new storyline, powerful combat options, new mount abilities and more.

New Games, Who Dis?

Jump into the list of the four new games hitting GeForce NOW this week:

• Techtonica (New release on Steam, July 18)
• Viewfinder (New release on Steam, July 18)
• Xenonauts 2 (New release on Steam, July 18)
• Embr (Steam)

Before heading into the weekend, check out our question of the week. Let us know your answer on Twitter or in the comments below.

Which video game character do you identify with the most and why?

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) July 19, 2023

Saildrone is making a splash in autonomous oceanic monitoring.

The startup’s nautical data collection technology has tracked hurricanes up close in the North Atlantic, discovered a 3,200-foot underwater mountain in the Pacific Ocean and begun to help map the entirety of the world’s ocean floor.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company develops autonomous uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) that carry a wide range of sensors. Its data streams are processed on NVIDIA Jetson modules for AI at the edge and are being optimized in prototypes with the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit for intelligent video analytics.

Saildrone is seeking to make ocean intelligence collection cost-effective, offering data-gathering systems for science, fisheries, weather forecasting, ocean mapping and maritime security.

It has three different USVs, and its Mission Portal control center service is used for monitoring customized missions and visualizing data in near real time. Also, some of Saildrone’s historical data is freely available to the public.

“We’ve sailed into three major hurricanes, and right through the eye of Hurricane Sam, and all the vehicles came out the other side — they are pretty robust platforms,” said Blythe Towal, vice president of software engineering at Saildrone, referring to a powerful cyclone that threatened Bermuda in 2021 .

Saildrone, founded in 2012, has raised $190 million in funding. The startup is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program that provides companies with technology support and AI platforms guidance.

Keeping an AI on Earth’s Waters

Saildrone is riding a wave of interest for use of its crewless data collection missions in environmental studies of oceans and lakes.

The University of Hawaii at Manoa has enlisted the help of three 23-foot Saildrone Explorer USVs to study the impact of ocean acidification on climate change. The six-month mission around the islands of Hawaii, Maui, Oahu and Kaui will be used to help evaluate the ocean’s health around the state.

Ocean acidification is a reduction in its pH, and contributing factors include the burning of fossil fuels and farming. These can have an impact on coral, oysters, clams, sea urchins and calcareous plankton, which can threaten marine ecosystems.

Saildrone recently partnered with Seabed 2030 to completely map the world’s oceans. Seabed 2030 is a collaboration between the Nippon Foundation and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, or GEBCO, to map ocean floors worldwide by 2030.

“Saildrone’s vision is of a healthy ocean and a sustainable planet,” said Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins. “A complete map of the ocean floor is fundamental to achieving that vision.”

The scientific community worldwide is embracing NVIDIA AI for climate studies, including for hyper-local climate modeling, AI to improve sequestering carbon, renewable energy research and many other areas. Dedicating its own expertise, NVIDIA is developing the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer for predicting climate change, named Earth-2, which will be used to create a digital twin of Earth in Omniverse.

Energy-Efficient Data Processing 

Saildrone USVs enable researchers to collect more data using fewer resources than traditional boats and crews, conserving energy and keeping crews out of danger.

The USVs are built for harsh weather and long missions. One of its USVs recently completed a 370-day voyage monitoring carbon dioxide, sailing from Rhode Island across the North Atlantic to Cabo Verde, down to the equator off the west coast of Africa, and back to Florida.

Running mostly on solar and wind power requires energy-efficient computing to handle so much data processing.

“With solar power, being able to keep our compute load power efficiency lower than a typical computing platform running GPUs by implementing NVIDIA Jetson is important for enabling us to do these kinds of missions,” said Towal.

Oceanic Surveying Meets Edge AI

Saildrone relies on the NVIDIA JetPack SDK for access to a full development environment for hardware-accelerated edge AI on the Jetson platform. It runs machine learning on the module for image-based vessel detection to aid navigation.

Saildrone pilots set waypoints and optimize the routes using metocean data — which includes meteorological and oceanographic information — returned from the vehicle. All of the USVs are monitored around the clock, and operators can change course remotely via the cloud if needed.

Machine learning is mostly run locally on the Jetson module— but can run on the cloud as well with a satellite connection — because bandwidth can be limited and costly to shuttle from its robust suite of sensors producing high-resolution imagery.

The USVs have oceanographic sensors for measurement of wind, temperature, salinity and dissolved carbon. The company also enables research of ocean and lake floors with bathymetric sensors, including deep sonar mapping with single- or multi-beam for going deeper or wider. And its perceptual sensor suite includes radar and visual underwater acoustic sensors.

DeepStream Goes Deep Sea

Saildrone taps into the NVIDIA DeepStream SDK for its vision AI applications and services. Developers can build seamless streaming pipelines for AI-based video, audio and image analytics using the kit.

Offering a 10x throughput improvement, DeepStream can be applied from edge to cloud to develop optimized intelligent video applications that handle multiple video, image and audio streams.

Saildrone will rely on DeepStream for image preprocessing and model inference, which enables machine learning at the edge, even at sea while powered by sun and wind.

Learn more about NVIDIA Jetson modules and the DeepStream SDK.

Editor’s note: This post is part of our weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology improves creative workflows. We’re also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.

The Portal: Prelude RTX gaming mod — a remastering of the popular unofficial Portal prequel — comes with full ray tracing, DLSS 3 and RTX IO technology for cutting-edge, AI-powered graphics that rejuvenate the legendary mod for gamers, creators, developers and others to experience it anew.

Nicolas “NykO18” Grevet, a software engineer behind Portal: Prelude, collaborated with modder David Driver-Gomm to create the project — which launched today as a free download on Steam — using NVIDIA RTX Remix. The free modding platform enables users to quickly create and share RTX mods for classic games. Learn about the duo’s workflow this week In the NVIDIA Studio.

Plus, this month, graphics card partners will begin to offer the 16GB version of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU, featuring the state-of-the-art NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture that supercharges creative apps and productivity while delivering immersive, AI-accelerated gaming with ray tracing and DLSS 3. The GPUs are well-suited for working in larger 3D scenes, editing videos in up to 12K resolution and running native AI foundation models.

All of this is backed by the July NVIDIA Studio Driver, which supports these latest updates and more, available for download today.

In addition, the NVIDIA Studio #StartToFinish community challenge is in full swing. Use the hashtag to submit a screenshot of a favorite project featuring its beginning and ending stages for a chance to be featured on the @NVIDIAStudio and @NVIDIAOmniverse social channels.

A Portal Into Creativity

Portal: Prelude’s storyline revolves around what’s called the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, or GlaDOS, an AI created by Aperture Science, the fictional scientific research corporation key to the original game’s plot.

With extra chapters, test chambers, challenges and an extended storyline, the most popular Portal mod of all time was recognized by Mod DB with a “Mod of the Year” award. Check out the original game trailer below.

“Modders have to wear many hats — they’re simultaneously level designers, 2D artists, scripters, writers, web developers, quality-assurance analysts and so much more,” said Grevet. “This demands resilience and adaptability.”

Grevet and Driver-Gomm transformed Portal: Prelude’s older, lower-resolution assets into new, high-resolution assets using RTX Remix. Both creators used a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU, which enabled full ray tracing and DLSS 3.

The duo first gathered 360-degree screenshots of entire scene levels with RTX Remix.

Next, they used a component of RTX Remix called RTX Remix Runtime to capture game scenes and replace assets during playback while adding RTX technology to the game, including NVIDIA Reflex for low-latency responsiveness.

“We played with AI upscaling a lot,” said Grevet. “It was tremendously helpful in cutting down on early work and enabled sharper focus on the hero assets that required more hands-on treatment, like characters and non-playable character models, as well as large, predominant textures.”

These higher-resolution assets in the OpenUSD format were uploaded to NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting and building 3D tools and applications, through the Blender Connector. This allowed the team to use their 3D app of choice for modeling new geometry and beveling out edges, all in real time, with full ray-traced fidelity for ultra-photorealistic lighting and shadows. Blender Cycles’ RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing enabled smooth movement in the viewport.

“Some assets were practically modeled from scratch, whereas others — like pipes — mostly just had their edges beveled out so they were higher poly and smoother,” said Driver-Gomm. “Either way, it was exponentially faster in Omniverse.” All refined assets work from captured meshes rather than by applying new meshes for individual assets, saving an incredible amount of time.

The team then UV unwrapped the assets, which is the process of opening a mesh to make a 2D texture that can blanket a 3D object for the precise application of textures and materials.

Grevet and Driver-Gomm then moved to Adobe Substance 3D Painter and Sampler to create high-quality physically based render models. This means images were rendered modeling lights and surfaces with real-world optics. GPU-accelerated filters sped up and simplified material creation, while RTX-accelerated light and ambient occlusion baked assets in seconds.

With all assets in place, the team used RTX Remix to swap older ones with these newer, higher-fidelity models. But the creators weren’t ready to rest on their laurels just yet — RTX Remix allowed them to relight every single level with realistic, path-traced lighting.

The final result of Portal: Prelude RTX is “light-years ahead of what I could do on my own,” said Grevet. “Having the opportunity to remaster these levels in the way I’d intended for them to look and behave was a nice cherry on top.”

“The RTX Remix tool is insanely powerful and almost comes across as magic to me,” said Grevet. “The ability to capture any part of a game, load it in a 3D tool and chip away at it as if this was being done using the original game’s level editor is insane.”

Pick up Portal: Prelude RTX for free for Portal owners on Steam.

Check out Grevet and Driver-Gomm on Twitter.

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