The ecosystem around NVIDIA’s technologies has always been verdant — but this is absurd.
After a stunning premiere at the World Economic Forum in Davos, immersive artworks based on Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Nature Model will come to the U.S. for the first time at NVIDIA GTC.
Offering a deep dive into the synergy between AI and the natural world, Anadol’s multisensory work, “Large Nature Model: A Living Archive,” will be situated prominently on the main concourse of the San Jose Convention Center, where the global AI event is taking place, from March 18-21.
Fueled by NVIDIA’s advanced AI technology, including powerful DGX A100 stations and high-performance GPUs, the exhibit offers a captivating journey through our planet’s ecosystems with stunning visuals, sounds and scents.
These scenes are rendered in breathtaking clarity across screens with a total output of 12.5 million pixels, immersing attendees in an unprecedented digital portrayal of Earth’s ecosystems.
Refik Anadol, recognized by The Economist as “the artist of the moment,” has emerged as a key figure in AI art. His work, notable for its use of data and machine learning, places him at the forefront of a generation pushing the boundaries between technology, interdisciplinary research and aesthetics. Anadol’s influence reflects a wider movement in the art world towards embracing digital innovation, setting new precedents in how art is created and experienced.
Exhibition Details
Location: Main concourse at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, ensuring easy access for all GTC attendees.
Total experience hours: Available from 5-7 p.m., providing a curated window to engage with the installation fully.
Screen dimensions: The installation features two towering screens, each four meters high. The larger, four-by-12-meter screen displays the “Large Nature Model: Living Archive,” showcasing Anadol’s centerpiece. A second, four-by-six-meter screen offers a glimpse into the process of building the Large Nature Model.
A Gateway to Digital Nature
Large Nature Model is a generative AI model focused exclusively on nature.
This installation exemplifies AI’s unique potential to capture nature’s inherent intelligence, aiming to redefine our engagement with and appreciation of Earth’s ecosystems.
Anadol has been working with nature-based datasets throughout his career, and began working with rainforest data years ago.
The Large Nature Model, on which the work being shown at GTC is based, continues to evolve. It represents the work of a team of 29 data scientists, graphic designers and AI specialists from around the world, all working under the umbrella of the Refik Anadol Studio.
The Large Nature Model showcased at GTC is fine-tuned using the Getty Images foundation model built using the NVIDIA Edify architecture. The model is fine-tuned on an extensive dataset of approximately 750,000 images, comprising 274,947 images of flora, 358,713 images of fauna and 130,282 images of fungi — showcasing the rich biodiversity of the Amazonian rainforest.
Insights Into the Making
Alongside the visual feast, a panel discussion featuring Anadol and colleagues from the Refik Anadol Studio will provide insights into their research and design processes.
Moderated by Brian Dowdy, a senior technical marketing engineer at NVIDIA, the discussion will explore the collaborative efforts, technical challenges and creative processes that make such pioneering art possible.
The creation of the Large Nature Model represents six months of rigorous development and collaboration with NVIDIA researchers, underscoring the dedication and interdisciplinary effort required to bring this innovative vision to life.
Register for GTC today to join this immersive journey into the heart of nature, art and AI innovation.
You might say that James Alberque has a bird’s-eye view of the road congestion and challenges that come with a booming U.S. city.
Alberque analyzes traffic data for Raleigh, North Carolina, which has seen its population more than double in the past three decades. The city has been working with NVIDIA and its partners to analyze traffic on the roads and intersections to help reduce congestion and enhance pedestrian safety.
“We can now push traffic video into the NVIDIA DeepStream platform and can quantify in real time how many vehicles are entering and exiting intersections and visualize it for our engineers,” said Alberque, a geoinformation systems and emerging technology manager for the city.
Such information can be fed to vendors responsible for keeping traffic lights optimized, so population expansion doesn’t bring roadways to a crawl or increase the number of accidents.
Urban growth has slowed commutes as metropolitan regions across the nation turn to AI for assistance in optimizing traffic flow.
“We got great accuracy level using NVIDIA pre-trained AI computer vision models for traffic cameras right out of the box,” said Alberque. “And our engineers worked with an NVIDIA Metropolis partner, Quantiphi, to refine those models and got them up to an incredible 95% accuracy,” said Alberque.
The Raleigh system uses hundreds of cameras to enhance its model training, and the city has its sights set on everything from road flooding, license plate tracking and parking utilization to bus stop wait times and sanitation management.
Federal Initiatives Support Intersection Safety
Advances from the city of Raleigh and others looking to smooth the flow of traffic come as the U.S. Department of Transportation continues to support AI efforts.
In this first stage, 15 participants who submitted design concept proposals for intersection safety systems out of 120 submissions were awarded $100,000 each and an invitation to participate further.
The next stage will focus on system assessment and virtual testing, with teams expected to develop, train and improve algorithms used for detection, localization and classification of vehicles and road users in a controlled test intersection.
Enlisting NVIDIA AI for Smart Intersections
Deloitte Consulting is building a foundation for smart intersections, enlisting the NVIDIA Metropolis application framework, developer tools and partner ecosystem.
Derq USA is developing an intersection safety system that relies on NVIDIA Metropolis to help manage the deluge of sensor data for insights.
Metropolis partner, Miovision, which has traffic light safety systems deployed across the U.S., uses the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform in its devices for processing video and TensorRT for inference.
“There are so many people moving into our city and surrounding areas, and our number one and number two concerns for citizens are around traffic — this is providing data to move the needle,” said Alberque, regarding Raleigh’s Metropolis and DeepStream development.
Register for GTC24 to discover how AI is transforming smart cities. Some key sessions include:
2024 will be the year generative AI gets personal, the CEOs of NVIDIA and HP said today in a fireside chat, unveiling new laptops that can build, test and run large language models.
“This is a renaissance of the personal computer,” said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at HP Amplify, a gathering in Las Vegas of about 1,500 resellers and distributors. “The work of creators, designers and data scientists is going to be revolutionized by these new workstations.”
“AI is the biggest thing to come to the PC in decades,” said HP’s Enrique Lores, in the runup to the announcement of what his company billed as “the industry’s largest portfolio of AI PCs and workstations.”
Greater Speed and Security
Compared to running their AI work in the cloud, the new systems will provide increased speed and security while reducing costs and energy, Lores said in a keynote at the event.
Entry-level systems with the NVIDIA RTX 500 Ada Generation Laptop GPU let users run generative AI apps and tools wherever they go.
High-end models pack the RTX 5000 to deliver up to 682 TOPS, so they can create and run LLMs locally, using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to connect to their content for results that are both personalized and private.
Access to Accelerated Software
The new workstations can tap into NVIDIA’s full-stack AI platform, including software that speeds the data science at the foundation of generative AI.
The systems’ Z by HP AI Studio platform — developed in collaboration with NVIDIA — links to NVIDIA NGC, a catalog of GPU-accelerated software for AI and data science. NGC includes NVIDIA NeMo, a framework to build, customize and deploy generative AI models.
In addition, HP and NVIDIA announced that NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries will be integrated with the systems to turbocharge the data preparation and processing that’s fundamental for generative AI.
Speedups for Data Scientists
The libraries include NVIDIA RAPIDS cuDF, which accelerates pandas, software used by nearly 10 million data scientists.
“It used to take them hours and sometimes days to process data that now they can do in minutes,” Huang said.
“This pandas library is insanely complex,” he added, noting NVIDIA engineers worked for more than five years on reformulating the code so it can be accelerated with GPUs.
Entering a New Era
In tandem with the new systems, HP announced a partner training program developed in collaboration with NVIDIA. It will equip computer vendors to advise customers on the right AI products and solutions to meet their needs.
Such programs pave the way for an industry that’s entering an era where AI lets software write software.
“We’ve reinvented the computer. We’ve reinvented how software is written, and now we have to reinvent how software is used,” said Huang. “Large language models, connected into other LLMs, will help solve application problems — that’s the future.”
NVIDIA is offering a new professional certification in generative AI to enable developers to establish technical credibility in this important domain.
Generative AI is revolutionizing industries worldwide, yet there’s a critical skills gap and need to uplevel employees to more fully harness the technology.
Available for the first time from NVIDIA, this new professional certification enables developers, career professionals, and others to validate and showcase their generative AI skills and expertise. Our new professional certification program introduces two associate-level generative AI certifications, focusing on proficiency in large language models and multimodal workflow skills.
“Generative AI has moved to center stage as governments, industries and organizations everywhere look to harness its transformative capabilities,” NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang recently said.
The certification will become available starting at GTC, where in-person attendees can also access recommended training to prepare for a certification exam.
“Organizations in every industry need to increase their expertise in this transformative technology,” said Greg Estes, VP of developer programs at NVIDIA. “Our goals are to assist in upskilling workforces, sharpen the skills of qualified professionals, and enable individuals to demonstrate their proficiency in order to gain a competitive advantage in the job market.”
See AI’s Future. Learn How to Use It.
GTC 2024 — running March 18-21 in San Jose, Calif. — is the first in-person GTC event in five years, and more than 300,000 people are expected to register to attend in person or virtually. There will be 900 sessions and more than 300 exhibitors showcasing how organizations are deploying NVIDIA platforms to achieve industry breakthroughs.
Attendees can choose from 20 full-day, hands-on technical workshops, with many sessions available virtually in EMEA and APAC time zones. Also, sign up for the GTC Conference + Training package for more than 40 complimentary onsite training labs.
Sign up for GTC . Learn more about the generative AI course here and here.
Gamers can now seize the day with Day Passes, available to purchase for 24-hour continuous access to powerful cloud gaming with all the benefits of a GeForce NOW Ultimate or Priority membership — no commitment required.
Publisher Cygames brings its next triple-A title to the cloud. Granblue Fantasy: Relink leads eight new games joining the GeForce NOW library this week.
Plus, an update for GeForce NOW Windows and macOS adds support for G-SYNC in the cloud. By pairing it with new NVIDIA Reflex support for 60 and 120 frames per second streaming options, Ultimate members can experience ultra-low-latency streaming that’s nearly indistinguishable from using a local PC.
Seize the Day
Day Passes offer access to 24 hours of GeForce RTX-powered cloud gaming. Users can get all the benefits of Ultimate and Priority memberships for a day without committing to longer-term monthly memberships, and choose how and when they access the cloud.
Play for a day.
Ultimate Day Pass users can stream at either 4K 120 fps, up to 240 fps, or with ultrawide resolutions. Plus, they can get all the same benefits as gamers using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, with access to NVIDIA DLSS 3 and NVIDIA Reflex technologies for the smoothest gameplay and lowest latency, even on underpowered devices. Both Ultimate and Priority Day Pass users can turn RTX ON in supported games for immersive, cinematic gameplay.
The Ultimate Day Pass is available for $7.99 and the Priority Day Pass for $3.99. Twenty-four hours of continuous play begins at purchase. Day Passes are available in limited quantities each day, so grab one before the opportunity passes.
Head in the Clouds
Going on a grand adventure.
Cygames, known for developing popular online game Granblue Fantasy, brings their full-fledged action role-playing game to GeForce NOW. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is now available for fans to stream across devices.
Set in the same universe as the web browser and mobile version of the title, Granblue Fantasy: Relink is an ARPG that features many of the beloved characters from the franchise in an all-new original story. Step into the shoes of a captain leading a Skyfaring crew, alongside a scrappy dragon named Vyrn and a mysterious girl named Lyria, as they navigate the Sky Realm, a world of islands drifting in the clouds.
Slash, shoot and hex treacherous foes with up to three other gaming buddies. GeForce NOW Priority and Ultimate members can become Skyfarers in the cloud with longer game sessions and faster access to GeForce RTX-class servers.
Spring Into New Games
Pull no punches.
Step into the ring in Undisputed, an authentic boxing game from Steel City Interactive. Featuring bone-jarring action and more licensed boxers than ever, Undisputed, currently in early access, gives members unprecedented control to master every inch of the ring.
It’s available to stream from the cloud this week, along with the following games:
As visual generative AI matures from research to the enterprise domain, businesses are seeking responsible ways to integrate the technology into their products.
Bria, a startup based in Tel Aviv, is responding with an open platform for visual generative AI that emphasizes model transparency alongside fair attribution and copyright protections. Currently offering models that convert text prompts to images or transform existing images, the company will this year add text-to-video and image-to-video AI.
“Creating generative AI models requires time and expertise,” said Yair Adato, co-founder and CEO of Bria. “We do the heavy lifting so product teams can adopt our models to achieve a technical edge and go to market quickly, without investing as many resources.”
Advertising agencies and retailers can use Bria’s tools to quickly generate visuals for marketing campaigns. And creative studios can adopt the models to develop stock imagery or edit visuals. Dozens of enterprise clients have integrated the startup’s pretrained models or use its application programming interfaces.
Bria develops its models with the NVIDIA NeMo framework, which is available on NGC, NVIDIA’s hub for accelerated software. The company uses reference implementations from the NeMo Multimodal collection, trained on NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs, to enable high-throughput, low-latency image generation. It’s also adopting NVIDIA Picasso, a foundry for visual generative AI models, to run inference.
“We were looking for a framework to train our models efficiently — one that would minimize compute cost while scaling AI training to more quickly reach model convergence,” said Misha Feinstein, vice president of research and development at Bria. “NeMo features optimization techniques that allow us to maximize the GPUs’ performance during both training and inference.”
Creative Solutions to Creative Challenges
Bria, founded in 2020, offers flexible options for enterprises adopting visual generative AI. By adopting Bria’s platform, its customers can gain a competitive edge by creating visual content at scale while retaining control of their data and technology. Developers can access its pretrained models through APIs or by directly licensing the source code and model weights for further fine-tuning.
“We want to build a company where we respect privacy, content ownership, data ownership and copyright,” said Adato. “To create a healthy, sustainable industry, it’s important to incentivize individuals to keep creating and innovating.”
Adato likens Bria’s attribution program to a music streaming service that pays artists each time one of their songs is played. It’s required for all customers who use Bria’s models — even if they further train and fine-tune the model on their own.
Using licensed datasets provides additional benefits: the Bria team doesn’t need to spend time cleaning the data or sorting out inappropriate content and misinformation.
A Growing Suite of NVIDIA-Accelerated Models
Bria offers two versions of its text-to-image model. One islatency-optimized to rapidly accomplish tasks like image background generation. The other offers higher image resolution. Additional foundation models enable super-resolution, object removal, object generation, inpainting and outpainting.
The company is working to continuously increase the resolution of its generated images, further reduce latency and develop domain-specific models for industries such as ecommerce and stock imagery. Inference is accelerated by the NVIDIA Triton Inference Server software and the NVIDIA TensorRT software development kit.
“We’re running on NVIDIA frameworks, hardware and software,” said Feinstein. “NVIDIA experts have helped us optimize these tools for our needs — we would probably run much slower without their help.”
To keep up with the latest hardware and networking infrastructure, Bria uses cloud computing resources: NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs for AI training and a variety of NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs for inference.
Bria is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program that provides startups with technological support and AI platform guidance. Visit Bria in the Inception Pavilion at NVIDIA GTC, running March 18-21 in San Jose and online.
With the 2018 launch of RTX technologies and the first consumer GPU built for AI — GeForce RTX — NVIDIA accelerated the shift to AI computing. Since then, AI on RTX PCs and workstations has grown into a thriving ecosystem with more than 100 million users and 500 AI applications.
Generative AI is now ushering in a new wave of capabilities from PC to cloud. And NVIDIA’s rich history and expertise in AI is helping ensure all users have the performance to handle a wide range of AI features.
Users at home and in the office are already taking advantage of AI on RTX with productivity- and entertainment-enhancing software. Gamers feel the benefits of AI on GeForce RTX GPUs with higher frame rates at stunning resolutions in their favorite titles. Creators can focus on creativity, instead of watching spinning wheels or repeating mundane tasks. And developers can streamline workflows using generative AI for prototyping and to automate debugging.
The field of AI is moving fast. As research advances, AI will tackle more complex tasks. And the demanding performance needs will be handled by RTX.
What Is AI?
In its most fundamental form, artificial intelligence is a smarter type of computing. It’s the capability of a computer program or a machine to think, learn and take actions without being explicitly coded with commands to do so, or a user having to control each command.
AI can be thought of as the ability for a device to perform tasks autonomously, by ingesting and analyzing enormous amounts of data, then recognizing patterns in that data — often referred to as being “trained.”
AI development is always oriented around developing systems that perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence, and often significant levels of input, to complete — only at speeds beyond any individual’s or group’s capabilities. For this reason, AI is broadly seen as both disruptive and highly transformational.
A key benefit of AI systems is the ability to learn from experiences or patterns inside data, adjusting conclusions on their own when fed new inputs or data. This self-learning allows AI systems to accomplish a stunning variety of tasks, including image recognition, speech recognition, language translation, medical diagnostics, car navigation, image and video enhancement, and hundreds of other use cases.
The next step in the evolution of AI is content generation — referred to as generative AI. It enables users to quickly create new content, and iterate on it, based on a variety of inputs, which can include text, images, sounds, animation, 3D models or other types of data. It then generates new content in the same or a new form.
Popular language applications, like the cloud-based ChatGPT, allow users to generate long-form copy based on a short text request. Image generators like Stable Diffusion turn descriptive text inputs into the desired image. New applications are turning text into video and 2D images into 3D renderings.
GeForce RTX AI PCs and NVIDIA RTX Workstations
AI PCs are computers with dedicated hardware designed to help AI run faster. It’s the difference between sitting around waiting for a 3D image to load, and seeing it update instantaneously with an AI denoiser.
On RTX GPUs, these specialized AI accelerators are called Tensor Cores. And they dramatically speed up AI performance across the most demanding applications for work and play.
One way that AI performance is measured is in teraops, or trillion operations per second (TOPS). Similar to an engine’s horsepower rating, TOPS can give users a sense of a PC’s AI performance with a single metric. The current generation of GeForce RTX GPUs offers performance options that range from roughly 200 AI TOPS all the way to over 1,300 TOPS, with many options across laptops and desktops in between. Professionals get even higher AI performance with the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU.
To put this in perspective, the current generation of AI PCs without GPUs range from 10 to 45 TOPS.
More and more types of AI applications will require the benefits of having a PC capable of performing certain AI tasks locally — meaning on the device rather than running in the cloud. Benefits of running on an AI PC include that computing is always available, even without an internet connection; systems offer low latency for high responsiveness; and increased privacy so that users don’t have to upload sensitive materials to an online database before it becomes usable by an AI.
AI for Everyone
RTX GPUs bring more than just performance. They introduce capabilities only possible with RTX technology. Many of these AI features are accessible — and impactful — to millions, regardless of the individual’s skill level.
From AI upscaling to improved video conferencing to intelligent, personalizable chatbots, there are tools to benefit all types of users.
RTX Video uses AI to upscale streaming video and display it in HDR. Bringing lower-resolution video in standard dynamic range to vivid, up to 4K high-resolution high dynamic range. RTX users can enjoy the feature with one-time, one-click enablement on nearly any video streamed in a Chrome or Edge browser.
NVIDIA Broadcast, a free app for RTX users with a straightforward user interface, has a host of AI features that improve video conferencing and livestreaming. It removes unwanted background sounds like clicky keyboards, vacuum cleaners and screaming children with Noise and Echo Removal. It can replace or blur backgrounds with better edge detection using Virtual Background. It smooths low-quality camera images with Video Noise Removal. And it can stay centered on the screen with eyes looking at the camera no matter where the user moves, using Auto Frame and Eye Contact.
The tech demo, originally released in January, will get an update with Google’s Gemma soon.
Users can easily connect local files on a PC to a supported large language model simply by dropping files into a single folder and pointing the demo to the location. It enables queries for quick, contextually relevant answers.
Since Chat with RTX runs locally on Windows with GeForce RTX PCs and NVIDIA RTX workstations, results are fast — and the user’s data stays on the device. Rather than relying on cloud-based services, Chat with RTX lets users process sensitive data on a local PC without the need to share it with a third party or have an internet connection.
AI for Gamers
Over the past six years, game performance has seen the greatest leaps with AI acceleration. Gamers have been turning NVIDIA DLSS on since 2019, boosting frame rates and improving image quality. It’s a technique that uses AI to generate pixels in video games automatically. With ongoing improvements, it now increases frame rates by up to 4x.
And with the introduction of Ray Reconstruction in the latest version, DLSS 3.5, visual quality is further enhanced in some of the world’s top titles, setting a new standard for visually richer and more immersive gameplay.
There are now over 500 games and applications that have revolutionized the ways people play and create with ray tracing, DLSS and AI-powered technologies.
Beyond frames, AI is set to improve the way gamers interact with characters and remaster classic games.
NVIDIA ACE microservices — including generative AI-powered speech and animation models — are enabling developers to add intelligent, dynamic digital avatars to games. Demonstrated at CES, ACE won multiple awards for its ability to bring game characters to life as a glimpse into the future of PC gaming.
NVIDIA RTX Remix, a platform for modders to create stunning RTX remasters of classic games, delivers generative AI tools that can transform basic textures from classic games into modern, 4K-resolution, physically based rendering materials. Several projects have already been released or are in the works, including Half-Life 2 RTX and Portal with RTX.
AI for Creators
AI is unlocking creative potential by reducing or automating tedious tasks, freeing up time for pure creativity. These features run fastest or solely on PCs with NVIDIA RTX or GeForce RTX GPUs.
Adobe Premiere Pro’s Enhance Speech tool is accelerated by RTX, using AI to remove unwanted noise and improve the quality of dialogue clips so they sound professionally recorded. It’s up to 4.5x faster on RTX vs. Mac. Another Premiere feature, Auto Reframe, uses GPU acceleration to identify and track the most relevant elements in a video and intelligently reframes video content for different aspect ratios.
Another time-saving AI feature for video editors is DaVinci Resolve’s Magic Mask. Previously, if editors needed to adjust the color/brightness of a subject in one shot or remove an unwanted object, they’d have to use a combination of rotoscoping techniques or basic power windows and masks to isolate the subject from the background.
Magic Mask has completely changed that workflow. With it, simply draw a line over the subject and the AI will process for a moment before revealing the selection. And GeForce RTX laptops can run the feature 2.5x faster than the fastest non-RTX laptops.
This is just a sample of the ways that AI is increasing the speed of creativity. There are now more than 125 AI applications accelerated by RTX.
AI for Developers
AI is enhancing the way developers build software applications through scalable environments, hardware and software optimizations, and new APIs.
NVIDIA AI Workbench helps developers quickly create, test and customize pretrained generative AI models and LLMs using PC-class performance and memory footprint. It’s a unified, easy-to-use toolkit that can scale from running locally on RTX PCs to virtually any data center, public cloud or NVIDIA DGX Cloud.
After building AI models for PC use cases, developers can optimize them using NVIDIA TensorRT — the software that helps developers take full advantage of the Tensor Cores in RTX GPUs.
TensorRT acceleration is now available in text-based applications with TensorRT-LLM for Windows. The open-source library increases LLM performance and includes pre-optimized checkpoints for popular models, including Google’s Gemma, Meta Llama 2, Mistral and Microsoft Phi-2.
Developers also have access to a TensorRT-LLM wrapper for the OpenAI Chat API. With just one line of code change, continue.dev — an open-source autopilot for VS Code and JetBrains that taps into an LLM — can use TensorRT-LLM locally on an RTX PC for fast, local LLM inference using this popular tool.
Every week, we’ll demystify AI by making the technology more accessible, and we’ll showcase new hardware, software, tools and accelerations for RTX AI PC users.
The iPhone moment of AI is here, and it’s just the beginning. Welcome to AI Decoded.
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The 96th Academy Awards nominees for Best Visual Effects are a testament to the incredible technological advancements pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in film.
Whether showcasing colossal destruction scenes, heart-pumping action sequences or interstellar adventures, each nominee demonstrates unique contributions in visual effects, or VFX — and they all used cutting-edge NVIDIA technologies in their workflows to bring their magic to the screen.
This year’s nominees include:
The Creator (20th Century Studios) — Jay Cooper, Ian Comley, Andrew Roberts and Neil Corbould
Godzilla: Minus One (Toho) — Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi and Tatsuji Nojima
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Marvel Studios) — Stephane Ceretti, Alexis Wajsbrot, Guy Williams and Theo Bialek
Napoleon (Apple Original Films/Sony Pictures) — Charley Henley, Luc-Ewen Martin-Fenouillet, Simone Coco and Neil Corbould
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Paramount Pictures) — Alex Wuttke, Simone Coco, Jeff Sutherland and Neil Corbould
Reinventing the Monster Movie
Godzilla: Minus One presented a unique challenge: making a well-known giant monster, or kaijū, feel terrifying anew.
With a budget under $15 million, small by today’s standards, the film’s VFX team relied on rapid iterations with the director to eliminate long review cycles, along with a heavily detailed computer-generated imagery (CGI) model to bring Godzilla to life.
Godzilla was ready for its closeup, the monster’s head alone containing over 200 million polygons. The animators injected nuanced, lifelike behaviors into the creature to round out its performance.
In addition, the film’s destruction scenes used a sophisticated, memory-intensive physics engine, allowing for realistic simulations of crumbling buildings and landscapes under destruction to further immerse audiences in the chaos.
A Cosmic Spectacle
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 continued the series’s tradition of blending humor with breathtaking cosmic visuals. This installment pushed the envelope with its use of real-time rendering, enabling its artists to visualize complex space environments and characters on set.
The film brought together Wētā FX, Framestore and Sony Pictures Imageworks, among others, to create a whopping 3,000+ VFX shots. The dense, immersive 3D environments allowed for a seamless integration of live-action and CGI elements and characters, resulting in a visually stunning space opera that maintained the series’ signature style while exploring new visual territories.
One of Guardians’s greatest achievements is the hallway fight scene filmed at 120 frames per second and delivered as a single continuous shot with variable speed ramps and nonstop action.
Epic Storytelling Through Detailed VFX
The historical epic Napoleon was brought to life with meticulous attention to detail and scale. The film used various set extensions and practical effects to recreate the vast battlefields and period-specific architecture of early 19th-century Europe.
Advanced crowd simulation was used to depict the massive armies of Napoleon’s time, each soldier animated with individual behaviors to enhance the battle scenes’ realism. These touches, combined with high-resolution textures and dynamic lighting, created a visually compelling narrative grounded in reality.
Exploring AI’s Boundaries
The Creator explored the themes of AI and virtual reality, requiring VFX that could realistically depict advanced technology and digital worlds.
The film made significant use of CG animation and visual effects to create environments both futuristic and plausible. Director Gareth Edwards, also known for Rogue One and Godzilla (2014), has been widely applauded for delivering a film with the look of an expensive summer blockbuster using a fraction of the typical budget.
The portrayal of AI entities involved a combination of motion-capture and procedural animation to create characters that moved and interacted with complexity and fluidity at human level. The VFX team developed custom software to simulate the intricate patterns of digital consciousness, blurring the lines between the virtual and the real.
High-Octane Action Meets Precision VFX
For Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the visual effects team faced the challenge of enhancing the film’s signature action sequences without detracting from the series’s reputation for practical stunts. To achieve this, they took a hybrid approach, using CGI to seamlessly augment practical effects.
High-speed drone footage integrated with CG elements created breathtaking chase scenes, while advanced compositing techniques added layers of detail and depth to explosions and hand-to-hand combat scenes, elevating the film’s action to new heights.
NVIDIANs at the SciTech Awards
NVIDIA’s Christopher Jon Horvath, joined by Steve LaVietes and Joe Ardent, on stage to accept their award.
The Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical Achievements highlight technical contributions that have significantly affected the way movies are made, as well as the brilliant inventors behind them.
OpenUSD was honored in the science and engineering subcategory for its importance as the first open-source scene description framework that streamlines the entire production workflow. Its innovative layering system and efficient crate file format have established it as the de facto standard for 3D scene interchange, facilitating unparalleled collaboration across the industry.
The science and engineering subcategory also celebrated other remarkable technologies, including the OpenVDB open-source library, for sparse 3D volumes, which has become an industry standard for visual-effects simulations and renderings of water, fire, smoke and clouds.
Initially created in 2009 by Ken Museth, senior director of physics research at NVIDIA, OpenVDB has been further developed by Museth, Peter Cucka and Mihai Aldén. Learn more about the latest advancements in OpenVDB including NanoVDB and NeuralVDB.
In addition, the Alembic Caching and Interchange system, developed by Lucas Miller, NVIDIA’s Christopher Jon Horvath, Steve LaVietes and Joe Ardent, received recognition for its efficient algorithms in storing and retrieving baked, time-sampled data, facilitating high-efficiency caching and scene sharing across the digital production pipeline.
OpenVDB and Alembic are both interoperable with OpenUSD, enhancing their utility and integration within the industry’s production workflows.
And join us for OpenUSD Day to learn how to build generative AI-enabled 3D pipelines and tools using Universal Scene Description. Browse the full list of media and entertainment sessions at GTC.
Featured image courtesy of Toho Co., Ltd. TOHO CO., LTD.
Bringing together pioneers in robotics and AI, NVIDIA GTC will be a state-of-the-art showcase of applied AI for autonomous machines.
The conference, running March 18-21 at the San Jose Convention Center and online, boasts a star-studded lineup. This includes a fireside chat with Marc Raibert, executive director of The AI Institute, and Dieter Fox, senior director of robotics research at NVIDIA, as well as panels featuring heavyweights like Disney, Google DeepMind and Amazon, alongside insights from NVIDIA stalwarts like Senior Research Scientist Jim Fan.
With over 77 ecosystem partners and more than 25 partner robots, from industrial giants to entertainment bots, GTC is where the future of robotics unfolds.
Attendees will be able to explore the convergence of AI and robotics through dynamic displays in the AI at the Edge pavilion, the Metropolis pavilion and demo areas, featuring the latest robot arms, robotic vision systems and high-accuracy 3D scanning systems.
These demonstrations provide compelling examples of how AI seamlessly enhances human capabilities across diverse industries. Groundbreaking demos using large language models for real-world applications will push the boundaries of human-machine interaction.
Generative AI in Robotics: A panel led by NVIDIA Senior Strategic Partnerships Manager Sandra Skaff and featuring leaders from Ambi Robotics, Covariant, Vayu Robotics and Scaled Foundations discusses the impact of generative AI in robotics, focusing on its potential to advance reasoning, planning and perception.
Generative AI Revolution: Google DeepMind unveils the next frontier in robotics, powered by generative AI’s advancements in perception and interaction, in the session “Robotics in the Age of Generative AI.”
Metaverse Meets Automation: SICK AG offers a vision of the metaverse revolutionizing the automation industry, in the session “Exploring Tomorrow’s Industrial Automation.”
This year’s GTC also offers 40 hands-on labs, providing attendees with an immersive experience of the practical applications of these technologies.
A Jetson and Robotics Developer Day will be held on Thursday, March 21, featuring a full day of sessions and panels that dive deep into building next-gen AI-powered robotics and edge applications on the NVIDIA Jetson, Isaac and Metropolis platforms.
Over the past decade, GTC has been where advances in computer graphics, deep learning and generative AI were launched. As industries from agriculture to manufacturing are transformed by these technologies, this year’s event will offer a glimpse into the innovations that will soon define our daily lives.
Register for GTC to secure your spot at the forefront of technology’s next leap.
The Geneva International Motor Show, one of the most important and long-standing global auto exhibitions, opened this week, with the spotlight on several China and U.S. EV makers building on NVIDIA DRIVE that are expanding their presence in Europe.
BYD
One of the key reveals is BYD’s Yangweng U8 plug-in hybrid large SUV, built on the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin platform. It features an electric drivetrain with a range of up to 1,000 kilometers, or 621 miles, thanks to its 49 kilowatt-hour battery and range-extender gasoline engine.
IM Motors
The premium EV brand by SAIC and Alibaba, IM Motors, unveiled its IM L6 mid-size electric saloon (aka sedan), which will soon be available to the European market.
The L6 features IM’s proprietary Intelligent Mobility Autonomous Driving System, powered by NVIDIA DRIVE Orin. The advanced system uses a comprehensive sensor suite, including one lidar, three radars, 11 cameras and 12 ultrasonic sensors. IM reports that the L6 is capable of highway navigation on autopilot, marking a milestone in the company’s mission to bring advanced self-driving vehicles to market.
IM Motors has been working with NVIDIA since 2021, using NVIDIA DRIVE Orin as the AI brain for its flagship LS7 SUV and L7 sedan.
IM Motors IM L6
Lucid
The Geneva Motor Show marks the European debut of Lucid’s Gravity SUV.
The Gravity aims to set fresh benchmarks for sustainability and technological innovation when its production commences in late 2024. Powered by NVIDIA DRIVE, the luxury SUV features supercar levels of performance and an impressive battery range to mitigate range anxiety.
Lucid Gravity SUV
Explore the latest developments in mobility and meet NVIDIA DRIVE ecosystem partners showcasing their next-gen vehicles at GTC, the conference for the era of AI, running from March 18-21 at the San Jose Convention Center and online.
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