Editor’s note: More than a dozen companies participated in our fifth annual Emerging Companies Summit, held earlier this year during NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference. Below is one in a series of company profiles showcasing how startups are innovating with GPU technology.

A growing number of early adopters can tell you about the cloud gaming service they enjoy, with its smooth play, hundreds of titles to choose from and flexible billing options. But ask them to name the company whose technology makes it possible, and they’ll likely be left scratching their heads.

For gamers in Asia, Europe and North America, that would be Taiwan-based Ubitus, one of the first companies to  commercialize cloud gaming.

Building a cloud gaming service isn’t easy. For a start, consider having to navigate the scores of publishers of thousands of different gaming titles and to account for all the various operating systems and device types.

Now, make it really hard: meet the demands of multiple telecommunications and cable providers in countries around the world, including integrating with their sophisticated billing and authentication systems.

“Selling a server and game content is easy,” says Ubitus CEO Wesley Kuo. “What sets Ubitus apart is the turnkey cloud gaming platform solution  we provide to telcos and cable operators – and being able to satisfy their 99.999% service-level agreements.”

Cloud-gaming services like Ubitus are turning smart TVs into game consoles.

Making cloud gaming work may be hard, but gamers don’t care about the details. They just want their games to run flawlessly from wherever they are.

To achieve this, Ubitus has been an early adopter of GPU technology. One year after its founding in 2007, the company began using NVIDIA GPUs and the CUDA programming model to virtualize game streams to the PC. It started using GPUs based on NVIDIA’s high-performance Kepler architecture last year, and are readying NVIDIA GRID cloud gaming technology to give performance a further boost.

March of the MMOs

By 2011, Ubitus was streaming games over LTE networks for mobile phones and tablets as part of a landmark deal with Japan’s NTT DoCoMo. Now, it has more than a million active Android devices on the latest LTE wireless networks, including Verizon Wireless in the U.S.

With every success, however, Ubitus finds another technological mountain to climb.

The rise in popularity of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) posed a challenge because, unlike standalone PC games sold at retail, MMOs can receive ongoing updates from the publisher. However, the games can’t be buffered on a device like movies can – the players would all be in different places in the game. So Ubitus figured out how to integrate these changes on the fly.

Ubitus can put big games onto teeny-tiny devices.

It’s also made it easy for graphic designers and programmers  to deal with the variety of gaming devices in use today by developing software that allows streaming games to recognize input from players, without changing the game itself. Controls can be virtualized, games adjust for different screen sizes, and the source of player input is recognized – whether from a joystick with a smart TV or a virtual gamepad with a tablet.

Ubitus continues to look to the future of cloud gaming. It recently integrated its low-latency gaming service with Google TV, and announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom to expand its footprint into Europe.

It’s also seeking to expand the social side of gaming.At E3 this year, Ubitus  showcased  a new feature that allows gamers to invite friends to compete instantly at any stage of the game session; through social networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Check out the video below to see how Ubitus will help friends join a game in progress, and broadcast your greatest moments and wins to your friends immediately.

Summer is in full swing, which means it’s movie-watching season. And, if you’re watching movies in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area, we’re offering you an opportunity to go hands-on with SHIELD at our SHIELD Movie Theater Experience Centers.

Catching a movie in the New York or San Francisco area? Grab some time with SHIELD, too.

There’s no substitute for a good, old-fashioned test drive. With SHIELD, your test drive will include a hands-on Android gaming session that demonstrates the 5-inch HD Retinal Quality touchscreen, stereo bass reflex speakers and console-grade controls.

So, how do you get some one-on-one time with SHIELD? Find your nearest SHIELD Movie Theater Experience Center on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through August.

Here are the four locations:

New York Area

• Garden State 16 – 1 Garden State Plaza, Paramus, New Jersey
• New Roc Stadium 18 – 33 Lecount Place, New Rochelle, New York

San Francisco Bay Area

• Cupertino 16 – 10123 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, California
• Mercado 20 – 3111 Mission College Boulevard., Santa Clara, California

Powerful graphics cards. A portable, next-generation gaming system. NVIDIA-branded water.

There are a lot of products that carry our brand. And they were all in demand – especially the water — as approximately 200 gamers crowded into the Currys PC World Gaming Bunker in London on the hottest day of the year last Saturday to get hands on with the latest tech for PC and mobile gaming.

Almost as refreshing as a new graphics card.

Turns out not all of the United Kingdom is transfixed by the impending royal birth.

Enthusiasts began lining up at 5 am – five hours before the event started – to experience the very best of GeForce GTX, with 7-series gaming PCs, the newly announced Razer gaming portables – including the world’s thinnest gaming laptop, the Razer Blade 14-inch, and the all new Tegra 4 powered Toshiba Excite Pro tablet, exclusive to Currys PC World.

They were rewarded with the opportunity to be among the first to play Ubisoft’s upcoming action-adventure stealth game – Splinter Cell: Blacklist, immerse themselves in the post-apocalyptic world of Metro: Last Light and get some hands-on time with our new NVIDIA SHIELD gaming device. A couple of lucky gamers also walked away with the new ASUS GeForce GTX 780, following an intense Metro: Last Light speed run competition.

Gamers were, understandably, excited about the event. “Thanks for the fun day!” Adam Dergiman wrote on our UK Facebook fan page. “Got a lot of t-shirts, Metro and Splinter Cell codes as well as NVIDIA BRANDED WATER, WUT!” Jakub Lakoon Mikwiewicz added.

Over on Twitter, Chris Parsons was one of our ASUS GeForce GTX 780 winners, “Thank you so much for a fantastic day on Saturday and coming away with a GeForce GTX 780 was unbelievable!”

Getting some thumbs on time with NVIDIA SHIELD, our new gaming portable.

A casual stroll through NVIDIA’s headquarters might not provide you with scents of fresh baked goods, but a multicolored Raspberry Pi server cluster flashing its lights just around the corner might be enough to stop you in your tracks.

You can’t eat it. You might not even see it if you walk by high performance computing (HPC) systems engineer Adam DeConinck’s cubicle too fast, because this cluster stands at a petite five inches. Don’t be fooled, however — this device is the real deal.

Adam DeConinck sees his tiny Raspberry  Pi cluster computer as a way to play with new ideas.

Raspberry Pi is a commercially available single-board computer created as a UK charity project to give schools cheap hardware students could tear apart and put back together again without worrying about ruining expensive gear. Since then, the hardy computer has been adapted for plenty of creative uses.

For geeks like Adam, the Raspberry Pi’s ARM CPUs, the same ones used in the vast majority of the world’s mobile devices, provide an alternative to the x86 architecture used by most PCs and servers. Adam – whose day job is building compute clusters on the Amazon Cloud and maintaining NVIDIA’s internal HPC clusters – likes to spend his spare time experimenting with his own, modest-sized cluster.

Although he admits that most people don’t build their own server clusters, which are sets of connected computers that work together as a single, more powerful computer, Adam sees his teensy cluster as a way to play with new ideas. The dinky machine is built from five separate Raspberry Pi ‘servers,’ each with its own tiny ARM CPU. The whole thing uses just 16 watts of power when running at full capacity.

“It’s basically a fun project,” he says. “Whenever I see some cool and interesting computer-related development, the first things I ask myself is, ‘how could I build a cluster out of this?’ I built this cluster because I thought it would be cool to have one on my desk to play around with.”

Adam isn’t the only one who had fun with this project. When Adam asked his wife, Leigh, who’s a non-techie, if she wanted to help create a Lego server rack for the 7 by 9-inch cluster, she quickly agreed.  “She thought it was a cool idea,” Adam says.

After ensuring his tiny cluster is optimized for speed and performance, Adam plans to convert it into a Hadoop cluster for Big (or not so big) Data processing, and use it to experiment with other system administration problems.

“Clustering with HPC servers is about solving problems with more than just one computer,” he says. “I build and work with clusters for a living, and one thing I always look for and get excited about is figuring out how you can work with new and interesting hardware in a scientific computing environment.”

Fellow employees agree that the cluster is innovative, but were disappointed when they discovered that there wasn’t yet any NVIDIA hardware in it.

But the future looks plenty green for this little cluster that could. Adam says he wants to get Tegra into it, turning it into a portable demo system to be shown off at conferences. Now that’s something you don’t just blow a raspberry at.

Raspberry Pi, served fresh, with a side of Lego.

You asked and we listened.

We received tons of positive feedback on this week’s Raspberry Pi server cluster blog post, and requests from fans for a guide on how to build one themselves.

So, we asked Chef Adam – aka high-performance computing systems engineer Adam DeConinck – if he’d be willing to give fans his recipe for making the internet’s most popular pi. He was more than happy to comply, secret sauces and ingredients included:

Physical setup:

1. Raspberry Pi is powered through a micro-USB port, so use a USB hub to distribute power to all five computers. Any powered hub should work as long as it can provide at least five volts and 700 milliamperes to each Pi.
2. You’ll need a basic eight-port Ethernet switch for networking.
3. Adam’s rack was custom-built. He had a rough idea of the design when he went to the Lego store, but it evolved as he went along with it; feel free to customize your rack, it just needs to supports the cluster.
4. Use one of the Pis as a head node, like in a larger HPC cluster, which provides a shared file system, cluster scheduler and other services. The other four Pis will act as compute nodes, used only for running computation jobs.

Operating system: You can use the most recent version of Raspbian Linux, a variant of Debian which has been designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi.  Find instructions for how to install the OS on the servers here.

Software configuration: Adam put this system together as a platform for playing with HPC clusters and system administration, so part of the project was automating the process of setting up all the system software. An open-source tool called Ansible was utilized for this part.

All of Adam’s Ansible playbooks for setting up the cluster can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/ajdecon/ansible-pi-cluster. There are also some more detailed technical notes on the OS installation and networking setup in the README file at that link.

Bon appétit! Let us know in the comments if you plan on cooking up your own cluster.

Don’t forget an 8-port Ethernet switch.

 

If NVIDIA were run by secret agents from the future – and, having seen some of the technology around here, sometimes I wonder – this would be our not-so-secret plan: to pour visual computing into the world’s water supply. Put another way: we’re out to put visual intelligence everywhere.

It’s a radical idea. Forty years ago, when the first SIGGRAPH conference was held, visual computing was a far-out notion. Twenty years ago, when NVIDIA was founded, visual computing was limited to a few high-end workstations and supercomputers. Today, we’re selling processors for handhelds, graphics cards for gamers, powerful tools for visual artists and engineers, and accelerators for the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Time to unveil the next steps in our plan to shape the future of visual computing at SIGGRAPH 2013, which starts Sunday. Our headquarters for this effort, once the exhibition portion of the conference opens Tuesday: booth 803 at the Anaheim Convention Center. We’ve packed our booth with examples of how widespread the idea of visual computing has become.

A few highlights:

• For your hand: you’ll be able to play with NVIDIA SHIELD, our new Tegra 4-powered gaming portable, and new Tegra 4-powered tablets from HP and Toshiba;
• For the cloud: NVIDIA GRID solutions, including the NVIDIA GRID Visual Computing Appliance with technologies from Autodesk, Adobe, SolidWorks, RTT and virtual desktops and applications with Citrix;
• For your desk: PCs running our flagship GeForce GTX Titan GPUs will run demos from Witcher 3, an upcoming action role playing game, as well as our Waveworks water effects demo;
• For the road: look for a full slate of tech demos – including a demo of an augmented reality car configuration system – as well as a Tesla Model S with its Tegra-powered all-digital dashboard.

Expect some surprises as the week progresses.

You’ll also be able to listen to talks from partners such as Pixar, Weta Digital, Adobe and Honda at our Visual Computing Theater, adjacent to our booth.

You’ll be able to catch more than a dozen Tech Talks from NVIDIANs on topics such as high-performance graphics for next-generation 4K displays in Room 211 on the second floor of the convention center.

And we’ll be hosting nine hands-on training sessions with our Nsight Visual Studio developer tools in room 205A.

In short our agents, um, colleagues, will be everywhere.

If you’re attending the show, visit our SIGGRAPH page for more information. And if you can’t get to Anaheim, we’ll be live-streaming talks from our Visual Computing Theater and posting highlights from the show and news to our corporate blog.

We have great news to share with you about NVIDIA SHIELD. The high-performance gaming and entertainment portable is in full production and will begin shipping on July 31.

Last month, we made the difficult decision to delay the launch of SHIELD due to a mechanical issue we found in our rigorous testing process. Since then we have been working non-stop to put SHIELD through its paces and ensure it meets the highest quality control standards in the industry.

Order now and get a limited edition t-shirt, while supplies last.

You can experience SHIELD for yourself at SHIELD Experience Centers at select GameStop, Microcenter and Canada Computers brick-and-mortar locations in the U.S. and Canada.

If you are ready to join the SHIELD movement and experience the ultimate gaming and entertainment portable, order now through a SHIELD Experience Center or online, and you’ll get a limited-edition SHIELD t-shirt, while supplies last.

Find the SHIELD reseller or Experience Center nearest you at http://shield.nvidia.com/where-to-preorder/.

It’s been escalating for a while now.

Fully adorned Christmas trees have shown up in cubicles. Employees have had their nameplates changed to “Justin Bieber.” Office furniture has been gift-wrapped. And, for too long, one man has been at the center of it all: NVIDIA’s Chris Holmes.

“I have been officially gotten,” Chris Holmes admits.

That, sources say, is why Chris had it coming. That is why his Honda Fit was transformed Thursday afternoon, taking on the fearsome countenance of Pinkie Pie– the pink, magical pony worshiped by small children, loathed by women and feared by men of all ages.

“I deserved this,” said Chris, after he strode into the NVIDIA parking lot Thursday afternoon to discover what had been done. “I have been officially gotten.”

The story behind the story: a small faction of NVIDIANs led by software engineer Clay Causin were inspired after a report in the corporate blog quoted Chris saying his “many targets” have not been “brave enough to get even.” The result: a quick brain-storming session and a trip to the local art supply store.

The real craft here, however, lay in the set up. Colleagues scheduled meetings with Chris at odd hours. Others dropped cryptic hints. Posters of Chris went up around campus, put up by a mysterious group of “Bronies,” – as adult male fans of My Little Pony are known. The net effect: Chris was led to believe the hammer would come down Friday.

The plan comes together.

He was wrong. Instead, on Thursday, while Chris was distracted by a lunch appointment with a colleague, another NVIDIAN borrowed the keys Chris had left out on his desk. His Honda was then rolled into position outside his office, and quickly covered with pink paper. An enormous pink pony head was attached to the hood. Inside, the car was stuffed with balloons.

Chris, of course, was already planning his retaliation. The next day Clay’s cube was thoroughly redecorated. He is now the proud owner of a huge collection of Jar-Jar Binks memorabilia. Looks like this isn’t over. Yet.

Revenge is a dish best served from a Jar (Jar).

For many people, the first stop in the car-buying process is no stop at all: They go online to browse options, colors and trim level from the comfort of home.

To entice potential buyers into showrooms, many dealerships are adding a similar customization experience so they can show customers options that may not be in stock.

While convenient, both methods suffer from a key limitation: the end result is a static image. Enjoying a car is a 3D experience. So, ideally, you could see your choices on an actual car.

This week at the annual SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim, Calif., visual projection specialist Christie and NVIDIA will be showcasing the next best thing: an interactive design studio that brings vehicles to life using augmented reality to blend computer graphics with physical models.

This demo will be just one of the ways we’ll be telling the story of how computer graphics is revolutionizing the auto industry. In our booth we’re also showcasing how NVIDIA is making cars safer, and more enjoyable to drive. Stop by to experience:

• UI Composer Studio– our software tool chain that lets designers digitally craft customizable digital dashboards and infotainment systems.
• Jetson – our next generation automotive development kit, that enables automakers to accelerate their development and bring the power of our next-generation mobile graphics technology to cars instead of trying to play catch-up consumer electronics.
• Tesla Model S– Car of the Year for 2013, according to Motor Trend, and powered by NVIDIA.   On-board auto computing represents a huge opportunity for the computer graphics industry, and there’s no better example of that than the Tesla’s all digital dashboard and 17″ touchscreen display.
• RTT DeltaGen and Dassault Catia – Real-time rendering improves how auto designers, engineers and artists can leverage the same data to streamline the process of developing cars and bringing them to market.

While these will reshape how drivers experience the next generation of cars, Christie’s work starts well before consumers slip behind the wheel.

The centerpiece of this demo at the NVIDIA booth is a one-fifth scale model of an Audi R8 coupe resting on a surface of specialized projection tiles (see image, below). Using a touch panel, users can instantly change the appearance of the car, select the style of the wheels and alter the head lamps.

Want to see how the Audi R8 looks on a mountain road or city street? No problem. The environment surrounding the car can be changed with a simple touch.

Christie achieves the effect using a car configurator developed by RTT for Audi. It’s built on RTT DeltaGen software, the same tool many automakers use for digital review of new car designs.

To “apply” paint, wheels and the like, Christie uses unique projection mapping software to create what’s called a WARP mesh – a 3D mesh that matches the physical shape of the screen, in this case the 3D shape of the car’s body.

An NVIDIA GPU creates an image and de-forms it so it wraps onto the body. Images from multiple projectors are combined to get a seamless rendering of the car, which is viewable from all angles.  To add further realism, the software renders reflections of the background onto the car (see image, right).

Roy Anthony, the lead researcher at Christie, who came up with the installation, is already planning to update the graphics hardware. He’s looking to augment the current graphics server, which uses  Quadro K5000 cards and Quadro Sync cards, with NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerators – the kind used in supercomputers to add more realistic effects – and maybe even show the car driving down the road.

It sounds complicated to pull off – and it definitely is sophisticated technology. But it couldn’t be easier for the customer to experience.

Like a summer blockbuster to your local cinema, NVIDIA GRID technology is coming, inevitably, to a business near you.

Large enterprises often have the resources to set up their own private cloud-based IT services. But for smaller businesses relying on graphics-intensive applications in their work, NVIDIA GRID technology is enabling a new set of outsourced “virtual private clouds,” or VPCs for short.

It’s these midsize businesses – and smaller – that need the ability to provide their employees with secure access to critical tools, scale up quickly to meet demand, and protect intellectual property by keeping it safely in a data center. But without the hassle and cost of multiplying the size of their IT departments.

In a harbinger of the proliferation of virtual private clouds, two cloud services companies today unveiled infrastructure-as-a-service solutions that use NVIDIA GRID at their core. These services allow engineering, design and architectural firms to provide their employees with secure access to 3D drawings from GPU-powered virtual desktops running on just about any connected device.

Out of Boulder, Colo., comes Ajubeo with its new Graphics Virtual Desktop. The service provides employees with true PC graphics performance while virtually accessing sophisticated 3D design and engineering tools – such as Autodesk AutoCAD and Revit – from PCs, tablets and smartphones.

CT Networks customer Steven Kratchman Architect, P.C., created this rendering using an NVIDIA GRID-powered cloud offering.

Separately, CT Networks of Hauppauge, N.Y., has announced a service for firms looking to virtualize Autodesk AutoCAD and Adobe Creative Suites. The cloud-based offering allows firms in design, architecture and other industries to collaborate and modify 3D designs without sacrificing graphics performance – even when remotely accessing files onsite with customers or urban planning teams.

NVIDIA GRID technology is the spark to massive change in how businesses can deliver virtualized solutions to their workforces. CT Networks and Ajubeo are at the tip of what we’re certain is a coming wave of cloud service providers helping small and midsize businesses navigate these waters.

This week at SIGGRAPH, we’re giving a sneak peek at the GPU inside Project Logan, our next-generation, CUDA-capable mobile processor. From a graphics perspective, this is as big a milestone for mobile as the first GPU, GeForce 256, was for the PC when it was introduced 14 years ago. I am really excited to start showing it off to the world.

GeForce 256 revolutionized PC graphics and created the GPU category, with its full workstation-class feature set and industry-leading performance. Kepler delivers the same promise to mobile. It brings a huge jump in performance. It offers extraordinary power efficiency. And it provides full support for the modern GPU feature set found in the latest PC GPUs and upcoming consoles, instead of the incomplete, outdated capabilities of current mobile GPUs.

Single Architecture Across Product Line

Project Logan’s GPU is based on our revolutionary Kepler architecture, which forms the foundation for products that a year ago began rolling out across our notebook, desktop, workstation and supercomputer lines.

Our mission with Project Logan was to scale this technology down to the mobile power envelope – creating new configurations that we could both deploy in the Logan mobile SOC and license to others, as announced last month.

We took Kepler’s efficient processing cores and added a new low-power inter-unit interconnect and extensive new optimizations, both specifically for mobile. With this design, mobile Kepler uses less than one-third the power of GPUs in leading tablets, such as the iPad 4, while performing the same rendering. And it gives us enormous performance and clocking headroom to scale up.

We achieved this efficiency without compromising graphics capability. Kepler supports the full spectrum of OpenGL – including the just-announced OpenGL 4.4 full-featured graphics specification and the OpenGL ES 3.0 embedded standard. It also supports DirectX 11, Microsoft’s latest graphics API.

New Rendering, Simulation Techniques

These advanced APIs will allow developers to use more efficient, visually compelling rendering approaches than were previously possible in mobile. They will bring amazing images to life through a variety of advanced rendering and simulation techniques, such as:

• Tessellation – which creates geometry dynamically and efficiently on the GPU from high-level descriptions, sizing triangles optimally based on the user’s viewpoint. By comparison, fine detail in a traditional pre-generated approach is inefficient, requiring excess geometry to deal with all possible viewpoints.

• Compute-based deferred rendering – which calculates the effect of all lights in a scene in a single deferred rendering pass. This OpenGL 4 capability greatly improves deferred rendering efficiency and scalability compared to current OpenGL ES-based implementations, which require an extra pass for each light source in the scene. The scalability of the compute-based approach also paves the way to even more advanced lighting models, such as using virtual points of lights to approximate global illumination effects.

• Advanced anti-aliasing and post-processing algorithms – which deliver better image quality, particularly in areas of very sharp color contrast, by making multi-sampling more programmable and allowing applications to implement their own anti-aliasing filters. These also enable more efficient film-quality post-processing effects, such as motion blur and depth of field.

• Physics and simulations – which simulate the physical behavior of rendered objects, such as calculating rigid-body dynamics or animating particles of smoke. This enables gamers to enjoy more detailed, fully interactive virtual worlds not previously possible on mobile devices.

Leveraging Kepler’s heritage as the industry-leading architecture for general purpose GPU computing, we will also bring groundbreaking compute capability and power efficiency to new mobile applications outside of graphics. Among these are computational imaging, computer vision, augmented reality and speech recognition.

You can get a sense of Kepler’s capabilities in this video of our demo of “Ira,” a startlingly realistic digital model of a human head generated in real time. Our CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, introduced Ira earlier this year on the stage of our GPU Technology Conference. At the time, it was running on a desktop PC equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan GPU, the most powerful single-GPU gaming processor on the market. In this demo, it’s running on the Kepler GPU inside Logan.

Logan has only been back in our labs for a few weeks and it has been amazing to see new applications coming up every day that have never been seen before in mobile. But this is only the beginning. Simply put, Logan will advance the capability of mobile graphics by over seven years, delivering a fully state-of-the-art feature set combined with awesome performance and power efficiency.

I can’t wait to see what the industry can do with this technology now that it has been revealed. Stay tuned!

Below, a video showing Logan running our “Island” demo. 

Head and skin data in “Ira” video courtesy of the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC.

[Editor's note: Gaming industry pioneer Tim Sweeney is the founder, CEO and technical director of Epic Games, whose widely used Unreal game engine technology has defined the state of the art in gaming for more than a decade.]

Today at SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA showed our next-generation game engine technology — Unreal Engine 4 – running on their next-generation mobile GPU.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney

The big news here is NVIDIA’s support for the OpenGL 4.3 feature set, which brings to mobile devices the same high-end graphics hardware capabilities exposed via DirectX 11 on PC games and on next-generation consoles!

And this isn’t your father’s GPU: NVIDIA’s mobile graphics technology is built on the same Kepler graphics architecture found in its latest generation of PC GPUs. It’s the same Kepler architecture on top of which we’ve created high-end Unreal Engine 4 PC demos, which have taken advantage of over 2.5 teraflops of computing performance.

More than ever before, we see the opportunity for developers to create high-end games and ship them across multiple platforms on a wide variety of devices, including tablet, smartphone, Windows, Mac, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. NVIDIA’s OpenGL 4.3 achievements open up the mobile front of this strategy.

While Unreal Engine 3 already powers hundreds of high-quality games, from PC and console to mobile, Unreal Engine 4 has been reimagined for the future of game development. We’re supporting developers on an entirely new level across major platforms with our most powerful and scalable toolset to date.

Starting today, NVIDIA’s engineers are demonstrating Unreal Engine 4-powered desktop PC game content to a select group of journalists and industry insiders. It’s all running on a chip no bigger than a fingernail, and is just a taste of what mobile Kepler will make possible.

Jon Peddie Research – one of the premier market research firms in the computer graphics industry – is posing an interesting question at their traditional SIGGRAPH luncheon today: Is democratization a good thing? Let’s sort out exactly what this means.

To any observer of the visual effects (VFX)  industry, it’s clear looking back over the past year just how big its economic challenges have been. And it’s equally clear, looking ahead, just how exciting opportunities are for independent filmmakers and creative shops as software and hardware tools become more powerful at less cost. The business model for creating and distributing digital content is continuing to evolve to meet the economic realities of the marketplace.

On one hand, this means that the tools and computing power once reserved for the few are becoming available to the many. On the other hand, it means that larger studios with facilities in multiple geographies are benefiting from new technologies that allow them to create content with teams spread across time zones – taking advantage of a global workforce and the ability to “follow the sun” in their production schedules.

So, in this time of change – in which old models are proving not to work well and exciting new opportunities are being created – both large media companies and small independents would benefit from a rethink of their workflows.

So what are the key considerations?

The Cloud, of Course

The ability to get high-end computer horsepower delivered on-demand to users, independent of their devices, is unquestionably a game changer. Enabling a designer to plug a four-year-old MacBook into a network and run the latest version of, say, After Effects or Maya, delivered with state-of-the-art NVIDIA graphics, is a powerful new weapon, no matter your company’s size.

NVIDIA’s new GRID technology is one way to get there. GRID includes all the important elements necessary to provide high-end graphics horsepower to essentially any client device, including GPU virtualization and software that makes the artist interaction more fluid. GRID technology comes in a flexible range of implementation choices, from a stand-alone appliance built for small shops with no IT department to server-based systems for large facilities with existing virtualization environments.

Whatever a company’s size or IT sophistication, there are new NVIDIA GRID-based solutions appropriate for virtualizing artists’ desktops through on-premise or remote deployments.

Not the Cloud, of Course

Despite all the headlines, it turns out that the cloud may not be the answer to all of life’s problems. There are still key advantages to having a powerful NVIDIA Quadro-based workstation sitting next to an artist or editor. Multiple 4K monitors, 30-bit color accuracy, SDI I/O and confidence monitors are just a few reasons that a remote solution isn’t perfect for every user in every workflow.

“Monsters University” is the first Pixar film to implement Global Illumination, a new lighting technology that allows for ultra-complex lighting set-ups where light bounces in a physically realistic way.

The real economic driver for many VFX shops may well be putting more visualization capability in the hands of its creators. New technologies like Autodesk Maya Viewport 2.0, Chaos V-Ray RT and the new NVIDIA Quadro K6000 with 12GB of graphics memory are important tools that are enabling artists from companies like Pixar to visualize higher-fidelity scenes with more artist interactivity than ever before.

And once artists can do visualization and simulation simultaneously and interactively, the chances of the final render being what the director or client wanted increases dramatically. That lowers production costs by reducing the number of scenes that need to be re-rendered due to mistakes or last-minute artistic decision changes.

So, yes, democratization is a good thing. Any time you put more power into the hands of artists, you get better content. And the latest technology advances from NVIDIA and others are making this possible at lower cost and with more flexibility in workflows than ever before.

Image credit: Disney Pixar, all rights reserved. 

1992 was a big year. The leaders of the United States and Russia declared the Cold War was, officially, over. South Africans voted to abolish apartheid. Tim Berners-Lee and a handful of other researchers scattered around the world were already building out the still nascent World Wide Web.

And SGI released a new application programming interface it called Open GL, for Open Graphics Library. The idea behind OpenGL is a powerful one: it’s a cross-language standard that can be used on a wide variety of hardware to render 2D and 3D graphics, just as the Web can be used to exchange text on a wide variety of devices.

Now overseen by the Khronos Group, a non-profit industry consortium, OpenGL sits at the center of a sprawling worldwide ecosystem of hardware and software that has delivered a dazzling array of applications – including computer-aided design, flight simulation, scientific visualization and gaming – to hundreds of millions of PC users around the globe

And just as the World Wide Web would revolutionize the PC – and then go on to upend mobile communications – OpenGL is poised to do the same. It promises to give companies building mobile devices the ability to tap into the graphically rich applications that are now standard on the world’s PCs. And it gives software developers a set of hooks they can use so they can tap gobs of graphics power with just a few simple commands.

We know this because a subset of OpenGL targeted at embedded devices introduced 10 years ago – OpenGL ES – has already been a huge success. OpenGL ES has raised the bar for graphics on everything from phones to appliances and cars. The good news as OpenGL ES turns 10: thanks to OpenGL, there’s more where that came from.

That’s why we’ve raced to be the first to put OpenGL into mobile devices with the Project Logan GPU we’re announcing at SIGGRAPH, more than twenty-one years after OpenGL was released. It’s based on the same Kepler architecture that powers our latest generation of GPUs – including the GeForce GTX Titan and our GeForce GTX 780 GPUs — shrunk down to fit on Logan, a chip no bigger than a thumbnail.

We’re offering an early taste of what this will mean at SIGGRAPH, where we’re showing off a mobile version of the demo of an amazingly lifelike talking head – whom we’ve dubbed ‘Ira’ – that we gave earlier this year at our GPU Technology Conference. That demo was powered by high-end PCs running our latest Kepler-based graphics cards. Our mobile demo taps into the mobile version of that same Kepler architecture to do the same.

We’re also showing off a Logan running the next generation of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine technology. Epic’s game engine already powers hundreds of cutting-edge PC and console games. Because Logan supports OpenGL, we are able to show desktop PC game content using Epic’s next-generation Unreal Engine 4, on a chip no bigger than a fingernail, giving game developers a taste of what Open GL will make possible.

There’s potential here for more than just gaming, of course. Pixar is also working with the broader OpenGL community on OpenSubdiv, which promises to make Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces – which can generate extraordinarily smooth surfaces in digital images – a geometry standard. Full OpenGL on the Project Logan’s GPU means the power of OpenSubdiv – previously available only on high-end workstations – will run on mobile as well. “This is a big step forward,” said Pixar CTO Steve May. “Subdivision capability on mobile creates a huge incentive for the rest of the ecosystem to adopt this surface standard.”

So what’s next? We do know that when powerful PC and mobile technologies come together, the results are spectacular. Putting both OpenGL ES and OpenGL into the palm of your hand will let developers create amazing games that scale from tablets all the way up to high-end gaming PCs. It also opens up new frontiers as mobile devices tap into the power of visual computing to help their users navigate the world around them.

In short, being 21 is always awesome. For OpenGL it should be no different.

Shock. Awe. Wonder.

Those were the reactions when we unveiled a startlingly lifelike demo of a rendered human head – nicknamed “Ira” – at our GPU Technology Conference earlier this year. Ira’s skin moves and stretches as he blinks and grimaces. His mouth moves realistically as he talks. In short, Ira, based on a model of a real person, looks warm and approachable – a leap forward from the uncanny, rubbery faces generated by older generations of graphics technology.

Now, we’ve built a version of Ira you can take anywhere. Think of it as Ira To Go. That’s because our next-generation mobile technology, Project Logan – which we unveiled this week at the SIGGRAPH visual computing conference – relies on the same Kepler graphics architecture found in the GeForce GTX Titan GPUs we used to generate our original Ira demo.

Take me with you: our next-generation mobile technology relies on the same Kepler graphics architecture found in the GeForce GTX Titan.

“The community has been waiting for NVIDIA to lead the way,” said Kevin Krewell, a senior analyst at The Linley Group. “Now they’re in the position in the industry where they should be: leading.”

Kepler’s unofficial mascot, in other words, has been leading a secret double life. Ever since March — when we first unveiled the demo we created in partnership with the Institute for Creative Technology at the University of Southern California – our in-house development team has been working to put Ira into our next-generation mobile technology.

For most of that time, the team has been working on a pair of developer kits that replicate what Logan can do. It wasn’t until about 10 days ago that they got Logan itself. The chips – thanks to our bring-up team – worked just as expected. Within days, the demo was ready to show off at SIGGRAPH.

It’s an effort that wouldn’t be possible without Logan’s Kepler-based architecture and its support for high-octane graphics technologies typically available only on high-powered PCs. Features such as support for full tone mapping, bloom, FXAA 3.0 and full HDR are tools that have previously only been available on PCs.

These tools let the team build a demo that smiles and grimaces in real time and that holds up under different lighting conditions, while letting the user zoom in and out or pan side to side.

While the demo doesn’t include all the features seen on the original Ira demo – remember, Logan is for low-power mobile devices – it does include a number of grace notes the original demo didn’t. For example, the portable version of Ira includes details such as tear ducts, and the slight redness around the edges of the eye where it meets the eyelid. And the light bounces off the irises of Ira’s eyes in the demo in a more realistic way.

The result, we think: a helping of shock and awe, to go, hold the uncanny aftertaste. “There’s no other mobile processor demo that comes close,” said Krewell. “They’ve raised the bar for the entire graphics industry.”

Video, posted below. Head and skin data courtesy of the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC.

The Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation made its debut at SIGGRAPH 2013.

Whether you work with hammers or harmonicas, the right tool makes all the difference. It feels good in the hand. It’s light. It’s powerful. It makes you more productive.

The new Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation– introduced recently at SIGGRAPH, the visual computing conference – is all of these things. It’s less than three quarters of an inch thick. It weighs just 4.5 pounds. And it packs the power and efficiency of our new professional-grade Quadro K1100M mobile GPU.

This is a machine for designers, engineers and architects looking to be productive, and stylish, anywhere. For more details on the new thin and light mobile workstation, check out: www.dell.com/speedoflight.

More Quadro mobile workstation GPUs are coming. They range from the powerful and efficient K510M to the K5100M, which includes 8GB of dedicated graphics memory – the most ever built into a notebook, to power through complex models and graphics-intensive workflows. Notable features of this new lineup include:

• NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture, featuring incredible performance and power efficiency
• Industry’s largest 8GB frame buffer on the Quadro K5100M GPU
• Certifications – Tested and certified to run today’s most popular and demanding professional design, content creation and engineering applications
• NVIDIA Optimus technology ensures graphics performance is there when you need it, while intelligently extending battery life

The new Quadro mobile graphics lineup – including Quadro K5100M, K4100M, K3100M, K2100M, K1100M, K610M and K510M – also announced at SIGGRAPH, will be available later this year from major notebook OEMs worldwide.

Improved graphics, a new stunting system, new tracks, new (upgradeable) hydro jets and a full career mode.

These are just some of the new features available now in Riptide GP 2– the sequel to the only console-quality watercross-racing game on mobile devices.

Riptide GP 2 includes Tegra 4 optimizations that allow extra-crisp graphics on high-res screens, complex shaders, high-res textures, dynamic lighting and real-time shadows.

And, with the all-new Vector Engine 4, the game builds on the original game’s stunning visuals with completely remodeled riders and vehicles.

The new stunting system allows for crazier stunts – 25 stunts in total – you can unlock to earn more “boost”. There’s also a new career mode that doles out XP points you can use to upgrade your hydro jet, unlock new stunts and increase your rider’s performance.

And, to make sure you don’t lose your progress through the game, Riptide GP 2 makes use of Google Play Game Services to sync your achievements across your devices.

Whether you’re looking for some heads-up online multiplayer racing action or you want to upgrade and customize your watercraft, Riptide GP 2 delivers the most visually stunning watercross game on mobile.

Download the game today on Google Play for $2.99.

I have good news to share today about our mission to provide developers with the world’s best accelerated computing platform.

NVIDIA has acquired The Portland Group (PGI), the HPC industry’s leading independent supplier of compilers and tools.

Founded in 1989, PGI has a long history of innovation in HPC compiler technology for Intel, IBM, Linux, OpenMP, GPGPU and ARM. We’ve worked closely with them for the past five years as we’ve pushed deeper into high performance computing with GPUs.

PGI and its exceptionally talented staff will continue to operate under the PGI flag – developing OpenACC, CUDA Fortran and CUDA x86 for multicore x86 and, of course, GPGPUs. And they will continue to serve their wide-range of customers – including chip makers, research labs and HPC computing centers.

Bringing our teams together further cements our strong, established technical partnership in creating developer tools for the accelerated computing revolution. It also strengthens the OpenACC initiative to create an easy on-ramp to parallel computing by joining the world’s top independent provider of OpenACC compilers with the world’s best GPU designers.

Behind every great processor technology stands a great compiler team. Ours just got bigger. And better.

From left to right: NVIDIA VP of Business Development Jeff Herbst, PGI Director Doug Miles and NVIDIA General Manager of GPU Computing Software Ian Buck.

What could be better than an all-out international World of Tanks tournament? An all-out international World of Tanks tournament with prizes of $100,000.

NVIDIA is hosting its first-ever GeForce eSports World of Tanks Open Tournament, letting tankers from all over the world blow each other to bits in the classic armored warfare massively-multiplayer online game.

And as if that weren’t enough, we’re also announcing the launch of the GeForce Pro Division Shoutcasts. These will allow fans and players to keep tabs on the latest tournament matches and results via livestreams and video-on-demand.

Tune in to Twitch for live shoutcasting. Or watch the VoDs at the Official World of Tanks YouTube channel and be on the alert for GeForce Scavenger hunt clues for a chance to win in-game gold, courtesy of tournament sponsors EVGA and Razer.

Twitch streams for the Americas are Sundays at 6 pm PT, starting July 28. Russia and Europe start Aug. 1, respectively, at 18:00 CET and 21:00 CET. Matches from China and South East Asia regions will be announced separately. VODs will be uploaded to YouTube shortly after the Twitch Live Premiers.

Professional players will have the chance to fight it out in the GeForce International Pro Division Finals and rake in their share of the $100,000 prize, beginning Aug. 12.

Today is a big day for gamers and for NVIDIA. We launch SHIELD at Newegg, GameStop, Microcenter, Canada Computers and NVIDIA. Get your hands on the first ever high-performance gaming and entertainment portable.

Here’s what you get:

• High-powered Gaming: Powered by the world’s fastest mobile processor, NVIDIA Tegra 4, SHIELD introduces an entirely new class of portable gaming with rich, immersive graphics.
• Gamer Controls: The console-grade controller gives gamers ultimate precision, ergonomics and feel to play over 100 controller-enabled games available on Google Play.
• Stunning Visuals and Sound: SHIELD has a stunning 5-inch HD retinal touchscreen. Combined with the custom-tuned, bass reflex audio system that powers deep, rich sound never before experienced on a handheld device.
• 100% Android: SHIELD comes with the latest Android Jelly Bean operating system — for instant access to hundreds of thousands of great apps and games.
• PC Gaming Made Portable: With PC Streaming BETA you can experience the performance of GeForce GTX gaming on SHIELD — from any room in the house.
• Play in New Ways: Game, tweet, fly a Parrot AR.Drone or drive a Sphero ball — SHIELD lets you do all the things you want, and even some things you never thought possible.

We are very proud of SHIELD and hope you love it as much as we do.