The leading software providers representing many of the most important applications for designing the products we use, the cars we drive, the movies we watch and even for scientists to visualize the world around us are jumping on Turing, NVIDIA’s newly launched GPU architecture.

Unveiled today by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the annual SIGGRAPH conference, Turing brings together dedicated hardware acceleration of four core elements: AI, ray tracing, programmable shading and simulation.

NVIDIA also announced an expansion of its RTX development platform to allow developers to easily incorporate these functions in their applications. This complete reinvention of how a GPU processes information means that some things like real-time ray tracing that were thought to be five or more years away are now possible with a standard workstation when equipped with a Turing-class GPU like those in the new Quadro RTX family.

Designers can now iterate their product model or building and see accurate lighting, shadows and reflections in real time. Previously, they would have to use a low-fidelity approximation to get their design more or less right, then ship files out to a CPU farm to be rendered and get the results back in minutes or even hours, depending on complexity. Only then could they determine what it was truly going to look like in the real world. Now, they can do so interactively on their Quadro RTX-powered desktop.

For artists in the entertainment world, the same is true for visualizing their creations for animation or visual effects. But the benefits don’t stop there. NGX, new NVIDIA technology for bringing AI into the graphics pipeline, is part of the RTX platform. And NVIDIA is providing an SDK that makes it easy for developers to incorporate AI-powered effects into their apps.

NGX technology brings capabilities such as taking a standard camera feed and creating super slow motion like you’d get from a $100,000+ specialized camera. Or using AI to increase the resolution and clarity of archived images. Or removing wires from a photograph and automatically replacing the missing pixels with the right background. Learn more about these NVIDIA Research papers that led to this work.

These new capabilities are combined with increases in the speed and fidelity of drawing raster graphics through newly advanced shaders. And up to 4,608 CUDA cores for parallel compute processing means that software developers have a hardware platform unlike anything before.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, application developers are jumping at the chance to bring to their customers amazing new capabilities and up to 30x speed increases vs. CPU only for rendering.

Adobe Dimension CC: Intuitive new 3D creative tool built for all aspects of design and marketing is supporting NVIDIA MDL and demonstrating at SIGGRAPH, for the first time, a preview of a Dimension renderer for NVIDIA RTX ray tracing and Turing GPUs.

Allegorithmic Project Alchemist: New Substance tool, integrating AI-powered feature with over 100x speedup when running on NVIDIA Turing GPUs compared with CPUs. Has been presented at Substance Days at SIGGRAPH this morning, and will be shown in the Allegorithmic booth.

Allegorithmic Substance Designer: Worldwide reference material editor, integrating RTX through DXR for light baking. RTX gives a speed increase of 800 percent compared with previous CPU-based technology.

Altair Thea Render: New SketchUp and Cinema 4D plug-ins, along with the upcoming Rhino plug-in release, will help a broad range of markets get a ray-tracing performance boost by one order of magnitude using NVIDIA OptiX denoiser technology.

ANSYS Optis VRXPERIENCE and Speos: Simulation software leveraging NVIDIA OptiX for faster convergence and high framerate deterministic ray-traced simulation for complex optical system, with 30x speedup compared with CPU legacy technology.

Autodesk Arnold: The Arnold GPU, which is currently in beta, is one of the first production renderers to utilize NVIDIA OptiX. At SIGGRAPH this week, we’re previewing it running on our latest Turing GPU hardware, featuring ray-tracing hardware designed specifically for OptiX.

Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve: World’s most popular color-grading application, using Turing Tensor Cores in Resolve 15 to accelerate AI inferencing for graphics enhancement.

Blender Cycles: Open source renderer using NVIDIA CUDA to accelerate performance.

Cebas finalRender: GPU-accelerated ray tracer for Autodesk 3ds Max uses NVIDIA OptiX AI denoiser for 5x+ acceleration.

Chaos Group: Preview of Project Lavina using Microsoft’s DXR to deliver 3-5x real-time ray-tracing performance over Volta generation for scenes exported from Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya. VRAY GPU using RT Cores in Quadro RTX for substantial acceleration over NVIDIA Pascal generation.

Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA: The industry reference Design and Engineering Solution plans to leverage RTX for rendering with life-like quality materials to accelerate VR rendering for immersive experiences and design validation.

Dassault Systèmes HomebyMe: Web portal for interior design that leverages OptiX denoiser to boost render times by 10x.

Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS Visualize: Visualization tool for 3D CAD data using OptiX denoiser for instant life-like rendering.

EA SEED: Cross-disciplinary team within EA Worldwide Studios whose Project PICA PICA is a real-time ray-tracing experiment featuring a mini-game for self-learning AI agents in a procedurally assembled world. The approaches inspire developers and provide a glimpse of a future where real-time ray tracing powers the creative experiences of tomorrow.

Epic Games’ Unreal Engine: Complete suite of tools for the creation of games, visualizations, interactive product designs, movies, broadcast entertainment and immersive experiences. Unreal Engine is using NVIDIA RTX technology through DXR to achieve industry-leading real-time ray-tracing performance.

ESI Group IC.IDO: Immersive VR solution for engineering virtual prototyping, using Quadro RTX accelerated NVIDIA OptiX, potentially supporting real-time ray tracing on Turing GPUs, planned for future IC.IDO version.

ESRI ArcGIS Pro: World’s leading GIS application is harnessing the power of deep learning for both training and inferencing, leveraging NVIDIA Turing Tensor Cores in the upcoming release of ArcGIS Pro.

Isotropix Clarisse: Physically based rendering engine demonstrating OptiX ray-tracing acceleration on Quadro RTX 6000, showing a 20x viewport performance improvement over CPUs.

Kitware ParaView: Popular scientific visualization tool, ParaView has been enhanced with a completely new rendering backend using NVIDIA RTX technology. It provides enhanced visual cues to better communicate the content of the scientific datasets while maintaining the speed for data exploration. The NVIDIA RTX backend for ParaView will be shown live at SIGGRAPH.

Otoy OctaneRender: GPU-accelerated, unbiased, physically correct renderer is demonstrating performance improvements of 5-8x with Octane 2019’s path-tracing kernel — running at 3.2 billion rays/second on NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000, compared with 400 million rays/second on Quadro P6000.

Pixar Renderman: Leading film renderer is announcing support for OptiX AI denoiser in R22.1 due later this year. Demonstrating RenderMan XPU architecture that uses CPU and GPU with NVIDIA OptiX.

PocketStudio: New tool that will be shown for first time at SIGGRAPH during Real-Time Live. It allows 3D filmmakers to easily create, play and stream 3D animation sequences using real-time collaborative editing. It leverages Vulkan real-time ray tracing for its advanced quality viewport.

Redshift 3.0: Leading biased GPU renderer is announcing that Redshift 3.0 will use OptiX to access RTX ray-tracing acceleration. Redshift 2.6 shipping with OptiX denoising, accelerating interactivity.

Remedy Entertainment: Creators of cinematic blockbuster action games that break media boundaries and push the envelope of 3D character technology and visual effects. Remedy has been researching how to utilize NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing technology and the DXR API in its Northlight engine.

Siemens NX: Leading CAD application supporting GPU-based rendering with Ray Traced Studio, to include AI denoising and MDL support.

University of Illinois VMD: A molecular visualization tool developed at University of Illinois and used by over 100,000 researchers all over the world demonstrating support for NVIDIA OptiX and Quadro RTX GPUs.

Weta Digital: Leading visual effects house showing their Gazebo virtual production tool with OptiX acceleration, enabling studio artists to see exactly what final-frame production renders will look like, reducing guesswork and allowing convergence to a desired look more quickly.

Praise for NVIDIA Turing

“Turing is a technological leap forward that will help Adobe shape the future of creative design. The powerful new ray-tracing features of NVIDIA RTX will make 3D more accessible to designers and marketers through intuitive tools like Dimension CC. We look forward to leveraging the enhanced AI capabilities of RTX as we extend our Sensei machine learning capabilities to democratize 2D/3D compositing.” — Ross McKegney, director of Engineering, Adobe Dimension CC

“RTX technology tightly integrates ray tracing into the real-time graphics pipeline. It enables new rendering techniques that will greatly improve the quality of real-time graphics, and the performance of graphical tools overall. In the case of Substance ray-traced bakers, we can observe an increase in speed of around 800% when compared with CPU-based ray tracing.” — Cyrille Damez, chief technology officer, Allegorithmic

“Altair Thea Render v2.0 integrates NVIDIA OptiX denoiser, dramatically accelerating production of final renders. Users can take advantage of this optimized workflow, creating out-of-the-box, stunning photorealistic images in a fraction of previous render times.” — Ioannis Pantazopoulos, vice president of Rendering Technology, Altair

“Autodesk is committed to bringing the highest quality photorealistic rendering to our users and we look forward to a GPU version of the Arnold renderer that could leverage the NVIDIA RTX platform. We are super excited to see the performance gains while maintaining the great look our Arnold customers love.” – Chris Vienneau, senior director of Media & Entertainment Products, Autodesk

“Our customers are always looking for large performance gains and we are seeing a significant leap with NVIDIA RTX.” — Dan May, president of Americas Operations, Blackmagic

“DXR on Turing enables us to explore workflows for real-time visualization that were not possible before. We estimate that Turing hardware is 3-5x faster than earlier GPU generations for the real-time ray tracing of our Project Lavina.” — Vlado Koylazov, co-founder and CTO, Chaos Group

“We are excited about the innovations in graphics technology that NVIDIA has unveiled at SIGGRAPH today, and know our customers will welcome this new, cutting-edge visualization capability into their daily workflows.” — Brian Hillner, senior product portfolio manager, DS SOLIDWORKS

“With its Turing architecture, NVIDIA have shattered the photorealism barrier that current-generation rasterizing techniques have presented until now. Just as we saw with the movie business over a decade ago, ray tracing is going to revolutionize the realism of real-time applications, cinematic experiences and high-end games. Now, we will see artists and designers using Unreal Engine technology to create, view and interact with content that is indistinguishable from reality.” — Kim Libreri, CTO, Epic Games

“Turing has the potential to be a game-changer for our customers’ workflows. Our preliminary tests with an early Turing-based GPU showed frame rates high enough for our engineering customers to realize ray-traced reflections and their effects on proposed product configurations in real time, for example cockpit or cabin visibility. This should significantly advance immersive product and procedural evaluation capability in CAVE’s or active stereo displays, and eventually maybe even HMDs. We are actively exploring how innovations like RTX can be integrated into future versions of our solution.” — Eric Kam, solution marketing manager, ESI’s IC.IDO

“Increasingly, our customers want to take advantage of all the benefits AI brings to their workflows. We are thrilled that NVIDIA is bringing Tensor Cores to Turing GPU architecture, which will provide a more cost-effective solution for inferencing whether on the desktop or from the data center.” –– Jim McKinney, chief technology officer, ESRI Desktop Applications

“We’re excited about the hardware acceleration in NVIDIA’s Turing generation because it will enable our customers to enjoy rendering acceleration 20x faster than on CPU. It’s just fantastic!” — Sebastien Guichou, chief technology officer and co-founder, Isotropix

“Interactive ray-tracing is a game changer for scientific visualization and NVIDIA RTX offers improved visual cues for communicating scientific content without disrupting the exploratory workflow.” — Berk Geveci, senior director of Scientific Computing, Kitware

“Advertising is an extremely iterative process and our clients want alternatives and revisions fast. NVIDIA RTX will accelerate how we use rendering and we’ll be able to reinvest that time into the creative process.” –– Tawfeeq Martin, Technical Innovations, The Mill

“NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing hardware is the future – and will define the next decades of GPU rendering. At SIGGRAPH, we’re demonstrating performance improvements of 5-8x with Octane 2019’s path-tracing kernel – running at 3.2 billion rays/second on NVIDIA’s new Quadro RTX 6000 – compared to 400 millions rays/second on P6000” — Jules Urbach, chief executive officer, Otoy

“Pixar is excited to be working closely with NVIDIA to integrate the OptiX ray-tracing acceleration in Quadro RTX into the next generation of high-performance RenderMan solutions for animation and VFX.” — David Laur, director of Product Management, Pixar

“The Quadro RTX is a BEAST!” — Rob Slater, co-founder, Redshift

“VMD exploits Turing’s RTX acceleration for fully interactive ray tracing of even the most difficult scenes from state-of-the-art research, giving scientists intuitive WYSIWYG publication rendering at high fidelity, all without becoming a graphics professional.” — John Stone, senior research programmer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Our long-term collaboration with NVIDIA on advanced rendering continues with Turing. The performance improvements change how artists can work with hero assets throughout the pipeline, improving every creative decision along the way. This is not a speed-up, it’s a step up to a new way of working.”– Luca Fascione, senior head of Technology and Research, Weta Digital