AMD isn’t the only hardware company making waves this week at SIGGRAPH 2017. NVIDIA is looking to bolster its position in the professional graphics arena with a few new breakthroughs. The first of which is the addition of two new external graphics solutions that are targeted at professional artists and designers who primarily work with notebooks.

NVIDIA is making it possible for these professionals to use either Pascal-based TITAN xP or Quadro graphics cards within an external GPU (eGPU) enclosure. NVIDIA will be partnering with a number of hardware partners including Bizon, Magma, and Sonnet, who will make compatible solutions available in September.



“While more computer power than ever is needed for VR, photoreal rendering and AI workflows, mobile systems are getting thinner and lighter, with limited performance and memory,” said Bob Pette, NVIDA VP for Professional Visualization. “Our eGPUs can now solve this problem, enabling creatives to plug into our most capable GPUs so they could do their best work on the most graphically demanding applications.”

NVIDIA is also playing up two of its strengths in artifice intelligence (AI) by launching the OptiX 5.0 SDK. With version 5.0, the OptiX is gaining ray tracing support to help speed up processing with regards to visual designs. This new release also adds GPU-accelerated motion blur along with AI-enhanced denoising capabilities.



“Developers using our platform can enable millions of artists and designers to access the capabilities of a render farm right at their desk,” added Pette. “By creating OptiX-based applications, they can bring the extraordinary power of AI to their customers, enhancing their creativity and dramatically improving productivity.”

NVIDIA is really talking up the power of OptiX 5.0 when used in conjunction with the DGX Station. Powered by NVIDIA’s Volta GPU architecture, the latest generation of the DGX Station is able to provide the rendering performance of 150 servers in just one system.

The OptiX 5.0 SDK will be available in November as a no-cost upgrade for registered developers.