NVIDIA Demonstrates GPU Processing at SIGGRAPH

By Jon K. Carroll
published

Just before SIGGRAPH, Nvidia gave a set of technology demonstrations to the press showing how GPU processing was being used or could be used across the entertainment industry.

Gone Girl

Mike Kanfer, Business Development Manager at Adobe, and Jeff Brue, postproduction supervisor for Gone Girl (an upcoming film starring Ben Affleck and directed by David Fincher), discuss shooting and postproduction of the film.

Gone Girl was shot in 6K on the RED Dragon camera and postproduction was done in Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Adobe After Effects CC. The offline edit was done in 2.5K ProRes and viewed in 1920x1080 HD. The systems used for this included seven HP z820 workstations with between 128 GB and 256 GB of RAM, and two 2011 Mac Pro systems. All machines were equipped with either the new K5200 or the top-of-the-line K6000 Nvidia GPUs.

Accelerating Adobe Creative Cloud

Mike Kanfer introduces a demo of GPU-based debayering in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014. An Nvidia GPU is suddenly a very nice alternative to the $4,750 RED Rocket.

GPU Acceleration in Adobe Illustrator CC 2014

One of the new updates in Adobe Illustrator CC 2014 is the use of GPU acceleration of path rendering. This may seem like something relatively minor, but anyone used to using Illustrator on detailed drawings can tell you how screen redraws can become painfully slow. The acceleration is implemented as a new OpenGL instruction called NV Path Rendering, which then accelerates the drawing of path-based objects using the GPU.  NV Path Rendering is enabled on all GeForce 8 and later GPUs and was enabled as of driver revision 275.11.

GPU-Accelerated Rendering and Design Visualization

John Willette, CGI Director at design visualization firm Armstrong White, discusses how they use GPU acceleration in their 3D design workflow.

New Quadros- New Workflows

Brief discussion of the new cards -- head here for more.

On-Set Visualization

Even though it is very much a work in progress, NVIDIA demonstrates real-time on-set visualization capability using Android tablets and a dual K5200-equipped workstation.

In this area of focus, Nvidia is trying to bring interactivity and user experience to new areas, giving users more options and streamlined workflows.

Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Jon K. Carroll
7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • pills161
    Wow forcefed the same commercial on every clip, no thanks...
    Reply
  • hardcore_player
    iray rendering engine use gpu rendering which takes much less time than mental ray in rendering a large scene with a great amount of details and light bounces in GPU Photorealistic Rendering .
    i remember when it was tested for comparison between cpu and gpu render times on gtx 590, Quadero k5000 and a core i7 980x .
    although gtx 590 can use cuda cores for rendering , it becomes extremely hot and unstable unlike the Quadro which is meant to be used in long render times .
    but gpu rendering is great to test scenes and adjust you regular Mental Ray renderings for a physical correct look, though using a rendering engine like mental ray or vray is somehow better because you can tweak the look and speed of renderings on how you want it .
    CPU support a wide range of instruction, including vector instructions. Also CPU cores can handle any loops and conditions. Compared to that GPU-s are much more limited. They can't really use conditions affecting many type of loops, and if they run out of tasks, they can't proceed to the next steps - but they are massively more cores compared to CPU , take for instance the old gtx 590 vs the newest intel corei7 4960x .
    a 1024 cuda cores vs 6 cores comparison , the numbers can tell .
    Reply
  • somebodyspecial
    13984716 said:
    Wow forcefed the same commercial on every clip, no thanks...

    Ghostery blocked all the vid crap for me ;) I all see is little blue ghosts...LOL.

    Nice try toms.

    Only the last one is playable (NOT from brightcove ad crap).
    Reply
  • voltagetoe
    In my experices: Nvidia = generally somehow weirdly unresponsive system. On one workstation my SSD performance went significantly up when I took Nvidia out - no idea why. AMD cards don't cripple a PC - everything feels much snappier.
    Reply
  • nikolajj
    In my experices: Nvidia = generally somehow weirdly unresponsive system. On one workstation my SSD performance went significantly up when I took Nvidia out - no idea why. AMD cards don't cripple a PC - everything feels much snappier.

    It is posible, that your PSU can't handle it, or your cooling is crippling. Maybe your motherboard is too cheap. I don't know, but it is not allway that simple.
    Reply
  • somebodyspecial
    13988765 said:
    In my experices: Nvidia = generally somehow weirdly unresponsive system. On one workstation my SSD performance went significantly up when I took Nvidia out - no idea why. AMD cards don't cripple a PC - everything feels much snappier.

    GPU'S don't cripple SSD perf. You had other issues.
    Reply
  • Draven35
    13985053 said:
    iray rendering engine use gpu rendering which takes much less time than mental ray in rendering a large scene with a great amount of details and light bounces in GPU Photorealistic Rendering .


    Sometimes. Sometimes not. You can make scenes that are faster on CPU than GPU. You can easily make scenes no GPU can load.
    Reply