Last week nVidia's Co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang opened the 2013 GPU Technology Conference. In his presentation he shown updates for existing nVidia technologies, roadmaps for its mobile & desktop offerings and some interesting new tech. So without further delay...
Although he talked about many interesting things I will focus more to the parts that picked my interested. So let's start in no particular order.
Wave Works
This was a piece of new tech. Wave Works is a real-time Beaufort scale ocean simulator. The demo was running in a Geforce GTX Titan and they showed the progression from calm seas up to a hurricane. The interesting bit was that it was not only simulating the ocean but at the same time it was simulating the ocean collision with the ship and the foam spray that resulted.
Face Works
Next was another new tech. Again it was running live on a Geforce GTX Titan. Face works is a new face-rendering technology that could revolutionize characters'
facial performances in video games, according to nVidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.
Face works was created in collaboration with Dr. Paul Debevec of the Institute
for Creative Technology (ICT) at the University of Southern California. ICT’s ‘light stage’ technology uses photographic techniques to derive
not only the 3D shape of an actor’s face, but the critical elements
needed to properly represent human skin. These include light reflection
and transmission through the skin, reflectivity from oils in the skin,
and the nearly microscopic lines and bumps in the skin surface.
After asking an actor to model several dozen basic expressions,
Debevec’s team then runs their footage through a compression engine.
The
result: a pared down set of data that can be mixed and matched to
generate a wide range of expressions. The data the team gets exceeds 32 gigabytes for a few expressions.
Even the most advanced GPUs will choke on the immensity of that.
Face Works reduces this to a very manageable 300 to 400 Mbytes.
OctaneRender Cloud Edition
The last bit that picked my interest was the revealing of the first Cloud Renderer. It is based on Octane, the first GPU renderer running in conjunction with nVidia's GRID VCA technology enabling access to unrepresented levels of rendering power even from a simple laptop where ever you are, during the presentation they connected from San Jose to LA where the renderer nodes where located and rendered a scene in a laptop in mere milliseconds.
For the full keynote go to : nVidia GTC 2013 keynote
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