NVIDIA SIGGRAPH 2018 Keynote Live Blog (4pm Pacific)

07:00PM EDT - Kicking off momentarily will be NVIDIA's 2018 SIGGRPAH keynote

07:00PM EDT - This is a bit of an unusual event for NVIDIA, as while they present at SIGGRAPH every year, it's normally a lower-key affair

07:01PM EDT - Instead, this year the man himself, NVIDIA CEO Jensen "the more you buy, the more you save" Huang is giving a full keynote address at the show

07:03PM EDT - This keynote is scheduled to last for roughly 2 hours, which means we're expecting a fairly prolific presentation

07:04PM EDT - Meanwhile if you'd like to watch the keynote yourself, NVIDIA is streaming it over on their Ustream channel: http://www.ustream.tv/nvidia

07:04PM EDT - Which is also how we're covering this, as AnandTech is not present at SIGGRAPH this year

07:04PM EDT - And of course, the stream, already struggling, has just died

07:05PM EDT - We're back. And here we go

07:06PM EDT - Starting with a traditional video roll

07:08PM EDT - This is basically a historical recap video, showing major graphics moments since the beginning of computer graphics

07:10PM EDT - (The stream is once again acting up)

07:10PM EDT - This is the 30th anniversary of Pixar's Renderman software

07:13PM EDT - Jensen is talking about the various Pixar rendering innovations over the years

07:14PM EDT - "4000 times more computation later"

07:15PM EDT - Artists will use as much computing resources as they are provided. The real limitation is how long they're willing to wait

07:17PM EDT - Now recapping NVIDIA's own GPU history. Riva TNT, GeForce 1, GeForce 3, etc

07:17PM EDT - Jensen is on another one of his Moore's Law spiels

07:18PM EDT - GPU performance has been growing faster than Moore's Law. And Jensen wants to keep it that way

07:19PM EDT - Now talking about photorealistic real-time rendering, physics simulations, and other tasks that need cutting-edge GPU performance

07:21PM EDT - Recounting all of the various graphical hacks used over the eras to reduce graphics rendering to something that contemporary processors can handle

07:21PM EDT - This leading into Jensen's other spiel as of late, ray tracing and how it's the holy grail of computer graphics

07:23PM EDT - Ray tracing is incredibly computationally expensive. Pretty. But expensive

07:24PM EDT - Now recapping NVIDIA's RTX ray tracing technology, which was first introduced at GDC 2018

07:25PM EDT - Rolling the Star Wars RTX demo

07:26PM EDT - 5 rays per pixel in that demo

07:27PM EDT - Suprise #1: What NV just demoed was running on just 1 card

07:27PM EDT - World's first ray tracing GPU

07:28PM EDT - Jensen is harassing the cameraman with the reflections off of the card

07:29PM EDT - The text on the card reads "Quadro RTX"

07:29PM EDT - "Up to 10 GigaRays per second"

07:30PM EDT - "New computer architecture"

07:30PM EDT - "Up to 16 TFLOPs"

07:31PM EDT - (Jensen is still messing with the cameraman. He seems to be genuinely enjoying it)

07:31PM EDT - Comes with NVLink

07:31PM EDT - 100GB/sec

07:32PM EDT - "500 trillion tensor ops per second"

07:32PM EDT - Brand new processor called the "RT Core"

07:33PM EDT - "Greatest leap since 2006", which was the launch of the G80 GPU (8800 GTX)

07:34PM EDT - "Motion adaptive shading"

07:34PM EDT - Architecture is confirmed. Say hello to Turing

07:36PM EDT - Jensen is now talking a bit more about the RT core

07:36PM EDT - It accelerates ray-triangle intersection and processing the Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH)

07:37PM EDT - Also talking about the various precision modes, from FP32 down to INT4

07:37PM EDT - Supports 8K displays

07:37PM EDT - 8K video encoding on the NVENC block as well

07:38PM EDT - 754mm2 GPU, 18.6B transistors

07:38PM EDT - 14Gbps memory clock

07:39PM EDT - This is a big chip. Not quite GV100 Volta big, but still very big by any kind of GPU standard

07:40PM EDT - Now diving into hybrid rendering, and the value of the tensor core

07:40PM EDT - NVIDIA will also be open sourcing their Material Description Language (MDL), which they've been releasing for the past couple of years

07:41PM EDT - NVIDIA will also be supporting Pixar's Universal Scene Description (USD) language

07:41PM EDT - (Was that someone mooing?)

07:43PM EDT - Now moving on to demos, starting with comparing different rendering types (rasterization, ray tracing, etc)

07:46PM EDT - Given the extreme die size, I'm going to be a bit surprised if we see this specific Turing GPU in consumer products

07:46PM EDT - Though anything is possible

07:50PM EDT - Compute is being used here to denoise the ray tracing output

07:52PM EDT - Now running another video clip. Everything here is being done in real time

07:55PM EDT - NVIDIA wants a bigger piece of the pie in the visual effects industry

07:58PM EDT - "Large render farms". Now imagine if they were full of Quadros instead of Xeons...

07:58PM EDT - Rolling another video, this time from Porsche

08:00PM EDT - It was also rendered in real-time

08:02PM EDT - (This is a surprisingly laid-back presentation for a Jensen Huang keynote. He's largely content gawking at graphics)

08:06PM EDT - A 6x speed-up in graphics over Pascal

08:07PM EDT - Using AI to get away with lower resolution rendering and then essentially upsample/anti-alias to get more quality

08:07PM EDT - Now discussing Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing

08:09PM EDT - As a result, the combination of ray tracing, faster shading, and DLAA, NVIDIA gets the 6x speed improvement

08:11PM EDT - Now demonstrating real-time scene editing with ray tracing, using RTX

08:13PM EDT - Using RTX for architectural engineering and design

08:15PM EDT - Now demonstratign film-quality rendering. It's moving at a couple of frames per second, which is incredibly fast for a single machine

08:16PM EDT - Now announcing the NVIDIA RTX Server

08:17PM EDT - 8 Quadro RTX 8000s in a single box

08:17PM EDT - General availability in Q1'2019

08:18PM EDT - $125,000

08:18PM EDT - 3250W power consumption

08:20PM EDT - NVIDIA has been working hard behind the scenes to get software and tool developers to adopt RTX, and it looks like they've had a fair bit of success

08:21PM EDT - Quadro RTX 5000: $2300

08:21PM EDT - RTX 6000: $6300. 24GB VRAM. 10 GigaRays/second

08:22PM EDT - RTX 8000: $10000. 48GB VRAM. 10 GigaRays/second

08:22PM EDT - "It's a steal"

08:22PM EDT - And there it is "the more you buy, the more you save"

08:24PM EDT - Now recapping the keynote thus far

08:24PM EDT - Turing and RTX. The most important NVIDIA GPU since G80/Tesla

08:24PM EDT - One more surprise

08:25PM EDT - NVIDIA Reveals Next-Gen Turing GPU Architecture: NVIDIA Doubles-Down on Ray Tracing, GDDR6, & More - https://www.anandtech.com/show/13214/nvidia-reveals-next-gen-turing-gpu-architecture

08:26PM EDT - (I'm getting the distinct impression that something was cut from this keynote at the last moment)

08:26PM EDT - Jensen is now thanking everyone, including the audience

08:29PM EDT - And that's a wrap. Be sure to check out our complete Turing article

08:29PM EDT - https://www.anandtech.com/show/13215/nvidia-siggraph-2018-keynote-live-blog-4pm-pacific