Nvidia to present latest advances in VR and GPU rendering

At its annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) this week Nvidia is set to showcase several new developments surrounding in VR and GPU rendering.

One such development is a proof of concept for multi user VR, which allows up to four people to collaborate and interact with each other in a shared experience.

Nvidia’s multi user system comprises four Nvidia Quadro P6000 GPUs running four virtual machines on a PC server. Combined with HTC’s Lighthouse tracking system it is able to power four HTC Vive Business Edition headsets.
The idea behind the multi-user system is to minimize space, power and cooling and make it portable and quick to deploy.

Nvidia has also added advanced audio to its VRWorks software development kit, with a view to increasing the realism of VR experiences.

The VRWorks Audio SDK provides real-time ray tracing of audio in virtual environments. It uses GPUs to model sound propagation phenomena, such as reflection, refraction and diffraction based on the dimensions and material properties of the physical environment. VRWorks Audio SDK is supported in Epic’s Unreal Engine 4.

VRWorks is designed to make it easier for software developers to create VR experiences. The SDK is currently being used by Autodesk (for VRED and Stingray), ESI Group (for IC.IDO) and OPTIS. It includes features such as VR SLI, which boosts VR performance by using two GPUs (each GPU renders one eye) and Single Pass Stereo, which draws geometry once, then simultaneously projects both right-eye and left-eye views of the geometry.

Read our VR focused reviews of Autodesk VRED, ESI Group IC.IDO.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is now letting third parties make their own Nvidia VCA (Visual Computing Appliance) – an 8 GPU rendering server that works with GPU-accelerated renderers like Nvidia Mental Ray, Nvidia Iray and Chaos V-Ray RT.

Certified VCA devices are now available from a number of hardware manufacturers including Asus, BOXX, Colfax, Exxact, HPE and PNY.