nVidia reveals $18,000 graphics card

[Tlock]

i think you ment $18,000 not $18.000. I thought at first they came out with a budget video card for something like the sub $100 system.

[Mikewilson2k5]

What person or even company would need to buy that?

[Bigpet]

If it's 18.000 or 18,000 depends on where you live :D

But holy cow. That looked soooo fake. Especially the design looked like some poorly constructed fake but it's real. Do check it out on the official site.

[dprgb]

They were showing off a large bank of them at Siggraph...

[lovisx]

imagine poly sculpting with one of those ... :drool:

[leach]

What person or even company would need to buy that?

For one, i can imagine flight simulator companies. The ability to produce that level of anti-aliasing is pretty incredible. And dont quote me on this, but i think that beats the price of alot of the current Image Generators which the big boys currently sell.

[Shade01]

It gets 2,365 fps on Oblivion :love:

[mech7]

i think you ment $18,000 not $18.000. I thought at first they came out with a budget video card for something like the sub $100 system.


Yup with us it's 18.000 with you it is 18,000 ;)

[havokzprodigy]

I can't wait until we get that kind of power at the consumer level.

[Szos]

It's aimed at the SGI market. And this is a smart move for Nvidia... the cost to engineer/develop these ultra-high end chips can be paid by the high-end clients that need that amount of speed, and at the same time, that very same technology will trickle down to power-users like us, that much sooner.

[ndat]

I don't see the point, you would be better off with a good render farm. All that is going to do is display a lot of polys for modeling that you probally don't need to see anyway. Plus you won't be able to use it at it's full potential and by the time you can there will be something a lot smaller and better for a heck of a lot cheaper.

I dunno, I can't see the point at least for CG...

[Gentle Fury]

What person or even company would need to buy that?

Ummmm, any movie studio in America!! You could basically do Nemo in real time with that!! Anyone else notice the 2 firewire ports.....does that mean you can chain them and have a farm of them? Maybe use it for rendering?

[js33]

I don't see the point, you would be better off with a good render farm. All that is going to do is display a lot of polys for modeling that you probally don't need to see anyway. Plus you won't be able to use it at it's full potential and by the time you can there will be something a lot smaller and better for a heck of a lot cheaper.

I dunno, I can't see the point at least for CG...

It looks to me like it's geared more toward high end real-time simulation and not for modeling.

[TumikSmacker]

Imagine something like this in the next next gen consoles! :D

[sjmoir]

I don't see the point, you would be better off with a good render farm. All that is going to do is display a lot of polys for modeling that you probally don't need to see anyway. Plus you won't be able to use it at it's full potential and by the time you can there will be something a lot smaller and better for a heck of a lot cheaper.

I dunno, I can't see the point at least for CG...

Depends what kind of CG you do. It would be useful for Arch Viz for example. Being able to display 7 billion vertices per second would certainly make my day a lot zippier next time I'm modelling a shopping centre...

You just can't be negative about these sorts of breakthroughs. I love this stuff, because it takes so little time for computer technology to trickle down. I remember three years ago getting excited by a whole GB of RAM. If I knew the specs of the workstation I use today, I would probably have wet myself a little with excitement (Then again, if I knew three years ago I'd be modelling shopping centres I'd be a plumber or something right now). Besides, I don't think the price per node is that ridiculous. Hook up a dozen of those puppies together, add the Cell processor farm to power them, the four super HD projectors and the air conditioned massaging LazyBoy, now that’s ridiculous.

[3DDave]

Maybe a new generation of arcade games will come about with enhanced graphics and large 180 degree screens. I would think gamers would pay to play since the tech is too expensive to place inside their own boxes.

[noisewar]

Yeah but does it support customizable overlay profiles for porn? Scoffscoffscoff. I'll give it props as probably the first videocard to be able to handle Trespasser though. :D

[JA-forreal]

Now this is what I would call thinking outside the "box".:)

[fuss]

The capabilities of shader languages on modern graphics cards are getting more and more impressive. Already today you can implement a lot of effects very similiar in quality to those known from movies on consumer level graphics cards. We're not quite there yet, though. Since the current pixel and vertex shader versions are still a bit limited by design, "conventional" shading languages like the Renderman Shading Language are still better when it comes to offline rendering. And since a typical graphics card is too slow to do these movie-like effects in realtime anyway, not much use for them in games yet (well, of course there are shaders used in modern games, but I am talking about movie-like quality shaders here). Newer, more powerful shader language specifications are already on the horizon, and I guess once they're implemented and supported by the hardware, the shaders you'll be able to write with them will be comparable to those made with the Renderman or similar shading languages. Get one or more of those 18,000$ graphics cards capable of rendering such shaders in realtime, and we've got Toy Story 3 rendered on the fly... ;) Now, that's just my theory, but that's what *I* would use such a graphics card for - for realtime movie rendering - or at least to greatly speed up offline rendering. In 5-10 years I can see movies rendered on nVidia and ATI cards using shaders programmed in HLSL :) . Maybe that's what nVidia is after? ;)

[deepcgi]

This was the plan the founders of nVidia originally pitched to the brass at SGI back before they split away. They're going to sell truck loads of them.

[krisr]

Yeah, this is a good move by Nvidia especially since SGI is a wreck. I think the huge bank of these they showed at Siggraph is mostly aimed at institutions or labs that need to visualize insane amounts of data like those immense point cloud renders that represent complex weather patterns. I still wouldn't mind having one or two :)

[Big_E.D.]

Jeez. If they can produce a card that can do all that, how soon will we see a processor capable of running Nuts (http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Joke_WAD)along with the card? :D

[heavyness]

to bad this is the power supply for it...

http://www.cmcpwe.com/generators/photos/es5000.jpg

...and you thught the 360's power brick was big.

[AndrewATL]

Yeah but does it support customizable overlay profiles for porn? Scoffscoffscoff. I'll give it props as probably the first videocard to be able to handle Trespasser though. :D


lol I loved exploring that island at 5 fps

[Kabab]

The type of companies that would use this would be automotive and aerospace companies when doing review of large datasets or for super high quaility real-time rendering (car companies do a shit load of this).

[daart]

to bad this is the power supply for it...

http://www.cmcpwe.com/generators/photos/es5000.jpg

...and you thught the 360's power brick was big.

LoL makes sence for professionals :D

[billrobertson42]

What I wonder is how fast it runs gelato.

[P_T]

to bad this is the power supply for it... We're not that far off I reckon, saw a power consumption benchmark for a quad SLI that almost reach 400 watts. Soon we'll probably need a dedicated power generator like that just for running a highend PC. Not to mention the heat... :eek:

[jedijrmax]

Imagine playing World of Warcraft with this thing!

:)

[enygma]

We're not that far off I reckon, saw a power consumption benchmark for a quad SLI that almost reach 400 watts. Soon we'll probably need a dedicated power generator like that just for running a highend PC. Not to mention the heat... :eek:
I have a feeling that power consumption levels will even out down the road. Take a look at Intel for example. They were the motherload of heat generation, and now they spank the pants off AMD, and provide better performance... :D

There is only so much a consumer is willing to handle on their breaker box before the workstation just becomes ridiculous to own.

[amannin]

hmmm, supply power to my house or my graphics card...decisions decisions :hmm:

to bad this is the power supply for it...

http://www.cmcpwe.com/generators/photos/es5000.jpg

...and you thught the 360's power brick was big.

[Howitzer]

Forget games and modeling, you could use this with Gelato and render feature films in a shorter time than you could with a massive render farm.

[jedijrmax]

Hey guys,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't really understand how this would be any form of render farm substitution. The primary component of your computer that does frame rendering, is your processor, not your video card.... am I wrong?

[shingo]

Just think about how Autodesk Inferno used to need an Onyx 3000 to run? Those systems are typically half a million dollars. On this thing, you would get real time compositing at film res and 4k, with anti-aliasing.

For defense companies, this would be pocket change. They'll buy these things by the dozen.


What person or even company would need to buy that?

[playmesumch00ns]

Hey guys,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't really understand how this would be any form of render farm substitution. The primary component of your computer that does frame rendering, is your processor, not your video card.... am I wrong?

No, you're correct, but nVidia'a Gelato renderer uses the GPU to accelerate certain parts of rendering, particularly sampling and antialiasing.

[dmonk]

I would think this would be sweet for cg lighting artists.

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