By Mike McCarthy
Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is taking place virtually this week, with a number of new hardware and software announcements.
On the hardware front, Nvidia has four new PCIe-based GPU cards, which are essentially scaled-back versions of the previously announced A6000 and A40. The new A5000 and A4000 are new Ampere generations of the previous Turning-based Quadro RTX 5000 and 4000.
A5000
The new cards have 2.5 times as many CUDA cores as their predecessors and 8GB more RAM. The A5000 has 8K cores and 24GB RAM, while the A4000 has 6K cores and 16GB RAM. This makes them the professional equivalents of the GeForce 3080 and 3070, respectively, but with more RAM. The A4000 seems like the ideal professional card for video editors and others who need professional GPU processing but not the overpriced 3D performance of the A6000.
On the server and virtualization side, the A10 replaces the T4 and sits between the A5000 and A4000 performance-wise. The A16 replaces the existing M10 as a 4x GPU card, with 64 GB RAM in total, targeting remote desktop hosting.
A4000
The other major hardware announcement is the mobile line of professional GPUs, scaling from the A5000 down to the T600. The mobile A5000 has 6K cores, doubling the number of cores from the previous-generation RTX 5000 mobile GPUs. This scales down to 5K cores in the A4000, 4K cores in the A3000 and 2,560 cores in the new A2000, which matches the specs of the previous second-tier Quadro RTX 4000.
So we are seeing a huge increase over the previous generation, but compared to the desktop cards, we are no longer seeing parity between the PCIe product naming and the mobile solution labels. The new mobile A5000 is equal to the desktop A4000, which makes the entire naming convention really difficult to intuitively decode or understand. Suffice to say, the new products are much faster than the old products, but it is difficult to compare them to each other. Similar to dropping the Quadro branding, Nvidia seems to be taking steps to make it more difficult to keep track of or compare their different product offerings. I say this as a huge fan of Nvidia’s products: “This confusion is not helping your end users.”
Omniverse
Omniverse
On the software front, Nvidia’s Omniverse is the culmination of a number of technologies being combined to greatly enhance 3D workflows and collaboration between different apps and users. Based on Pixar’s USD (Universal Scene Descriptions), it can link the 3D assets being worked on in applications from completely different vendors. On a single system, it appears to work like Adobe Dynamic Link, where changes made in one program show up immediately on assets in a separate application. But in other ways it is similar to the role of NDI for real-time workflows, sharing content between systems on a network or across the internet. The individual user version is a free tool, but the Nucleus server that allows sharing between multiple users will be an enterprise-level solution in the cloud. Nvidia has also partnered with Apple to allow direct support of viewing Omniverse XR content on iPads and iPhones. I don’t personally do much work in 3D, but I can see the benefits of what they have developed here, and I am sure it will make a lot of people’s creative 3D work much easier and more efficient.
Omniverse
Grace
Nvidia also announced its new line of “Grace” ARM processors. They are not yet available, but after their initial debut in data center servers, they may eventually make it into consumer systems. While this probably won’t totally replace Intel’s x86 CPUs anytime soon, Apple’s M1 architecture demonstrates that Nvidia isn’t the only company betting that x86 processing can be replaced in many new applications. So while Grace-based products aren’t going to impact your work immediately, it may be the first step toward a big change well into the future.
Sessions
Beyond the new products announced during the conference, there are also hundreds of sessions where attendees can learn about different technologies and their implementations from Nvidia’s staff and top users. The ones that stick out to me are Rob Legato’s session on virtual cinematography and a roundtable on in-camera VFX. Both are scheduled for Wednesday. Since the online version of GTC is free to attend, you are welcome to check them out along with hundreds of other sessions that are available to watch.
Mike McCarthy is a technology consultant with extensive experience in the film post production. He started posting technology info and analysis at HD4PC in 2007. He broadened his focus with TechWithMikeFirst 10 years later.
