NVIDIA has a lively, Fermi-powered booth at SIGGRAPH. The company today announced its new line-up of five Fermi-class Quadro GPUs and launched an exhibit designed to illustrate how the new supercharged graphics hardware could impact everything from automotive visualization and cloud-based rendering to stereographic editorial workflows and real-time 3D puppeteering.

The Fermi-series Quadros, which start at $1199 for the Quadro 4000, represent NVIDIA’s “most substantial investment in GPU technology ever,” Jeff Brown, general manager of the company’s Quadro business unit, told reporters at a pre-show briefing. NVIDIA claims the new GPUs represent an up to 5x increase in performance for 3D geometry and an up to 8x increase in performance for computational simulation.


Consider, for instance, ray-tracing on the GPU. The iray rendering system from NVIDIA subsidiary Mental Images was running very impressively on two Quadro 6000 GPUs with results representing a dramatic leap ahead of the previous generation of NVIDIA hardware. And put on your glasses — when the new GPU hardware is combined with NVIDIA’s new RF-synchronized 3D Vision Pro system for real-time stereo 3D workflow in applications like Maya, the results are impressive. For instance, you can dramatically tweak depth effects and see the results in stereo, immediately, without leaving the interactive Maya environment.

RTT was showing DeltaGen, an application rendering automotive designs in real time and in stereo 3D. The booth demo is very slick stuff, using multi-touch screen technology from PQ Labs to allow quick, touch-controlled visualization in 3D space. Bunkspeed SHOT is also at the booth taking advantage of iray.

Would you like to see photorealistic iray rendering in web apps? Hold that thought. The RealityServer 3D platform from Mental Images was shown using parallel GPUs hosted by PEER 1 to enable on-demand delivery of iray-rendered images over the web. PEER 1 said the system could enable new types of apps for Facebook, MySpace, and other sites.

An NVIDIA-accelerated version of the 3D-stereo editing workflow developed by CineForm for Adobe Premiere Pro, from live dual-stream capture to fine depth adjustments in the NLE, was also being shown. And if you’re at SIGGRAPH you’ll likely get a kick out of the demo of live real-time puppeteering in digital stereo 3D, executed in collaboration with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.

Finally, here’s the bottom line if you’ve been waiting for a new Quadro GPU: The Fermi-series Quadro 4000 ($1,199) and Quadro 5000 ($2,249) are shipping now. The Quadro 6000 ($4,999) and Quadro Plex 7000 ($14,500) are slated for fall availability. Mobile workstations based on the Quadro 5000M will ship from HP and Dell in Q3, NVIDIA said.