Get ready for Gunfire Games and Gearbox Publishing’s highly anticipated Remnant II, available for members to stream on GeForce NOW at launch. It leads eight new games coming to the cloud gaming platform.
Kick off the weekend with one of the hottest new games in the cloud. Remnant II from Gunfire Games and Gearbox Publishing, sequel to the hit game Remnant: From the Ashes, is newly launched in the cloud for members to stream.
Go head to head against new deadly creatures and god-like bosses while exploring terrifying new worlds with different types of creatures, weapons and items. With various stories woven throughout, each playthrough will be different from the last, making each experience unique for endless replayability.
Find secrets and unlock different Archetypes, each with their own special set of abilities. Members can brave it alone or team up with buddies to explore the depths of the unknown and stop an evil from destroying reality itself. Just remember — friendly fire is on, so pick your squad wisely.
Upgrade to an Ultimate membership to play Remnant II and more than 1,600 titles at RTX 4080 quality, with support for 4K 120 frames per second gameplay and ultrawide resolutions. Ultimate and Priority members can also experience higher frame rates with DLSS technology for AI-powered graphics on their RTX-powered cloud gaming rigs.
Reward Yourself
Boost yourself in “Guild Wars 2” with this reward.
Ultimate and Priority members can now grab their free, exclusive rewards for Guild Wars 2, featuring the “Always Prepared” and “Booster” bundles, available through the end of August.
The “Always Prepared” bundle includes ten Transmutation Charges to change character appearance, a Revive Orb that returns a player to 50% health at their current location and a top hat to add style to the character. On top of that, the “Booster” bundle includes an Item Booster, Karma Booster, Experience Booster, a 10-Slot Bag and a Black Lion Miniature Claim Ticket, which can be exchanged in game for a mini-pet of choice.
Visit the GeForce NOW Rewards portal to update the settings to receive special offers and in-game goodies. Better hurry — these rewards are available for a limited time on a first-come, first-served basis.
Grab them in time for the fourth expansion of Guild Wars 2, coming to GeForce NOW at launch on Tuesday, Aug. 22. The “Secrets of the Obscure” paid expansion includes a new storyline, powerful combat options, new mount abilities and more.
Racing Into the Weekend
Race into the weekend with ‘MotoGP23’.
Remnant II is one of the eight games available this week on GeForce NOW. Check out the complete list of new games:
AWS users can now access the leading performance demonstrated in industry benchmarks of AI training and inference.
The cloud giant officially switched on a new Amazon EC2 P5 instance powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. The service lets users scale generative AI, high performance computing (HPC) and other applications with a click from a browser.
The news comes in the wake of AI’s iPhone moment. Developers and researchers are using large language models (LLMs) to uncover new applications for AI almost daily. Bringing these new use cases to market requires the efficiency of accelerated computing.
The NVIDIA H100 GPU delivers supercomputing-class performance through architectural innovations including fourth-generation Tensor Cores, a new Transformer Engine for accelerating LLMs and the latest NVLink technology that lets GPUs talk to each other at 900GB/sec.
Scaling With P5 Instances
Amazon EC2 P5 instances are ideal for training and running inference for increasingly complex LLMs and computer vision models. These neural networks drive the most demanding and compute-intensive generative AI applications, including question answering, code generation, video and image generation, speech recognition and more.
P5 instances can be deployed in hyperscale clusters, called EC2 UltraClusters, made up of high-performance compute, networking and storage in the cloud. Each EC2 UltraCluster is a powerful supercomputer, enabling customers to run their most complex AI training and distributed HPC workloads across multiple systems.
So customers can run at scale applications that require high levels of communications between compute nodes, the P5 instance sports petabit-scale non-blocking networks, powered by AWS EFA, a 3,200 Gbps network interface for Amazon EC2 instances.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise helps users make the most of P5 instancesoptimize P5 instances. It’s a full-stack suite of software that includes more than 100 frameworks, pretrained models, AI workflows and tools to tune AI infrastructure.
Designed to streamline the development and deployment of AI applications, NVIDIA AI Enterprise addresses the complexities of building and maintaining a high-performance, secure, cloud-native AI software platform. Available in the AWS Marketplace, it offers continuous security monitoring, regular and timely patching of common vulnerabilities and exposures, API stability, and enterprise support as well as access to NVIDIA AI experts.
What Customers Are Saying
NVIDIA and AWS have collaborated for more than a dozen years to bring GPU acceleration to the cloud. The new P5 instances, the latest example of that collaboration, represents a major step forward to deliver the cutting-edge performance that enables developers to invent the next generation of AI.
Here are some examples of what customers are already saying:
Anthropic builds reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems that will have many opportunities to create value commercially and for public benefit.
“While the large, general AI systems of today can have significant benefits, they can also be unpredictable, unreliable and opaque, so our goal is to make progress on these issues and deploy systems that people find useful,” said Tom Brown, co-founder of Anthropic. “We expect P5 instances to deliver substantial price-performance benefits over P4d instances, and they’ll be available at the massive scale required for building next-generation LLMs and related products.”
Cohere, a leading pioneer in language AI, empowers every developer and enterprise to build products with world-leading natural language processing (NLP) technology while keeping their data private and secure.
“Cohere leads the charge in helping every enterprise harness the power of language AI to explore, generate, search for and act upon information in a natural and intuitive manner, deploying across multiple cloud platforms in the data environment that works best for each customer,” said Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere. “NVIDIA H100-powered Amazon EC2 P5 instances will unleash the ability of businesses to create, grow and scale faster with its computing power combined with Cohere’s state-of-the-art LLM and generative AI capabilities.”
For its part, Hugging Face is on a mission to democratize good machine learning.
“As the fastest growing open-source community for machine learning, we now provide over 150,000 pretrained models and 25,000 datasets on our platform for NLP, computer vision, biology, reinforcement learning and more,” said Julien Chaumond, chief technology officer and co-founder of Hugging Face. “We’re looking forward to using Amazon EC2 P5 instances via Amazon SageMaker at scale in UltraClusters with EFA to accelerate the delivery of new foundation AI models for everyone.”
Today, more than 450 million people around the world use Pinterest as a visual inspiration platform to shop for products personalized to their taste, find ideas and discover inspiring creators.
“We use deep learning extensively across our platform for use cases such as labeling and categorizing billions of photos that are uploaded to our platform, and visual search that provides our users the ability to go from inspiration to action,” said David Chaiken, chief architect at Pinterest. “We’re looking forward to using Amazon EC2 P5 instances featuring NVIDIA H100 GPUs, AWS EFA and UltraClusters to accelerate our product development and bring new empathetic AI-based experiences to our customers.”
Accelerating the work of those who create that code will boost their productivity — and that’s just what AI startup Codeium, a member of NVIDIA’s Inception program for startups, aims to do.
On the latest episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz interviewed Codeium founder and CEO Varun Mohan and Jeff Wang, the company’s head of business, about the company’s business, about how AI is transforming software.
Codeium’s AI-powered code acceleration toolkit boasts three core features: autocomplete, chat and search.
Autocomplete intelligently suggests code segments, saving developers time by minimizing the need for writing boilerplate or unit tests.
At the same time the chat function empowers developers to rework or even create code with natural language queries, enhancing their coding efficiency while providing searchable context on the entire code base.
Noah spoke with Mohan and Wang about the future of software development with AI, and the continued, essential role of humans in the process.
A postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota discusses his efforts to allow amputees to control their prosthetic limb — right down to the finger motions — with their minds.
Overjet, a member of NVIDIA Inception, is moving fast to bring AI to dentists’ offices. Dr. Wardah Inam, CEO of the company, discusses using AI to improve patient care.
Luis Voloch, co-founder and chief technology officer of Immunai, talks about tackling the challenges of the immune system with a machine learning and data science mindset.
Subscribe to the AI Podcast: Now Available on Amazon Music
NVIDIA DGX Cloud — which delivers tools that can turn nearly any company into an AI company — is now broadly available, with thousands of NVIDIA GPUs online on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as NVIDIA infrastructure located in the U.S. and U.K.
Unveiled at NVIDIA’s GTC conference in March, DGX Cloud is an AI supercomputing service that gives enterprises immediate access to the infrastructure and software needed to train advanced models for generative AI and other groundbreaking applications.
“Generative AI has made the rapid adoption of AI a business imperative for leading companies in every industry, driving many enterprises to seek more accelerated computing infrastructure,” said Pat Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
Generative AI could add more than $4 trillion to the economy annually, turning proprietary business knowledge across a vast swath of the world’s industries into next-generation AI applications, according to recent estimates by global management consultancy McKinsey.
Industry Pioneers Transforming Business With Generative AI
Healthcare companies use DGX Cloud to train protein models to speed drug discovery and clinical reporting with natural language processing.
Financial service providers use DGX Cloud to forecast trends, optimize portfolios, build recommender systems and develop intelligent generative AI chatbots.
Insurance companies are building models to automate claims processing.
Software companies are using it to develop AI-powered features and applications.
And others are using DGX Cloud to build AI factories and digital twins of valuable assets.
Dedicated AI Supercomputing With Immediate Availability
DGX Cloud instances provide dedicated infrastructure enterprises rent on a monthly basis, ensuring customers can quickly and easily develop large, multi-node training workloads without having to wait for accelerated computing resources that are often in high demand.
“The availability of NVIDIA DGX Cloud provides a new pool of AI supercomputing resources, with nearly instantaneous access,” Moorhead said.
This simple approach to AI supercomputing removes the complexity of acquiring, deploying and managing on-premises infrastructure. Providing NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputing paired with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, DGX Cloud makes it possible for businesses everywhere to access their own AI supercomputer using a web browser.
NVIDIA AI Supercomputing and Software in a Browser
Each instance of DGX Cloud features eight NVIDIA 80GB Tensor Core GPUs for 640GB of GPU memory per node. A high-performance, low-latency fabric ensures workloads can scale across clusters of interconnected systems, allowing multiple instances to act as one massive GPU. High-performance storage is integrated into DGX Cloud to provide a complete solution.
Enterprises manage and monitor DGX Cloud training workloads using NVIDIA Base Command Platform software. The platform provides a seamless user experience across DGX Cloud and on-premises NVIDIA DGX supercomputers, so enterprises can combine resources when needed.
And DGX Cloud includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the software layer of the NVIDIA AI platform, which provides over 100 end-to-end AI frameworks and pretrained models to accelerate data science pipelines and streamline the development and deployment of production AI.
Learn more about how to get started with DGX Cloud.
Editor’s note: This post is part of our weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology improves creative workflows. We’re also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.
We’re gonna need a bigger boat this week In the NVIDIA Studio as Alessandro Mastronardi, senior artist and programmer at BBC Studios, shares heart-stopping shark videos and renders.
The shark-themed series was conceived during the artist’s recent impromptu trip to Iceland, where he saw a huge basking shark up close. “I was eager to know all about its anatomy, the way it moves and feeds,” said Mastronardi.
After deep-diving on the sharks — including great whites, hammerheads and the Elasmobranchii subclass of rays and the like — he was ready to create. Learn more about his creative journey below — there’s no-fin to lose.
His incredible visuals — alongside extraordinary shark-themed artwork from creators Maggie Molloy and Hypertaf — are featured below in the latest Studio Standout video, which spotlights incredible artists and their work.
Plus, the NVIDIA Studio #StartToFinish community challenge runs through the end of August. Use the hashtag to submit a screenshot of a favorite project featuring its beginning and ending stages for a chance to be featured on the @NVIDIAStudio and @NVIDIAOmniverse social channels.
Jaw-some Creativity
Mastronardi, based in Florence, Italy, works to bring the awe-inspiring beauty of mother nature to the masses.
“The satisfaction of studying nature in all its forms — then transforming that information and reference material into art and content used in several productions and scopes — has been my greatest pride and joy,” he said.
He starts the process by sketching ideas and concepts on paper. “This is something I’ve done since my first years, as it helps to have a clear vision of what I want to achieve,” said Mastronardi.
Reference materials for great white sharks help guide Mastronardi’s artistic process.
“Simply put, GeForce RTX GPUs are the most reliable, highest-performing, advanced graphics cards that any 3D professional can use.” — Alessandro Mastronardi
Next, Mastronardi uses ZBrush to model all of his characters. “I like to define a base shape, carefully tune proportions and anatomy, and add detail and resolution until I have a high-polygon, fully detailed, featured character that’s finely sculpted and textured,” he said. “This stage isn’t complete until I’m fully satisfied with how the character looks from every angle, and it has its own personality, so to speak.”
Tremendous effort goes into the tiniest details.
The artist exports characters to Blender to retopologize the high-polygon mesh into low-poly, highly optimized characters. “The key is to reproject the highest possible level of detail onto the character, so that all the details will be maintained.”
Scary stuff.
Next, Mastronardi rigs the character and sets up a skeleton, configuring all digital bones and inverse kinematics, which determine the motion of objects in the scene.
Animation work in Blender.
“The render stage is GPU accelerated and uses OptiX ray-tracing application programming interfaces, which allow fantastic quality and performance.” — Alessandro Mastronardi
Here, Mastronardi’s PC — equipped with two GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 24GB GPUs — does the heavy lifting. Blender Cycles RTX-accelerated AI-powered OptiX ray tracing in the viewport ensures interactive, photorealistic rendering for modeling and animation.
This rigorous process delivers lifelike animations. “A lot of care has to go into the control-rig stage,” said Mastronardi. “All controls must allow for plausible and realistic deformations, with proper anatomy limits and characteristics, so that the character’s movement will look and feel realistic.”
Also using Blender, the artist sets up shaders and materials, and conducts test renders to evaluate how the characters look in different poses. When satisfied, Mastronardi prepares promotional images — built in an environment that matches the characters — and assembles a scene with added effects and props.
Properly themed environments elevate the characters within them.
Often, Mastronardi inspects his models with NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting and building custom 3D tools and applications with Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). “Omniverse is my preferred platform to inspect scenes very quickly,” he said. “I like how agile and effective the interface is, as well as the quality it can deliver.”
Simply stunning.
Mastronardi exports final files using RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing in Blender Cycles for the fastest final frame render. “I love the Cycles render engine, all its features, and the quality and speed that it’s able to deliver,” he added.
Mastronardi plans to use the NVIDIA Broadcast app — from the NVIDIA Studio suite of AI-powered tools — for a new series of 3D art lectures on wildlife, coming soon. Check out Mastronardi’s animal-themed portfolio on ArtStation.
3D artist Alessandro Mastronardi.
To other artists, Mastronardi would say, “Discard and forget about naysayers, those who tell you ‘No, it can’t be done.’” He added that “growing up, this was a lesson I taught myself: to believe in my own skills, and not to let negativity affect my work or vision to become a wildlife 3D artist.”
Learn about the latest with OpenUSD and Omniverse at SIGGRAPH, running August 6-10. Take advantage of showfloor experiences like hands-on labs, special events and demo booths — and don’t miss NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address on Tuesday, Aug. 8, at 8 a.m. PT.
It’s a party this GFN Thursday with several newly launched titles streaming on GeForce NOW. Revel in gaming goodness with Xenonauts 2, Viewfinder and Techtonica, among the four new games joining the cloud this week.
Portal fans, stay tuned — the Portal: Prelude RTX mod will be streaming on GeForce NOW to members soon.
Plus, find out how members can score an upcoming Guild Wars 2 premium reward.
Get ‘Em While They’re Hot!
Choose from over 1,600 games in the GeForce NOW library, starting off with the titles making their cloud debut. Be among the first to experience Xenonauts 2, Viewfinder and Techtonica from a high-performance GeForce RTX gaming rig in the cloud, without worrying about download times or system specs.
Find a new perspective in the cloud.
Take on a different perspective in Viewfinder, the new single-player game from Thunderful Publishing. Gamers can challenge perception, redefine reality and reshape the world around them with an instant camera. Capture pictures and bring them to life by placing them into the scene in this mind-bending reality adventure.
Get to work!
Those looking for something out of this world can check out Fire Hose Games’ Techtonica, set in a strangely beautiful, bioluminescent, mysterious subsurface alien universe. Play solo or with a buddy to build factories, gather resources, research new technologies and uncover long-forgotten secrets.
Naut your average game.
Fans of the Xenonauts series can look forward to the second entry in the franchise from Hooded Horse. In Xenonauts 2, work as the head of a multinational military organization tasked with eliminating an extraterrestrial threat. Play from the shadows to seek out and engage a growing alien presence.
Catch these titles fresh out of the oven and upgrade to a premium membership for faster access over free members.
Exclusive GeForce NOW Rewards
It pays to be a GeForce NOW member.
Starting next week, Ultimate and Priority members get an exclusive reward for the hit MMORPG Guild Wars 2. The “Always Prepared” and “Booster” bundles will bring premium members a combo of helpful tools, cosmetic items, a mini pet and more.
Upgrade to an Ultimate or Priority membership today, and visit the GeForce NOW Rewards portal to update the settings to receive special offers and in-game goodies. Better hurry — these rewards are available for a limited time on a first-come, first-served basis.
Grab them in time for the fourth expansion of Guild Wars 2, coming to GeForce NOW at launch on Tuesday, Aug. 22. The Secrets of the Obscure paid expansion includes a new storyline, powerful combat options, new mount abilities and more.
New Games, Who Dis?
Jump into the list of the four new games hitting GeForce NOW this week:
Saildrone is making a splash in autonomous oceanic monitoring.
The startup’s nautical data collection technology has tracked hurricanes up close in the North Atlantic, discovered a 3,200-foot underwater mountain in the Pacific Ocean and begun to help map the entirety of the world’s ocean floor.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company develops autonomous uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) that carry a wide range of sensors. Its data streams are processed on NVIDIA Jetson modules for AI at the edge and are being optimized in prototypes with the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit for intelligent video analytics.
Saildrone is seeking to make ocean intelligence collection cost-effective, offering data-gathering systems for science, fisheries, weather forecasting, ocean mapping and maritime security.
It has three different USVs, and its Mission Portal control center service is used for monitoring customized missions and visualizing data in near real time. Also, some of Saildrone’s historical data is freely available to the public.
“We’ve sailed into three major hurricanes, and right through the eye of Hurricane Sam, and all the vehicles came out the other side — they are pretty robust platforms,” said Blythe Towal, vice president of software engineering at Saildrone, referring to a powerful cyclone that threatened Bermuda in 2021 .
Saildrone, founded in 2012, has raised $190 million in funding. The startup is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program that provides companies with technology support and AI platforms guidance.
Keeping an AI on Earth’s Waters
Saildrone is riding a wave of interest for use of its crewless data collection missions in environmental studies of oceans and lakes.
The University of Hawaii at Manoa has enlisted the help of three 23-foot Saildrone Explorer USVs to study the impact of ocean acidification on climate change. The six-month mission around the islands of Hawaii, Maui, Oahu and Kaui will be used to help evaluate the ocean’s health around the state.
Ocean acidification is a reduction in its pH, and contributing factors include the burning of fossil fuels and farming. These can have an impact on coral, oysters, clams, sea urchins and calcareous plankton, which can threaten marine ecosystems.
Saildrone recently partnered with Seabed 2030 to completely map the world’s oceans. Seabed 2030 is a collaboration between the Nippon Foundation and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, or GEBCO, to map ocean floors worldwide by 2030.
“Saildrone’s vision is of a healthy ocean and a sustainable planet,” said Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins. “A complete map of the ocean floor is fundamental to achieving that vision.”
Saildrone USVs enable researchers to collect more data using fewer resources than traditional boats and crews, conserving energy and keeping crews out of danger.
The USVs are built for harsh weather and long missions. One of its USVs recently completed a 370-day voyage monitoring carbon dioxide, sailing from Rhode Island across the North Atlantic to Cabo Verde, down to the equator off the west coast of Africa, and back to Florida.
Running mostly on solar and wind power requires energy-efficient computing to handle so much data processing.
“With solar power, being able to keep our compute load power efficiency lower than a typical computing platform running GPUs by implementing NVIDIA Jetson is important for enabling us to do these kinds of missions,” said Towal.
Oceanic Surveying Meets Edge AI
Saildrone relies on the NVIDIA JetPack SDK for access to a full development environment for hardware-accelerated edge AI on the Jetson platform. It runs machine learning on the module for image-based vessel detection to aid navigation.
Saildrone pilots set waypoints and optimize the routes using metocean data — which includes meteorological and oceanographic information — returned from the vehicle. All of the USVs are monitored around the clock, and operators can change course remotely via the cloud if needed.
Machine learning is mostly run locally on the Jetson module— but can run on the cloud as well with a satellite connection — because bandwidth can be limited and costly to shuttle from its robust suite of sensors producing high-resolution imagery.
The USVs have oceanographic sensors for measurement of wind, temperature, salinity and dissolved carbon. The company also enables research of ocean and lake floors with bathymetric sensors, including deep sonar mapping with single- or multi-beam for going deeper or wider. And its perceptual sensor suite includes radar and visual underwater acoustic sensors.
DeepStream Goes Deep Sea
Saildrone taps into the NVIDIA DeepStream SDK for its vision AI applications and services. Developers can build seamless streaming pipelines for AI-based video, audio and image analytics using the kit.
Offering a 10x throughput improvement, DeepStream can be applied from edge to cloud to develop optimized intelligent video applications that handle multiple video, image and audio streams.
Saildrone will rely on DeepStream for image preprocessing and model inference, which enables machine learning at the edge, even at sea while powered by sun and wind.
Editor’s note: This post is part of our weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology improves creative workflows. We’re also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.
The Portal: Prelude RTX gaming mod — a remastering of the popular unofficial Portal prequel — comes with full ray tracing, DLSS 3 and RTX IO technology for cutting-edge, AI-powered graphics that rejuvenate the legendary mod for gamers, creators, developers and others to experience it anew.
Nicolas “NykO18” Grevet, a software engineer behind Portal: Prelude, collaborated with modder David Driver-Gomm to create the project — which launched today as a free download on Steam — using NVIDIA RTX Remix. The free modding platform enables users to quickly create and share RTX mods for classic games. Learn about the duo’s workflow this week In the NVIDIA Studio.
Plus, this month, graphics card partners will begin to offer the 16GB version of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU, featuring the state-of-the-art NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture that supercharges creative apps and productivity while delivering immersive, AI-accelerated gaming with ray tracing and DLSS 3. The GPUs are well-suited for working in larger 3D scenes, editing videos in up to 12K resolution and running native AI foundation models.
All of this is backed by the July NVIDIA Studio Driver, which supports these latest updates and more, available for download today.
In addition, the NVIDIA Studio #StartToFinish community challenge is in full swing. Use the hashtag to submit a screenshot of a favorite project featuring its beginning and ending stages for a chance to be featured on the @NVIDIAStudio and @NVIDIAOmniverse social channels.
A Portal Into Creativity
Portal: Prelude’s storyline revolves around what’s called the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, or GlaDOS, an AI created by Aperture Science, the fictional scientific research corporation key to the original game’s plot.
With extra chapters, test chambers, challenges and an extended storyline, the most popular Portal mod of all time was recognized by Mod DB with a “Mod of the Year” award. Check out the original game trailer below.
“Modders have to wear many hats — they’re simultaneously level designers, 2D artists, scripters, writers, web developers, quality-assurance analysts and so much more,” said Grevet. “This demands resilience and adaptability.”
3D mapping in Valve’s Hammer engine.
Grevet and Driver-Gomm transformed Portal: Prelude’s older, lower-resolution assets into new, high-resolution assets using RTX Remix. Both creators used a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU, which enabled full ray tracing and DLSS 3.
Reviewing 360-degree captures in the Shotcut video-editing platform.
The duo first gathered 360-degree screenshots of entire scene levels with RTX Remix.
Next, they used a component of RTX Remix called RTX Remix Runtime to capture game scenes and replace assets during playback while adding RTX technology to the game, including NVIDIA Reflex for low-latency responsiveness.
“We could take virtual, in-game 3D screenshots of a level and all of its assets, load the captures in RTX Remix, and literally replace every single asset, texture, geometry and light with up to 100x higher fidelity using open-source 2D and 3D formats.” — Nicolas “NykO18” Grevet
“We played with AI upscaling a lot,” said Grevet. “It was tremendously helpful in cutting down on early work and enabled sharper focus on the hero assets that required more hands-on treatment, like characters and non-playable character models, as well as large, predominant textures.”
These higher-resolution assets in the OpenUSD format were uploaded to NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting and building 3D tools and applications, through the Blender Connector. This allowed the team to use their 3D app of choice for modeling new geometry and beveling out edges, all in real time, with full ray-traced fidelity for ultra-photorealistic lighting and shadows. Blender Cycles’ RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing enabled smooth movement in the viewport.
Modeling a freight elevator with the Omniverse Connector for Blender.
“Some assets were practically modeled from scratch, whereas others — like pipes — mostly just had their edges beveled out so they were higher poly and smoother,” said Driver-Gomm. “Either way, it was exponentially faster in Omniverse.” All refined assets work from captured meshes rather than by applying new meshes for individual assets, saving an incredible amount of time.
The team then UV unwrapped the assets, which is the process of opening a mesh to make a 2D texture that can blanket a 3D object for the precise application of textures and materials.
Grevet and Driver-Gomm then moved to Adobe Substance 3D Painter and Sampler to create high-quality physically based render models. This means images were rendered modeling lights and surfaces with real-world optics. GPU-accelerated filters sped up and simplified material creation, while RTX-accelerated light and ambient occlusion baked assets in seconds.
Lifelike textures built in Adobe 3D Substance Sampler.
With all assets in place, the team used RTX Remix to swap older ones with these newer, higher-fidelity models. But the creators weren’t ready to rest on their laurels just yet — RTX Remix allowed them to relight every single level with realistic, path-traced lighting.
Valve’s Faceposer software development kit produced choreographed sequences that included facial expressions, lip-syncing and skeletal animations.
The final result of Portal: Prelude RTX is “light-years ahead of what I could do on my own,” said Grevet. “Having the opportunity to remaster these levels in the way I’d intended for them to look and behave was a nice cherry on top.”
Relight levels with realistic path-traced lighting in RTX Remix.
“The RTX Remix tool is insanely powerful and almost comes across as magic to me,” said Grevet. “The ability to capture any part of a game, load it in a 3D tool and chip away at it as if this was being done using the original game’s level editor is insane.”
Hammering out final details in RTX Remix.
Pick up Portal: Prelude RTX for free for Portal owners on Steam.
Game modders Nicolas “NykO18” Grevet and David Driver-Gomm.
A watershed moment on Nov. 22, 2022, was mostly virtual, yet it shook the foundations of nearly every industry on the planet.
On that day, OpenAI released ChatGPT, the most advanced artificial intelligence chatbot ever developed. This set off demand for generative AI applications that help businesses become more efficient, from providing consumers with answers to their questions to accelerating the work of researchers as they seek scientific breakthroughs, and much, much more.
Businesses that previously dabbled in AI are now rushing to adopt and deploy the latest applications. Generative AI — the ability of algorithms to create new text, images, sounds, animations, 3D models and even computer code — is moving at warp speed, transforming the way people work and play.
By employing large language models (LLMs) to handle queries, the technology can dramatically reduce the time people devote to manual tasks like searching for and compiling information.
The stakes are high. AI could contribute more than $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030, according to PwC. And the impact of AI adoption could be greater than the inventions of the internet, mobile broadband and the smartphone — combined.
The engine driving generative AI is accelerated computing. It uses GPUs, DPUs and networking along with CPUs to accelerate applications across science, analytics, engineering, as well as consumer and enterprise use cases.
Click to view the infographic: Generating the Next Wave of AI Transformation
Generative AI for Drug Discovery
Today, radiologists use AI to detect abnormalities in medical images, doctors use it to scan electronic health records to uncover patient insights, and researchers use it to accelerate the discovery of novel drugs.
Traditional drug discovery is a resource-intensive process that can require the synthesis of over 5,000 chemical compounds and yields an average success rate of just 10%. And it takes more than a decade for most new drug candidates to reach the market.
Researchers are now using generative AI models to read a protein’s amino acid sequence and accurately predict the structure of target proteins in seconds, rather than weeks or months.
Using NVIDIA BioNeMo models, Amgen, a global leader in biotechnology, has slashed the time it takes to customize models for molecule screening and optimization from three months to just a few weeks. This type of trainable foundation model enables scientists to create variants for research into specific diseases, allowing them to develop target treatments for rare conditions.
Whether predicting protein structures or securely training algorithms on large real-world and synthetic datasets, generative AI and accelerated computing are opening new areas of research that can help mitigate the spread of disease, enable personalized medical treatments and boost patient survival rates.
Generative AI for Financial Services
According to a recent NVIDIA survey, the top AI use cases in the financial services industry are customer services and deep analytics, where natural language processing and LLMs are used to better respond to customer inquiries and uncover investment insights. Another common application is in recommender systems that power personalized banking experiences, marketing optimization and investment guidance.
Advanced AI applications have the potential to help the industry better prevent fraud and transform every aspect of banking, from portfolio planning and risk management to compliance and automation.
Eighty percent of business-relevant information is in an unstructured format — primarily text — which makes it a prime candidate for generative AI. Bloomberg News produces 5,000 stories a day related to the financial and investment community. These stories represent a vast trove of unstructured market data that can be used to make timely investment decisions.
NVIDIA, Deutsche Bank, Bloomberg and others are creating LLMs trained on domain-specific and proprietary data to power finance applications.
Financial Transformers, or “FinFormers,” can learn context and understand the meaning of unstructured financial data. They can power Q&A chatbots, summarize and translate financial texts, provide early warning signs of counterparty risk, quickly retrieve data and identify data-quality issues.
These generative AI tools rely on frameworks that can integrate proprietary data into model training and fine-tuning, integrate data curation to prevent bias and use guardrails to keep conversations finance-specific.
Expect fintech startups and large international banks to expand their use of LLMs and generative AI to develop sophisticated virtual assistants to serve internal and external stakeholders, create hyper-personalized customer content, automate document summarization to reduce manual work, and analyze terabytes of public and private data to generate investment insights.
Generative AI for Retail
With 60% of all shopping journeys starting online and consumers more connected and knowledgeable than ever, AI has become a vital tool to help retailers match shifting expectations and differentiate from a rising tide of competition.
Retailers are using AI to improve customer experiences, power dynamic pricing, create customer segmentation, design personalized recommendations and perform visual search.
Generative AI can support customers and employees at every step through the buyer journey.
With AI models trained on specific brand and product data, they can generate robust product descriptions that improve search engine optimization rankings and help shoppers find the exact product they’re looking for. For example, generative AI can use metatags containing product attributes to generate more comprehensive product descriptions that include various terms like “low sugar” or “gluten free.”
AI virtual assistants can check enterprise resource planning systems and generate customer service messages to inform shoppers about which items are available and when orders will ship, and even assist customers with order change requests.
Fashable, a member of NVIDIA Inception’s global network of technology startups, is using generative AI to create virtual clothing designs, eliminating the need for physical fabric during product development. With the models trained on both proprietary and market data, this reduces the environmental impact of fashion design and helps retailers design clothes according to current market trends and tastes.
Expect retailers to use AI to capture and retain customer attention, deliver superior shopping experiences, and drive revenue by matching shoppers with the right products at the right time.
Whether improving customer service, streamlining network operations and design, supporting field technicians or creating new monetization opportunities, generative AI has the potential to reinvent the telecom industry.
Telcos can train diagnostic AI models with proprietary data on network equipment and services, performance, ticket issues, site surveys and more. These models can accelerate troubleshooting of technical performance issues, recommend network designs, check network configurations for compliance, predict equipment failures, and identify and respond to security threats.
Generative AI applications on handheld devices can support field technicians by scanning equipment and generating virtual tutorials to guide them through repairs. Virtual guides can then be enhanced with augmented reality, enabling technicians to analyze equipment in a 3D immersive environment or call on a remote expert for support.
New revenue opportunities will also open for telcos. With large edge infrastructure and access to vast datasets, telcos around the world are now offering generative AI as a service to enterprise and government customers.
As generative AI advances, expect telecommunications providers to use the technology to optimize network performance, improve customer support, detect security intrusions and enhance maintenance operations.
Generative AI for Energy
In the energy industry, AI is powering predictive maintenance and asset optimization, smart grid management, renewable energy forecasting, grid security and more.
To meet growing data needs across aging infrastructure and new government compliance regulations, energy operators are looking to generative AI.
In the U.S., electric utility companies spend billions of dollars every year to inspect, maintain and upgrade power generation and transmission infrastructure.
Until recently, using vision AI to support inspection required algorithms to be trained on thousands of manually collected and tagged photos of grid assets, with training data constantly updated for new components. Now, generative AI can do the heavy lifting.
With a small set of image training data, algorithms can generate thousands of physically accurate images to train computer vision models that help field technicians identify grid equipment corrosion, breakage, obstructions and even detect wildfires. This type of proactive maintenance enhances grid reliability and resiliency by reducing downtime, while diminishing the need to dispatch teams to the field.
Generative AI can also reduce the need for manual research and analysis. According to McKinsey, employees spend up to 1.8 hours per day searching for information — nearly 20% of the work week. To increase productivity, energy companies can train LLMs on proprietary data, including meeting notes, SAP records, emails, field best practices and public data such as standard material data sheets.
With this type of knowledge repository connected to an AI chatbot, engineers and data scientists can get instant answers to highly technical questions. For example, a maintenance engineer troubleshooting pitch control issues on a turbine’s hydraulic system could ask a bot: “How should I adjust the hydraulic pressure or flow to rectify pitch control issues on a model turbine from company X?” A properly trained model would deliver specific instructions to the user, who wouldn’t have to look through a bulky manual to find answers.
With AI applications for new system design, customer service and automation, expect generative AI to enhance safety and energy efficiency, as well as reduce operational expenses in the energy industry.
Generative AI for Higher Education and Research
From intelligent tutoring systems to automated essay grading, AI has been employed in education for decades. As universities use AI to improve teacher and student experiences, they’re increasingly dedicating resources to build AI-focused research initiatives.
For example, researchers at the University of Florida have access to one of the world’s fastest supercomputers in academia. They’ve used it to develop GatorTron — a natural language processing model that enables computers to read and interpret medical language in clinical notes that are stored in electronic health records. With a model that understands medical context, AI developers can create numerous medical applications, such as speech-to-text apps that support doctors with automated medical charting.
In Europe, an industry-university collaboration involving the Technical University of Munich is demonstrating that LLMs trained on genomics data can generalize across a plethora of genomic tasks, unlike previous approaches that required specialized models. The genomics LLM is expected to help scientists understand the dynamics of how DNA is translated into RNA and proteins, unlocking new clinical applications that will benefit drug discovery and health.
To conduct this type of groundbreaking research and attract the most motivated students and qualified academic professionals, higher education institutes should consider a whole-university approach to pool budget, plan AI initiatives, and distribute AI resources and benefits across disciplines.
Generative AI for the Public Sector
Today, the biggest opportunity for AI in the public sector is helping public servants to perform their jobs more efficiently and save resources.
These administrative roles often involve time-consuming manual tasks, including drafting, editing and summarizing documents, updating databases, recording expenditures for auditing and compliance, and responding to citizen inquiries.
To control costs and bring greater efficiency to routine job functions, government agencies can use generative AI.
Generative AI’s ability to summarize documents has great potential to boost the productivity of policymakers and staffers, civil servants, procurement officers and contractors. Consider a 756-page report recently released by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. With reports and legislation often spanning hundreds of pages of dense academic or legal text, AI-powered summaries generated in seconds can quickly break down complex content into plain language, saving the human resources otherwise needed to complete the task.
AI virtual assistants and chatbots powered by LLMs can instantly deliver relevant information to people online, taking the burden off of overstretched staff who work phone banks at agencies like the Treasury Department, IRS and DMV.
With simple text inputs, AI content generation can help public servants create and distribute publications, email correspondence, reports, press releases and public service announcements.
The analytical capabilities of AI can also help process documents to speed the delivery of vital services provided by organizations like Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Affairs, USPS and the State Department.
Generative AI could be a pivotal tool to help government bodies work within budget constraints, deliver government services more quickly and achieve positive public sentiment.
Generative AI – A Key Ingredient for Business Success
Across every field, organizations are transforming employee productivity, improving products and delivering higher-quality services with generative AI.
To put generative AI into practice, businesses need expansive amounts of data, deep AI expertise and sufficient compute power to deploy and maintain models quickly. Enterprises can fast-track adoption with the NeMo generative AI framework, part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, running on DGX Cloud. NVIDIA’s pretrained foundation models offer a simplified approach to building and running customized generative AI solutions for unique business use cases.
Learn more about powerful generative AI tools to help your business increase productivity, automate tasks, and unlock new opportunities for employees and customers.
Arise, members! Capcom’s legendary role-playing game Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen joins the GeForce NOW library today.
The RPG and THQ Nordic’s Jagged Alliance 3 are newly supported on GeForce NOW, playable on nearly any device.
From Dusk Till Pawn
It’s dangerous to go alone, so bring a Pawn along in “Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen.”
Become the Arisen and take up the challenge in Capcom’s critically acclaimed RPG. Set in a huge open world, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen brings players on an epic adventure filled with challenging battles and action.
But there’s no need to go it alone: Adventure with up to three Pawns. These customizable AI companions fight independently, demonstrating prowess and ability they’ve developed based on traits learned from each player.
Players can share their Pawns online and reap rewards of treasures, tips and strategy hints for taking down terrifying enemies. Pawns can also be borrowed when specific skills are needed to complete various challenging quests.
Revisit Gransys or experience Dragon’s Dogma for the first time. Members can play the real Steam version of this RPG classic with support for stunning visuals and high-resolution graphics, even on devices like Macs, mobile devices and smart TVs. Priority members can adventure at up to 1080p 60 frames per second, or upgrade to an Ultimate membership for gameplay at up to 4K 120 fps, longer streaming sessions and RTX ON for supported games.
Game On
The cloud is locked and loaded.
Another week means new games.
THQ Nordic’s tactical RPG Jagged Alliance 3 joins the cloud this week. Chaos reigns when the elected president of Grand Chien — a nation of rich natural resources and deep political divides — goes missing and a paramilitary force known as “The Legion” seizes control of the countryside. Recruit from a large cast of unique mercenaries and make choices to impact the country’s fate.
Members can look forward to the following this week:
On top of that, in collaboration with EE, the U.K.’s biggest and fastest mobile network, GeForce NOW launched new cloud gaming bundles featuring Priority and Ultimate memberships. To celebrate, check out how streamer Leah ‘Leahviathan’ Alexandra showcased GeForce NOW in action at the U.K.’s highest-altitude gaming den on the slopes of Ben Nevis, 1,500 feet above sea level in the clouds of the Scottish Highlands.
What are you planning to play this weekend? Let us know on Twitter or in the comments below.
Challenger
Medic
Gunslinger
Handler
Hunter
NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) July 26, 2023
