Posts in category: nVidia AI

Newly released open-source software can help developers guide generative AI applications to create impressive text responses that stay on track.

NeMo Guardrails will help ensure smart applications powered by large language models (LLMs) are accurate, appropriate, on topic and secure. The software includes all the code, examples and documentation businesses need to add safety to AI apps that generate text.

Today’s release comes as many industries are adopting LLMs, the powerful engines behind these AI apps. They’re answering customers’ questions, summarizing lengthy documents, even writing software and accelerating drug design.

NeMo Guardrails is designed to help users keep this new class of AI-powered applications safe.

Powerful Models, Strong Rails

Safety in generative AI is an industry-wide concern. NVIDIA designed NeMo Guardrails to work with all LLMs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The software lets developers align LLM-powered apps so they’re safe and stay within the domains of a company’s expertise.

NeMo Guardrails enables developers to set up three kinds of boundaries:

• Topical guardrails prevent apps from veering off into undesired areas. For example, they keep customer service assistants from answering questions about the weather.
• Safety guardrails ensure apps respond with accurate, appropriate information. They can filter out unwanted language and enforce that references are made only to credible sources.
• Security guardrails restrict apps to making connections only to external third-party applications known to be safe.

Virtually every software developer can use NeMo Guardrails — no need to be a machine learning expert or data scientist. They can create new rules quickly with a few lines of code.

Riding Familiar Tools

Since NeMo Guardrails is open source, it can work with all the tools that enterprise app developers use.

For example, it can run on top of LangChain, an open-source toolkit that developers are rapidly adopting to plug third-party applications into the power of LLMs.

“Users can easily add NeMo Guardrails to LangChain workflows to quickly put safe boundaries around their AI-powered apps,” said Harrison Chase, who created the LangChain toolkit and a startup that bears its name.

In addition, NeMo Guardrails is designed to be able to work with a broad range of LLM-enabled applications, such as Zapier. Zapier is an automation platform used by over 2 million businesses, and it’s seen first-hand how users are integrating AI into their work.

“Safety, security, and trust are the cornerstones of responsible AI development, and we’re excited about NVIDIA’s proactive approach to embed these guardrails into AI systems,” said Reid Robinson, lead product manager of AI at Zapier.

“We look forward to the good that will come from making AI a dependable and trusted part of the future.”

Available as Open Source and From NVIDIA

NVIDIA is incorporating NeMo Guardrails into the NVIDIA NeMo framework, which includes everything users need to train and tune language models using a company’s proprietary data.

Much of the NeMo framework is already available as open source code on GitHub.  Enterprises also can get it as a complete and supported package, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.

NeMo is also available as a service. It’s part of NVIDIA AI Foundations, a family of cloud services for businesses that want to create and run custom generative AI models based on their own datasets and domain knowledge.

Using NeMo, South Korea’s leading mobile operator built an intelligent assistant that’s had 8 million conversations with its customers. A research team in Sweden employed NeMo to create LLMs that can automate text functions for the country’s hospitals, government and business offices.

An Ongoing Community Effort

Building good guardrails for generative AI is a hard problem that will require lots of ongoing research as AI evolves.

NVIDIA made NeMo Guardrails — the product of several years’ research — open source to contribute to the developer community’s tremendous energy and work on AI safety.

Together, our efforts on guardrails will help companies keep their smart services aligned with safety, privacy and security requirements so these engines of innovation stay on track.

For more details on NeMo Guardrails and to get started, see our technical blog.

From climate modeling to endangered species conservation, developers, researchers and companies are keeping an AI on the environment with the help of NVIDIA technology.

They’re using NVIDIA GPUs and software to track endangered African black rhinos, forecast the availability of solar energy in the U.K., build detailed climate models and monitor environmental disasters from satellite imagery.

This Earth Day, discover five key ways AI and accelerated computing are advancing sustainability, climate science and energy efficiency.

1. Applying AI to Biodiversity Conservation, Sustainable Agriculture

To protect endangered species, camera-enabled edge AI devices embedded in the environment or on drones can help scientists observe animals in the wild, monitoring their populations and detecting threats from predators and poachers.

Conservation AI, a U.K.-based nonprofit, has deployed 70+ cameras around the world powered by NVIDIA Jetson modules for edge AI. Together with the NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, the Conservation AI platform can identify species of interest from footage in just four seconds — and help conservationists detect poachers and rapidly intervene. Another research team developed an NVIDIA Jetson-based solution to monitor endangered black rhinos in Namibia using drone-based AI.

And artist Sofia Crespo raised awareness for critically endangered plants and animals through a generative AI art display at Times Square, using generative adversarial networks trained on NVIDIA GPUs to create high-resolution visuals representing relatively unknown species.

In the field of agriculture, Bay Area startup Verdant and smart tractor company Monarch Tractor are developing AI to support sustainable farming practices, including precision spraying to reduce the use of herbicides.

2. Powering Renewable Energy Research

NVIDIA AI and high performance computing are advancing nearly every field of renewable energy research.

Open Climate Fix, a nonprofit product lab and member of the NVIDIA Inception program for startups, is developing AI models that can help predict cloud cover over solar panels — helping electric grid operators determine how much solar energy can be generated that day to help meet customers’ power needs. Startups Utilidata and Anuranet are developing AI-enabled electric meters using NVIDIA Jetson to enable a more energy efficient, resilient grid.

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy is working with NVIDIA to create physics-informed digital twins of wind farms using NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA Modulus. U.K. company Zenotech used cloud-based GPUs to accurately simulate the likely energy output of a wind farm’s 140 turbines. And Gigastack, a consortium-led project, is using Omniverse to build a proof of concept for a wind farm that will turn water into hydrogen fuel.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved a breakthrough in fusion energy using HPC simulations running on Sierra, the world’s sixth-fastest HPC system, which has 17,280 NVIDIA GPUs. And the U.K.’s Atomic Energy Authority is testing the NVIDIA Omniverse simulation platform to design a fusion energy power plant.

3. Accelerating Climate Models, Weather Visualizations

Accurately modeling the atmosphere is critical to predicting climate change in the coming decades.

To better predict extreme weather events, NVIDIA created FourCastNet, a physics-ML model that can forecast the precise path of catastrophic atmospheric rivers a full week in advance.

Using Omniverse, NVIDIA and Lockheed Martin are building an AI-powered digital twin for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that could significantly reduce the amount of time necessary to generate complex weather visualizations.

An initiative from Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory researchers is instead taking a hyper-local approach, using NVIDIA Jetson-powered devices to better understand wildfires, urban heat islands and the effect of climate on crops.

4. Managing Environmental Disasters With Satellite Data

When it’s difficult to gauge a situation from the ground, satellite data provides a powerful vantage point to monitor and manage climate disasters.

NVIDIA is working with the United Nations Satellite Centre to apply AI to the organization’s satellite imagery technology infrastructure, an initiative that will provide humanitarian teams with near-real-time insights about floods, wildfires and other climate-related disasters.

NVIDIA Inception member Masterful AI has developed machine learning tools that can detect climate risks from satellite and drone feeds. The model has been used to identify rusted transformers that could spark a wildfire and improve damage assessments after hurricanes.

San Francisco-based Inception startup Orbital Sidekick operates satellites that collect hyperspectral intelligence — information from across the electromagnetic spectrum. Its NVIDIA Jetson-powered AI solution can detect hydrocarbon or gas leaks from this data, helping reduce the risk of leaks becoming serious crises.

5. Advancing Energy-Efficient Computing 

On its own, adopting NVIDIA tech is already a green choice: If every CPU-only server running AI and HPC worldwide switched to a GPU-accelerated system, the world could save around 20 trillion watt-hours of energy a year, equivalent to the electricity requirements of nearly 2 million U.S. homes.

Semiconductor leaders are integrating the NVIDIA cuLitho software library to accelerate the time to market and boost the energy efficiency of computational lithography, the process of designing and manufacturing next-generation chips. And the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip — which scored 2x performance gains over comparable x86 processors in tests — can help data centers slash their power bills by up to half.

In the most recent MLPerf inference benchmark for AI performance, the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin system-on-module achieved gains of up to 63% in energy efficiency, supplying AI inference at low power levels, including on battery-powered systems.

NVIDIA last year introduced a liquid-cooled NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU, which Equinix evaluated for use in its data centers. Both companies found that a data center using liquid cooling could run the same workloads as an air-cooled facility while using around 30% less energy.

Bonus: Robot-Assisted Recycling on the AI Podcast

Startup EverestLabs developed RecycleOS, an AI software and robotics solution that helps recycling facilities around the world recover an average of 25-40% more waste, ensuring fewer recyclable materials end up in landfills. The company’s founder and CEO talked about its tech on the NVIDIA AI Podcast:

Learn more about green computing, and about NVIDIA-accelerated applications in climate and energy.

Content creators using Epic Games’ open, advanced real-time 3D creation tool, Unreal Engine, are now equipped with more features to bring their work to life with NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for creating and operating metaverse applications.

The Omniverse Connector for Unreal Engine’s 201.0 update brings significant enhancements to creative workflows using both open platforms.

Streamlining Import, Export and Live Workflows

The Unreal Engine Omniverse Connector 201.0 release delivers improvements in import, export and live workflows, as well as updated software development kits.

New features include:

• Alignment with Epic’s USD libraries and USDImporter plug-in: Improved compatibility between Omniverse and Epic’s Universal Scene Description (USD) libraries and USDImporter plug-in make it easier to transfer assets between the two platforms.
• Python 3.9 scripts with Omniverse URLs: Unreal Engine developers and technical artists can access Epic’s built-in Python libraries by running Python 3.9 scripts with Omniverse URLs, which link to files on Omniverse Nucleus servers, helping automate tasks.
• Skeletal mesh blendshape import to morph targets: The Unreal Engine Connector 201.0 now allows users to import skeletal mesh blendshapes into morph targets, or stored geometry shapes that can be used for animation. This eases development and material work on characters that use NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL), reducing the time it takes to share character assets with other artists.
• UsdLuxLight schema compatibility: Improved compatibility of Unreal Engine with the UsdLuxLight schema — the blueprint used to define data that describes lighting in USD — makes it easier for content creators to work with lighting in Omniverse.

Transforming Workflows One Update at a Time

Artists and game content creators are seeing notable improvements to their workflows thanks to this connector update.

Developer and creator Abdelrazik Maghata, aka MR GFX on YouTube, recently joined an Omniverse livestream to demonstrate his workflow using Unreal Engine and Omniverse. Maghata explained how to animate a character in real time by connecting the Omniverse Audio2Face generative AI-powered application to Epic’s MetaHuman framework in Unreal Engine.

Maghata, who’s been a content creator on YouTube for 15 years, uses his platform to teach others about the benefits of Unreal Engine for their 3D workflows. He’s recently added Omniverse into his repertoire to build connections between his favorite content creation tools.

“Omniverse will transform the world of 3D,” he said.

Omniverse ambassador and short-film phenom Jae Solina often uses the Unreal Engine Connector in his creative process, as well. The connector has greatly improved his workflow efficiency and increased productivity by providing interoperability between his favorite tools, Solina said.

Getting connected is simple. Learn how to accelerate creative workflows with the Unreal Engine Omniverse Connector by watching this video:

Get Plugged Into the Omniverse 

At the recent NVIDIA GTC conference, the Omniverse team hosted many sessions spotlighting how creators can enhance their workflows with generative AI, 3D SimReady assets and more. Watch for free on demand.

Plus, join the latest Omniverse community challenge, running through the end of the month. Use the Unreal Engine Omniverse Connector and share your creation — whether it’s fan art, a video-game character or even an original game — on social media using the hashtag #GameArtChallenge for a chance to be featured on channels for NVIDIA Omniverse (Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram) and NVIDIA Studio (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).

Are you up for a challenge?

From now until April 30, share your video-game inspired work in our #GameArtChallenge.

@rafianimates is making his very own #AR game and shared some WIPs of the characters #MadeInOmniverse with @VoxEdit & #MagicaVoxel. pic.twitter.com/pppDNarNk4

— NVIDIA Omniverse (@nvidiaomniverse) March 9, 2023

Get started with NVIDIA Omniverse by downloading the standard license free, or learn how Omniverse Enterprise can connect teams. Developers can get started with these Omniverse resources. 

To stay up to date on the platform, subscribe to the newsletter and follow NVIDIA Omniverse on Instagram, Medium and Twitter. Check out the Omniverse forums, Discord server, Twitch and YouTube channels.

What’s the difference between NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 and 40 Series GPUs for gamers?

To briefly set aside the technical specifications, the difference lies in the level of performance and capability each series offers.

Both deliver great graphics. Both offer advanced new features driven by NVIDIA’s global AI revolution a decade ago. Either can power glorious high-def gaming experiences.

But the RTX 40 Series takes everything RTX GPUs deliver and turns it up to 11.

“Think of any current PC gaming workload that includes ‘future-proofed’ overkill settings, then imagine the RTX 4090 making like Grave Digger and crushing those tests like abandoned cars at a monster truck rally,” writes Ars Technica.

Common Ground: RTX 30 and 40 Series Features

That said, the RTX 30 Series and 40 Series GPUs have a lot in common.

Both offer hardware-accelerated ray tracing thanks to specialized RT Cores. They also have AI-enabling Tensor Cores that supercharge graphics. And both come loaded with support for next-generation AI and rendering technologies.

But NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 Series delivers all this in a simply unmatched way.

Unveiling the GeForce RTX 40 Series

Unveiled in September 2022, the RTX 40 Series GPUs consist of four variations: the RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070.

All four are built on NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace architecture, a significant upgrade over the NVIDIA Ampere architecture used in the RTX 30 Series GPUs.

Tensor and RT Cores Evolution

While both 30 Series and 40 Series GPUs utilize Tensor Cores, Ada’s new fourth-generation Tensor Cores are unbelievably fast, increasing throughput by up to 5x, to 1.4 Tensor-petaflops using the new FP8 Transformer Engine, first introduced in NVIDIA’s Hopper architecture H100 data center GPU.

NVIDIA made real-time ray tracing a reality with the invention of RT Cores, dedicated processing cores on the GPU designed to tackle performance-intensive ray-tracing workloads.

Stay updated on the latest news, features, and tips for gaming, creating, and streaming with NVIDIA GeForce; check out GeForce News – the ultimate destination for GeForce enthusiasts.

Advanced ray tracing requires computing the impact of many rays striking numerous different material types throughout a scene, creating a sequence of divergent, inefficient workloads for the shaders to calculate the appropriate levels of light, darkness and color while rendering a 3D scene.

Ada’s third-generation RT Cores have up to twice the ray-triangle intersection throughput, increasing RT-TFLOP performance by over 2x vs. Ampere’s best.

Shader Execution Reordering and In-Game Performance

And Ada’s new Shader Execution Reordering technology dynamically reorganizes these previously inefficient workloads into considerably more efficient ones. SER can improve shader performance for ray-tracing operations by up to 3x and in-game frame rates by up to 25%.

As a result, 40 Series GPUs excel at real-time ray tracing, delivering unmatched gameplay on the most demanding titles, such as Cyberpunk 2077 that support the technology.

DLSS 3 and Optical Flow Accelerator

Ada also advances NVIDIA DLSS, which brings advanced deep learning techniques to graphics, massively boosting performance.

Powered by the new fourth-gen Tensor Cores and Optical Flow Accelerator on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, DLSS 3 uses AI to create additional high-quality frames.

As a result, RTX 40 Series GPUs deliver buttery-smooth gameplay in the latest and greatest PC games.

Eighth-Generation NVIDIA Encoders

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards also feature new eighth-generation NVENC (NVIDIA Encoders) with AV1 encoding, enabling new possibilities for streamers, broadcasters, video callers and creators.

AV1 is 40% more efficient than H.264. This allows users streaming at 1080p to increase their stream resolution to 1440p while running at the same bitrate and quality.

Remote workers will be able to communicate more smoothly with colleagues and clients. For creators, the ability to stream high-quality video with reduced bandwidth requirements can enable smoother collaboration and content delivery, allowing for a more efficient creative process.

Cutting-Edge Manufacturing and Efficiency

RTX 40 Series GPUs are also built at the absolute cutting edge, with a custom TSMC 4N process. The process and Ada architecture are ultra-efficient.

And RTX 40 Series GPUs come loaded with the memory needed to keep its Ada GPUs running at full tilt.

RTX 30 Series GPUs: Still a Solid Choice

All that said, RTX 30 Series GPUs remain powerful and popular.

Launched in September 2020, the RTX 30 Series GPUs include a range of different models, from the RTX 3050 to the RTX 3090 Ti.

All deliver the grunt to run the latest games in high definition and at smooth frame rates.

But while the RTX 30 Series GPUs have remained a popular choice for gamers and professionals since their release, the RTX 40 Series GPUs offer significant improvements for gamers and creators alike, particularly those who want to crank up settings with high frames rates, drive big 4K displays, or deliver buttery-smooth streaming to global audiences.

With higher performance, enhanced ray-tracing capabilities, support for DLSS 3 and better power efficiency, the RTX 40 Series GPUs are an attractive option for those who want the latest and greatest technology.

Related Content

• NVIDIA Ada Lovelace Architecture: Ahead of its Time, Ahead of the Game 
• NVIDIA DLSS 3: The Performance Multiplier, Powered by AI 
• NVIDIA Reflex: Victory Measured in Milliseconds 
• NVIDIA Studio: Your Creativity AI Take 
• How to Build a Gaming PC with an RTX 40 Series GPU 
• The Best Games to Play on RTX 40 Series GPUs 
• How to Stream Like a Pro with an RTX 40 Series GPU

More than 50 automotive companies around the world have deployed over 800 autonomous test vehicles powered by the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion automotive compute architecture, which has recently achieved new safety milestones.

The latest NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion architecture is based on the DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC). Many NVIDIA DRIVE processes, as well as hardware and software components, have been assessed and/or certified compliant to ISO 26262 by TÜV SÜD, an independent, accredited assessor that ensures compliance with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26262:2018 Functional Safety Standard for Road Vehicles.

Specifically, NVIDIA DRIVE core development processes are now certified as ISO 26262 Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) D compliant. ISO 26262 is based on the concept of a safety lifecycle, which includes planning, analysis, design and implementation, verification and validation.

Additionally:

• The NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoC completed concept and product assessments and is deemed to meet ISO 26262 ASIL D systematic requirements and ASIL B random fault management requirements.
• The NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin board completed concept assessment and is deemed to meet ISO 26262 ASIL D requirements.
• The NVIDIA DRIVE Orin-based platform, which unifies the Orin SoC and DRIVE AGX Orin board, completed concept assessment and is deemed to meet ISO 26262 ASIL D requirements.
• Development of NVIDIA DRIVE OS 6.x is in progress and will be assessed by TÜV SÜD. This follows the recent certification of DRIVE OS 5.2, which includes NVIDIA CUDA libraries and the NVIDIA TensorRT software development kit for real-time AI inferencing.

Building safe autonomous vehicle technology is one of NVIDIA’s largest and most important endeavors, and functional safety is the focus at every step, from design to testing to deployment.

Functional safety is paramount in the deployment of AVs — ensuring they operate safely and reliably without endangering occupants, pedestrians or other road users.

AV Functional Safety Leadership

The initial ISO 26262 ASIL D functional safety certification — and recertification — of NVIDIA’s hardware development processes, along with the assessment of two generations of SoCs that include NVIDIA GPU and Tensor Core technology, demonstrate NVIDIA’s commitment to AV functional safety.

NVIDIA’s leadership in AV safety is further exhibited in its contributions to published standards – such as ISO 26262 and ISO 21448 — and ongoing initiatives — such as ISO/TS 5083 on AV safety, ISO/PAS 8800, ISO/IEC TR 5469 on AI safety and ISO/TR 9839.

Unified Hardware and Software Architecture

NVIDIA offers a unified hardware and software architecture throughout its AV research, design and deployment infrastructure. NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion is an end-to-end, modular development platform and reference architecture for designing autonomous vehicles. The latest generation includes the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin developer kit, plus a diverse and redundant sensor suite.

Self-Driving Safety Report

Learn more about NVIDIA’s AV safety practices and technologies in the NVIDIA Self-Driving Safety Report.

GFN Thursday rolls up this week with a hot new deal for a GeForce NOW six-month Priority membership.

Enjoy the cloud gaming service with seven new games to stream this week, including more favorites from Bandai Namco Europe and F1 2021 from Electronic Arts.

Make Gaming a Priority 

Starting today, GeForce NOW is offering a limited-time discount sure to spark up gamers looking to skip the wait and jump right into their games. Through Sunday, May 21, get 40% off a six-month Priority membership for $29.99, normally $49.99.

It’s perfect for those looking to try out GeForce NOW or lock in a lower price for another half-year with one of GeForce NOW’s premium membership tiers.

Priority members get higher access to GeForce gaming servers, meaning less wait times than free members, as well as gaming sessions extended up to six hours. Priority members can also stream across multiple devices with beautifully ray-traced graphics with RTX ON for supported games.

With new games added weekly and other top titles on the way, gamers won’t want to miss out on this hot deal. Sign up now or power up devices even further with an Ultimate membership, GeForce NOW’s highest performance tier.

The Dark Side of the Cloud

Carve out time this month for The Dark Pictures Anthology series from Bandai Namco Europe, with support for ray tracing to bring a realistic tinge of spine-tingling horror to the cloud.

Each entry of the popular series features interactive horror stories with unique characters and plots. Choose what happens in each adventure while discovering branching narratives and multiple endings.

The first game in the series, Man of Medan, follows a group of young adults stranded on a ghost ship haunted by malevolent spirits. Little Hope, next in the series, features a group of college students and their professor who must escape a cursed New England town haunted by witches.

House of Ashes, the series’ third installment, features war soldiers who unknowingly awaken an ancient evil force when they stumble across an underground temple. The Devil in Me, set in a replica of a real-life serial killer’s “Murder Castle,” follows a documentary film crew as they set out to capture footage of the hotel, only to find their lives at grave risk.

With more Bandai Namco titles joining the cloud this week, it’ll be easy as pie to start a marathon for The Dark Pictures Anthology series, if you dare.

Take a Victory Lap 

Jump into the seat of a Formula One driver in F1 2021 from Electronic Arts. Every story has its beginning, and members can start theirs with the Braking Point story mode, a thrilling experience with on-track competition and off-track drama.

Take on the Formula One world and go head to head against official teams and drivers in “Career Mode,” solo or with a buddy. Or, put the pedal to the metal with “Real-Season Start” mode to redo the F1 2021 season as desired, if Max Verstappen didn’t happen to be your winner of choice. There’s plenty of content with other gaming modes, including “My Team” and online multiplayer.

F1 2021 is fueled up with RTX ON for Ultimate and Priority members — the ultrarealistic game play will have players feeling as if they’re racing directly from the track.

Blazing-Hot New Games

Sit back and relax with new games and a demo joining the cloud this week. Start with Monster Hunter Rise — first-time hunters can try it out for free with a demo of the game and its expansion, Sunbreak, available now to all GeForce NOW members.

Plus, the highly anticipated first-person action role-playing game Dead Island 2 launches in the cloud this week. In this sequel to the popular game Dead Island from Deep Silver, horror and dark humor mix well throughout the zombie-slaying adventure set in Los Angeles. Play solo if you dare, or with some buddies.

GFN Thursday keeps on rolling with seven hot new games available to stream this week:

• Survival: Fountain of Youth (New release on Steam, April 19)
• Dead Island 2 (New release on Epic Games Store, April 21)
• F1 2021 (Steam)
• The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan (Steam)
• The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope (Steam)
• The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes (Steam)
• The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me (Steam)

That wraps up another GFN Thursday. Let us know how you’re making gaming a priority this weekend in the comments below, or on the GeForce NOW Facebook and Twitter channels.

Make your cloud gaming a 𝙥𝙧𝙞𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 tomorrow.

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) April 19, 2023

NVIDIA today recognized a dozen partners for their work helping customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa harness the power of AI across industries.

At a virtual EMEA Partner Day event, which was hosted by the NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) and drew more than 750 registrants, Partner of the Year awards were given to companies working with NVIDIA to lead AI education and adoption across the region. The winners are transforming how their customers tap AI to improve data centers, manufacturing, sales and marketing workflows and more.

“NVIDIA partners have been at the forefront of technological advances and incredible business opportunities emerging across EMEA, using innovative NVIDIA solutions to help customers reduce costs, increase efficiency and solve their greatest challenges,” said Alfred Manhart, vice president of the EMEA channel at NVIDIA. “With the EMEA NPN Partner of the Year awards, we honor those who play a critical role in the success of our business as they apply their knowledge and expertise to deliver transformative solutions across a range of industries.”

The 2023 NPN award winners for EMEA are:

Central Europe

• THINK ABOUT IT, Germany — Rising Star Partner of the Year. Recognized for driving exceptional revenue growth of close to 100% across the complete NVIDIA portfolio. Throughout four years of working with NVIDIA, the IT services company has become a cornerstone of the NVIDIA partner landscape in Germany.
• Delta Computer Reinbek, Germany — Star Performer Partner of the Year. Recognized for outstanding sales achievement and customer relations, deploying NVIDIA high performance computing, machine learning, deep learning and AI solutions to enterprise, industry and higher education and research institutes throughout Germany.
• MEGWARE Computer, Germany — Go-to-Market Excellence Partner of the Year. Recognized for its broad NVIDIA H100 marketing campaign, using its own benchmark center to increase awareness and generate leads.

Northern Europe

• AMAX, Ireland — Rising Star Partner of the Year. Recognized for its significant commitment to helping customers meet their AI and HPC goals, and aligning with members of the NVIDIA Inception program for startups to create new opportunities within the enterprise and automotive sectors.
• Boston Ltd., U.K. — Star Performer Partner of the Year. Recognized for exceptional execution across business areas and implementation of a full-stack approach to deliver complex solutions built on NVIDIA technologies, which have led Boston Ltd. to achieve record revenues.
• Scan Computers International Ltd., U.K. — Go-to-Market Excellence Partner of the Year. Recognized for designing and delivering several successful marketing campaigns comprising high-quality digital content and a comprehensive user-experience strategy, resulting in a strong return on investment.

Southern Europe and Middle East

• Computacenter, France — Rising Star Partner of the Year. Recognized for its fast growth across solution areas, addition of many new customers and close engagement with NVIDIA to drive significant revenue growth.
• MBUZZ, United Arab Emirates — Star Performer Partner of the Year. Recognized for its dedication to increasing the adoption of NVIDIA technologies throughout the Middle East, growing revenue in areas ranging from HPC to visualization and achieving 100% annual growth.

• Azken Muga, Spain — Go-to-Market Excellence Partner of the Year. Recognized for outstanding marketing performance, alignment with NVIDIA’s strategic goals and consistent investment in high-impact, high-quality marketing campaigns with a focus on the NVIDIA DGX platform.

Distribution Partners

• PNY Technologies Europe — Distributor of the Year. Recognized for the second consecutive year for providing NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms and software to vertical markets — including media and entertainment, healthcare and cloud data center — as well as its commitment to delivering significant year-on-year sales growth.
• TD Synnex — Networking Distributor of the Year. Recognized for its dedication toward, expertise in and understanding of both NVIDIA technologies and customers’ business needs, as well as its commitment to partner outreach and consistent reseller support.

Outstanding Impact

• SoftServe — Outstanding Impact Award. Recognized for its commitment to innovating and collaborating with NVIDIA at all levels. SoftServe has dedicated significant time and resources to creating a practice based on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for building and operating metaverse applications — building industry-specific showcases, developing dedicated Omniverse labs and training, and enabling thousands of its employees to tap NVIDIA solutions.

“It’s an honor for SoftServe to be recognized as the NPN Outstanding Impact Partner of the Year, an award that demonstrates the importance of collaborating with strong partners like NVIDIA to solve complex challenges using cutting-edge technologies,” said Volodymyr Semenyshyn, president of EMEA at SoftServe. “SoftServe is fully dedicated to advancing our vision of accelerated computing by combining NVIDIA’s trailblazing technologies with our strong industry expertise to deliver leading IT solutions and services that empower our customers.”

This year’s awards arrive as AI adoption is rapidly expanding across industries, unlocking new opportunities and accelerating discovery in healthcare, finance, business services and more. As AI models become more complex, the 2023 NPN Award winners are expert partners that can help enterprises develop and deploy AI in production using the infrastructure that best aligns with their operations.

Learn how to join the NPN, or find your local NPN partner.

Shanghai is once again showing why it’s called the “Magic City” as more than 1,000 exhibitors from 20 countries dazzle the automotive world this week at the highly anticipated International Automobile Industry Exhibition.

With nearly 1,500 vehicles on display, the 20th edition of Auto Shanghai is showcasing the newest AI-powered cars and mobility solutions using the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion compute platform built on the DRIVE Orin system-on-chip (SoC).

NVIDIA-Powered Vehicles in China and Beyond

SAIC Motor’s Rising Auto brand unveiled the recently launched mid-to-large luxury pure electric sedan F7 and mid-to-large luxury pure electric SUV R7 at the show, both of which feature an advanced intelligent-driving system built on NVIDIA DRIVE Orin. Equipped with a swappable battery pack, the F7 is built to go the distance with up to a 413-mile range.

New energy vehicle (NEV) maker GAC AION showcased its flagship model Hyper GT, which is available for pre-sale. Equipped with the high-performance NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoC, the car is designed to support advanced level 2+ driving capabilities in high-speed environments. Featuring an array of aerodynamic features that minimize drag, the Hyper GT has a wind resistance coefficient of just 0.19 Cd, the lowest of any production car in the world, GAC Aion claims.

At the show, EV maker XPENG showcased its full range of models including the all-new P7i ultra-smart coupe and XPENG G9, a super-fast-charging, intelligent SUV, built on the high-performance DRIVE Orin centralized compute architecture to deliver AI capabilities that are continuously upgradable through over-the-air updates.

XPENG also debuted the first model under its SEPA 2.0 Soaring architecture — the XPENG G6 — also powered by NVIDIA DRIVE Orin. As an intelligent driving coupe SUV, the XPENG G6 is based on a high-voltage 800V silicon carbide platform that XPENG launched globally, and is also equipped with its proprietary XNGP intelligent assisted driving system.

Elsewhere on the show floor, IM Motors, a joint venture among China’s SAIC Motor, Alibaba and Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Group, exhibited its flagship LS7 SUV and the L7 sedan powered by NVIDIA DRIVE Orin. IM Motors reports that it has launched its capability for highway navigation on autopilot — users will be able to experience it on the L7 and LS7 soon.

NEV maker Human Horizons officially took the wraps off its HiPhi Y SUV, the latest addition to its lineup of intelligent vehicles. The vehicle’s marquee features include a wing-door design, a China light-duty vehicle test cycle (CLTC) range of more than 497 miles on a single charge, and an autonomous-driving system powered by DRIVE Orin.

This is the second model stemming from HiPhi’s cooperation with NVIDIA. The NEV company last summer launched HiPhi Z, the digital grand tourer equipped with the HiPhi Pilot intelligent driver-assistance system. The system features NVIDIA DRIVE Orin and a 30+ sensor suite to support functions such as assisted driving.

As China NEV makers look to expand their global footprint, HiPhi also announced it will bring its vehicles to select countries in Western Europe and Scandinavia. This includes HiPhi X, HiPhi Z and HiPhi Y.

Premium smart electric vehicle company NIO revealed the ES6 SUV during Auto Shanghai. NIO’s family of smart vehicles are being showcased at the NIO booth, including an updated version of its ET7, along with the ES8, EC7, ES7, ES6 and ET5. All these vehicles run on its proprietary Adam supercomputer, which is powered by four NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoCs. This quad configuration delivers 1,016 TOPS of performance to enable advanced driver-assistance systems and a point-to-point autonomous driving experience.

NIO also recently announced it’s equipping its third-generation powerswap station with two laser radars and two NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoCs, with a total computing power of 508 TOPS, which enables the Automatic Summon and Swap feature, which enables the station to communicate with the vehicle and automatically navigate the vehicle for a battery swap.

Li Auto displayed three of its flagship models, including the L9, L8 Max and L7 Max. These models feature dual NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoCs to power its intelligent-driving system, the Ideal AD Max, delivering 508 TOPS of computing power to help the vehicle efficiently process data from high-definition cameras, lidars, millimeter-wave radars and ultrasonic sensors in real time.

Li Auto also released an 800V supercharged pure electric solution, which can travel 248 miles after charging for 10 minutes. The automaker demonstrated AD Max 3.0, which is also powered by NVIDIA DRIVE Orin. The company’s urban NOA navigation assisted-driving system will be released in the second quarter of this year. And by the end of the year, this all-scenario navigation-assisted driving system will cover 100 cities in China.

Swedish premium automaker Volvo Cars debuted its all-electric EX90 in China. Revealed in November last year, the state-of-the-art, software-defined SUV features a new powertrain and cutting-edge technology to deliver the ultimate in safety and intelligence with the AI compute of NVIDIA DRIVE Orin and Xavier platforms.

During its Volvo Cars Tech Day held earlier this week, the automaker also unveiled its EX90 Excellence, the top-of-the-line and limited edition of the EX90. The four-seater SUV features a two-tone exterior, outstanding comfort inside and an intelligent technology base powered by NVIDIA DRIVE.

Lotus brought its three champion products to the Auto Shanghai, including the first electric Hyper-SUV Lotus Eletre, the first pure electric hypercar Evija and Emira, the last internal combustion engine sports car from Lotus. The Lotus Eletre is equipped with the cockpit-forward design inspired by Evija and embodies the essence of aesthetics. It features an immersive digital cockpit, long battery range of the Eletre S+ version up to 403 miles and autonomous-driving capabilities powered by the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin.

Tier-1 Manufacturers, Emerging Mobility Companies Also Spotlighted

Tier-1 suppliers for the auto industry and emerging self-driving companies also presented their latest offerings at Auto Shanghai.

Desay SV is pushing the boundaries of autonomous-driving performance with its latest solutions for smart cockpit, intelligent driving and connected services. The mobility company demonstrated its DRIVE Orin-based smart cockpit solution, which is part of the ICPAurora Intelligent Centralized Computing Platform, for powering new forms of in-vehicle infotainment, including 3D gaming and Android-based systems.

Desay SV’s integration of cabin and autonomous driving showcases centralizing all intelligent vehicle functions on a single NVIDIA DRIVE computer. Announced last September, the NVIDIA DRIVE Thor SoC is the successor to DRIVE Orin, delivering 2,000 teraflops of performance and designed to centralized automated driving and AI cockpit functions on a single platform. DRIVE Thor is targeting automakers’ 2025 models.

Baidu Apollo showcased its level-2 driver-assisted product Apollo City Driving Max intelligent driving computing unit, featuring a Baidu-developed intelligent-driving domain controller and powered by two NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoCs to process camera and lidar sensor data for enhanced safety behind the wheel. The company reports the Apollo City Driving Max will be available in volume production to automakers globally in 2023.

Momenta launched Mpilot Pro, its new advanced driver-assistance solution. The solution adopts the energy-efficient DRIVE Orin to meet the computing performance requirements of mainstream mid-range models. In addition, DRIVE Orin’s compatible architecture scales from level 2+ ADAS to level 5 autonomous driving.

The NVIDIA DRIVE ecosystem can be found throughout this year’s Auto Shanghai — showcasing how NVIDIA is leading the charge toward a future of intelligent vehicles that deliver higher levels of safety, convenience and enjoyment on the road.

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.

NVIDIA Omniverse, a pillar of the NVIDIA Studio suite of tools and apps built for creators, helps interconnect 3D artists’ workflows by replacing linear pipelines with live-sync creation.

This week’s In the NVIDIA Studio artists specializing in 3D, Gianluca Squillace and Pasquale Scionti, benefitted from just that — in their individual work and in collaborating to construct the final scene for their project, Cold Inside Diorama.

The artists set out to build a Viking scene that conveyed a cold, glacial mood — uniting Squillace’s character with Scionti’s environment while maintaining their individual styles. Such a workflow, which used to require endless exports and imports, was made simple with Omniverse and Universal Scene Description (USD), the open and extensible ecosystem for describing, composing, simulating and collaborating within 3D worlds.

It Takes Character

Powered by a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, Squillace started with rich reference research to create the character. He took several realistic and stylized images, concepts and photos of characters and weapons to define all the details.

After defining the character, Squillace built a quick blockout in the ZBrush tool, before sculpting all the details to reach the definitive high-poly model. The character’s hairstyle and other aspects underwent several tests in this step of the process before arriving at the final version.

Squillace then moved on to the retopology and UV phase in Autodesk Maya, optimizing models for movements and deformations, which he said allows excellent control of the polygons with quad draw and simple management of the UVs. It also enables mirroring different UV shells and saving space by improving the final quality.

The artists brought the completed high- and low-poly into Adobe Substance 3D Painter for the bake and texturing phase. Squillace had already defined the main colors with polypaint in ZBrush, so he used the materials present in Painter to stylize different metals, leathers and woods and achieve the final textures.

After completing a quick rig and an animation idle in Maya, the animation in video games when the main character remains still, the artist took advantage of the USD file format to instantly pull the animation into NVIDIA Omniverse USD Composer (formerly known as Create) to see the results in real time.

“With the connectors plug-in installed in Substance 3D Painter and Maya, I could edit textures and animation in real time and immediately see the results in Omniverse USD Composer, without exporting extra files or having to close and reopen the software,” Squillace said. “It was really a great improvement in terms of workflow and speed.”

He next felt the benefit of working with USD when seamlessly importing files into Marmoset Toolbag for character-only renders.

Squillace took full advantage of his RTX GPU in nearly every step of production. “I was really impressed by the fast calculation of ray-traced lighting in the Marmoset Toolbag scene, which lets me make a lot of real-time renders and videos with an outstanding final result,” he said.

A Hostile Environment Built in a Friendly One

Another artist worked in parallel. Scionti built the cold, harsh environment using Omniverse’s collaboration capabilities and USD files. This combination enabled him to integrate his files with Squillace’s — and see edits in real time.

Scionti said he always starts his work by establishing its mood. With the cold, glacial tone set for this piece, he modeled some of the scene elements using Autodesk 3ds Max before importing them into Adobe Substance 3D Painter, where he created unique materials.

For some additional materials, he used Quixel software and completed the composition and design using Quixel Megascans. As with all his work, in this piece Scionti intentionally left room for interpretation, letting the audience imagine their own story.

The scene was then finalized with composition mood and lighting. Accelerated by his GeForce RTX 3090 GPU, Unreal Engine 5.1 and Lumen with hardware ray tracing helped Scionti achieve a higher level of realism with intricate details. Nanite meshes with improved virtualized geometry were useful to generate high-polygon models for close-up details. In the lighting phase, the artist used sun and sky with volumetric fog and high dynamic range.

“My GPU gives me so many realistic details in real time,” Scionti said.

The duo then brought Squillace’s work into Scionti’s Unreal Engine scene to integrate the character into the snowy environment. With their scene complete, the artists enjoyed the final render and reflected on its creation.

“NVIDIA Omniverse was the center of experimentation for this project — it allowed me to work with different software at the same time, increasing the production speed of the final character,” Squillace said. “I think the system provides enormous potential, especially if combined with the standard production workflow of a 3D asset.”

Scionti added that Omniverse is “a great software to collaborate with other people around the globe and interact in real time on the same project.”

Follow NVIDIA Studio on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Access tutorials on the Studio YouTube channel and get updates directly in your inbox by subscribing to the Studio newsletter. Get started with Omniverse and learn more on Instagram, Medium, Twitter and YouTube for additional resources and inspiration. Check out the Omniverse forums, and join our Discord server and Twitch channel to chat with the community.

At the Hannover Messe trade show this week, Siemens unveiled a digital model of next-generation FREYR Battery factories that was developed using NVIDIA technology.

The model was created in part to highlight a strategic partnership announced Monday by Siemens and FREYR, with Siemens becoming FREYR’s preferred supplier in automation technology, enabling the Norway-based group to scale up production and maximize plant efficiency.

Built by Siemens, the demo uses the NVIDIA Omniverse development platform to provide an immersive experience of the FREYR factories and follows the joint vision for an industrial metaverse unveiled last year by Siemens and NVIDIA.

Displayed as part of an industrial metaverse experience in the Siemens booth during Hannover Messe 2023, the world’s largest industrial technology trade show, the demos incorporate operational data from the FREYR factory in Norway.

Highlighting the integration between Siemens Xcelerator and NVIDIA Omniverse, the demo features 3D representations of the infrastructure, plant, machinery, equipment, human ergonomics, safety information, robots, automated guided vehicles, and detailed product and production simulations.

These technologies will help FREYR to meet surging demand for high-density, cost-effective battery cells for stationary energy storage, electric mobility and marine applications.

Amid growing worldwide sustainability initiatives and the rapid electrification of transportation, the battery industry is projected to grow to $400 billion by 2030. Battery cell manufacturing is a critical step in the battery value chain, with manufacturers investing billions of dollars in new battery-cell plants to meet this new demand.

In the demo, Siemens shows a vision for how teams can harness comprehensive digital twins in the industrial metaverse using models of existing and future plants.

Within moments, FREYR can set up a meeting with potential investors or customers to take place within the digital FREYR plant in Norway and explore the facility’s exterior before entering to view current production processes at work.

The striking interior flythrough instantly conveys the facility’s size and scale. The real-time, physically accurate simulation shows how machines and robots inside the factory move, and can even simulate complex processes. Sensors capturing machine information allow real-time performance visualization and ergonomic assessments.

The demo also demonstrates how the model can be used for production planning, highlighting how a plant manager can rapidly evaluate plant performance using a custom Siemens application, which provides at a glance an overview of the facility’s operation.

From there, the manager initiates a Microsoft Teams meeting with colleagues at a manufacturing “cell” — which places key people, machines and supplies in one strategic location — inside the virtual factory.

The team can then examine a robotic arm experiencing low-cycle-time issues, access machine performance data, identify specific cycle-time problems and view a live video stream with accompanying sensor data on machine performance.

This showcase at Hannover Messe is only the beginning, as more industries embrace and implement the industrial metaverse.

Learn more about NVIDIA Omniverse and our partnership with Siemens.