Enlarge (credit: Nvidia)
Back in 2013, Nvidia introduced a new technology called G-Sync to eliminate screen tearing and stuttering effects and reduce input lag when playing PC games. The company accomplished this by tying your display's refresh rate to the actual frame rate of the game you were playing, and similar variable refresh-rate (VRR) technology has become a mainstay even in budget monitors and TVs today.
The issue for Nvidia is that G-Sync isn't what has been drivin
Back in 2013, Nvidia introduced a new technology called G-Sync to eliminate screen tearing and stuttering effects and reduce input lag when playing PC games. The company accomplished this by tying your display's refresh rate to the actual frame rate of the game you were playing, and similar variable refresh-rate (VRR) technology has become a mainstay even in budget monitors and TVs today.
The issue for Nvidia is that G-Sync isn't what has been driving most of that adoption. G-Sync has always required extra dedicated hardware inside of displays, increasing the costs for both users and monitor manufacturers. The VRR technology in most low-end to mid-range screens these days is usually some version of the royalty-free AMD FreeSync or the similar VESA Adaptive-Sync standard, both of which provide G-Sync's most important features without requiring extra hardware. Nvidia more or less acknowledged that the free-to-use, cheap-to-implement VRR technologies had won in 2019 when it announced its "G-Sync Compatible" certification tier for FreeSync monitors. The list of G-Sync Compatible screens now vastly outnumbers the list of G-Sync and G-Sync Ultimate screens.
Today, Nvidia is announcing a change that's meant to keep G-Sync alive as its own separate technology while eliminating the requirement for expensive additional hardware. Nvidia says it's partnering with chipmaker MediaTek to build G-Sync capabilities directly into scaler chips that MediaTek is creating for upcoming monitors. G-Sync modules ordinarily replace these scaler chips, but they're entirely separate boards with expensive FPGA chips and dedicated RAM.
With the 2018 launch of RTX technologies and the first consumer GPU built for AI — GeForce RTX — NVIDIA accelerated the shift to AI computing. Since then, AI on RTX PCs and workstations has grown into a thriving ecosystem with more than 100 million users and 500 AI applications.
Generative AI is now ushering in a new wave of capabilities from PC to cloud. And NVIDIA’s rich history and expertise in AI is helping ensure all users have the performance to handle a wide range of AI features.
Users at
With the 2018 launch of RTX technologies and the first consumer GPU built for AI — GeForce RTX — NVIDIA accelerated the shift to AI computing. Since then, AI on RTX PCs and workstations has grown into a thriving ecosystem with more than 100 million users and 500 AI applications.
Generative AI is now ushering in a new wave of capabilities from PC to cloud. And NVIDIA’s rich history and expertise in AI is helping ensure all users have the performance to handle a wide range of AI features.
Users at home and in the office are already taking advantage of AI on RTX with productivity- and entertainment-enhancing software. Gamers feel the benefits of AI on GeForce RTX GPUs with higher frame rates at stunning resolutions in their favorite titles. Creators can focus on creativity, instead of watching spinning wheels or repeating mundane tasks. And developers can streamline workflows using generative AI for prototyping and to automate debugging.
The field of AI is moving fast. As research advances, AI will tackle more complex tasks. And the demanding performance needs will be handled by RTX.
What Is AI?
In its most fundamental form, artificial intelligence is a smarter type of computing. It’s the capability of a computer program or a machine to think, learn and take actions without being explicitly coded with commands to do so, or a user having to control each command.
AI can be thought of as the ability for a device to perform tasks autonomously, by ingesting and analyzing enormous amounts of data, then recognizing patterns in that data — often referred to as being “trained.”
AI development is always oriented around developing systems that perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence, and often significant levels of input, to complete — only at speeds beyond any individual’s or group’s capabilities. For this reason, AI is broadly seen as both disruptive and highly transformational.
A key benefit of AI systems is the ability to learn from experiences or patterns inside data, adjusting conclusions on their own when fed new inputs or data. This self-learning allows AI systems to accomplish a stunning variety of tasks, including image recognition, speech recognition, language translation, medical diagnostics, car navigation, image and video enhancement, and hundreds of other use cases.
The next step in the evolution of AI is content generation — referred to as generative AI. It enables users to quickly create new content, and iterate on it, based on a variety of inputs, which can include text, images, sounds, animation, 3D models or other types of data. It then generates new content in the same or a new form.
Popular language applications, like the cloud-based ChatGPT, allow users to generate long-form copy based on a short text request. Image generators like Stable Diffusion turn descriptive text inputs into the desired image. New applications are turning text into video and 2D images into 3D renderings.
GeForce RTX AI PCs and NVIDIA RTX Workstations
AI PCs are computers with dedicated hardware designed to help AI run faster. It’s the difference between sitting around waiting for a 3D image to load, and seeing it update instantaneously with an AI denoiser.
On RTX GPUs, these specialized AI accelerators are called Tensor Cores. And they dramatically speed up AI performance across the most demanding applications for work and play.
One way that AI performance is measured is in teraops, or trillion operations per second (TOPS). Similar to an engine’s horsepower rating, TOPS can give users a sense of a PC’s AI performance with a single metric. The current generation of GeForce RTX GPUs offers performance options that range from roughly 200 AI TOPS all the way to over 1,300 TOPS, with many options across laptops and desktops in between. Professionals get even higher AI performance with the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU.
To put this in perspective, the current generation of AI PCs without GPUs range from 10 to 45 TOPS.
More and more types of AI applications will require the benefits of having a PC capable of performing certain AI tasks locally — meaning on the device rather than running in the cloud. Benefits of running on an AI PC include that computing is always available, even without an internet connection; systems offer low latency for high responsiveness; and increased privacy so that users don’t have to upload sensitive materials to an online database before it becomes usable by an AI.
AI for Everyone
RTX GPUs bring more than just performance. They introduce capabilities only possible with RTX technology. Many of these AI features are accessible — and impactful — to millions, regardless of the individual’s skill level.
From AI upscaling to improved video conferencing to intelligent, personalizable chatbots, there are tools to benefit all types of users.
RTX Video uses AI to upscale streaming video and display it in HDR. Bringing lower-resolution video in standard dynamic range to vivid, up to 4K high-resolution high dynamic range. RTX users can enjoy the feature with one-time, one-click enablement on nearly any video streamed in a Chrome or Edge browser.
NVIDIA Broadcast, a free app for RTX users with a straightforward user interface, has a host of AI features that improve video conferencing and livestreaming. It removes unwanted background sounds like clicky keyboards, vacuum cleaners and screaming children with Noise and Echo Removal. It can replace or blur backgrounds with better edge detection using Virtual Background. It smooths low-quality camera images with Video Noise Removal. And it can stay centered on the screen with eyes looking at the camera no matter where the user moves, using Auto Frame and Eye Contact.
The tech demo, originally released in January, will get an update with Google’s Gemma soon.
Users can easily connect local files on a PC to a supported large language model simply by dropping files into a single folder and pointing the demo to the location. It enables queries for quick, contextually relevant answers.
Since Chat with RTX runs locally on Windows with GeForce RTX PCs and NVIDIA RTX workstations, results are fast — and the user’s data stays on the device. Rather than relying on cloud-based services, Chat with RTX lets users process sensitive data on a local PC without the need to share it with a third party or have an internet connection.
AI for Gamers
Over the past six years, game performance has seen the greatest leaps with AI acceleration. Gamers have been turning NVIDIA DLSS on since 2019, boosting frame rates and improving image quality. It’s a technique that uses AI to generate pixels in video games automatically. With ongoing improvements, it now increases frame rates by up to 4x.
And with the introduction of Ray Reconstruction in the latest version, DLSS 3.5, visual quality is further enhanced in some of the world’s top titles, setting a new standard for visually richer and more immersive gameplay.
There are now over 500 games and applications that have revolutionized the ways people play and create with ray tracing, DLSS and AI-powered technologies.
Beyond frames, AI is set to improve the way gamers interact with characters and remaster classic games.
NVIDIA ACE microservices — including generative AI-powered speech and animation models — are enabling developers to add intelligent, dynamic digital avatars to games. Demonstrated at CES, ACE won multiple awards for its ability to bring game characters to life as a glimpse into the future of PC gaming.
NVIDIA RTX Remix, a platform for modders to create stunning RTX remasters of classic games, delivers generative AI tools that can transform basic textures from classic games into modern, 4K-resolution, physically based rendering materials. Several projects have already been released or are in the works, including Half-Life 2 RTX and Portal with RTX.
AI for Creators
AI is unlocking creative potential by reducing or automating tedious tasks, freeing up time for pure creativity. These features run fastest or solely on PCs with NVIDIA RTX or GeForce RTX GPUs.
Adobe Premiere Pro’s Enhance Speech tool is accelerated by RTX, using AI to remove unwanted noise and improve the quality of dialogue clips so they sound professionally recorded. It’s up to 4.5x faster on RTX vs. Mac. Another Premiere feature, Auto Reframe, uses GPU acceleration to identify and track the most relevant elements in a video and intelligently reframes video content for different aspect ratios.
Another time-saving AI feature for video editors is DaVinci Resolve’s Magic Mask. Previously, if editors needed to adjust the color/brightness of a subject in one shot or remove an unwanted object, they’d have to use a combination of rotoscoping techniques or basic power windows and masks to isolate the subject from the background.
Magic Mask has completely changed that workflow. With it, simply draw a line over the subject and the AI will process for a moment before revealing the selection. And GeForce RTX laptops can run the feature 2.5x faster than the fastest non-RTX laptops.
This is just a sample of the ways that AI is increasing the speed of creativity. There are now more than 125 AI applications accelerated by RTX.
AI for Developers
AI is enhancing the way developers build software applications through scalable environments, hardware and software optimizations, and new APIs.
NVIDIA AI Workbench helps developers quickly create, test and customize pretrained generative AI models and LLMs using PC-class performance and memory footprint. It’s a unified, easy-to-use toolkit that can scale from running locally on RTX PCs to virtually any data center, public cloud or NVIDIA DGX Cloud.
After building AI models for PC use cases, developers can optimize them using NVIDIA TensorRT — the software that helps developers take full advantage of the Tensor Cores in RTX GPUs.
TensorRT acceleration is now available in text-based applications with TensorRT-LLM for Windows. The open-source library increases LLM performance and includes pre-optimized checkpoints for popular models, including Google’s Gemma, Meta Llama 2, Mistral and Microsoft Phi-2.
Developers also have access to a TensorRT-LLM wrapper for the OpenAI Chat API. With just one line of code change, continue.dev — an open-source autopilot for VS Code and JetBrains that taps into an LLM — can use TensorRT-LLM locally on an RTX PC for fast, local LLM inference using this popular tool.
Every week, we’ll demystify AI by making the technology more accessible, and we’ll showcase new hardware, software, tools and accelerations for RTX AI PC users.
The iPhone moment of AI is here, and it’s just the beginning. Welcome to AI Decoded.
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The AI revolution returned to where it started this week, putting powerful new tools into the hands of gamers and content creators.
Generative AI models that will bring lifelike characters to games and applications and new GPUs for gamers and creators were among the highlights of a news-packed address Monday ahead of this week’s CES trade show in Las Vegas.
“Today, NVIDIA is at the center of the latest technology transformation: generative AI,” said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president for GeForce
The AI revolution returned to where it started this week, putting powerful new tools into the hands of gamers and content creators.
Generative AI models that will bring lifelike characters to games and applications and new GPUs for gamers and creators were among the highlights of a news-packed address Monday ahead of this week’s CES trade show in Las Vegas.
“Today, NVIDIA is at the center of the latest technology transformation: generative AI,” said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president for GeForce at NVIDIA, who was joined by leaders across the company to introduce products and partnerships across gaming, content creation, and robotics.
A Launching Pad for Generative AI
As AI shifts into the mainstream, Fisher said NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs, with more than 100 million units shipped, are pivotal in the burgeoning field of generative AI, exemplified by innovations like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
And with our new Chat with RTX playground, releasing later this month, enthusiasts can connect an RTX-accelerated LLM to their own data, from locally stored documents to YouTube videos, using retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, a technique for enhancing the accuracy and reliability of generative AI models.
Fisher also introduced TensorRT acceleration for Stable Diffusion XL and SDXL Turbo in the popular Automatic1111 text-to-image app, providing up to a 60% boost in performance.
NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine Microservices Debut With Generative AI Models for Digital Avatars
NVIDIA ACE is a technology platform that brings digital avatars to life with generative AI. ACE AI models are designed to run in the cloud or locally on the PC.
In an ACE demo featuring Convai’s new technologies, NVIDIA’s Senior Product Manager Seth Schneider showed how it works.
First, a player’s voice input is passed to NVIDIA’s automatic speech recognition model, which translates speech to text. Then, the text is put into an LLM to generate the character’s response.
After that, the text response is vocalized using a text-to-speech model, which is passed to an animation model to create a realistic lip sync. Finally, the dynamic character is rendered into the game scene.
At CES, NVIDIA is announcing ACE Production Microservices for NVIDIA Audio2Face and NVIDIA Riva Automatic Speech Recognition. Available now, each model can be incorporated by developers individually into their pipelines.
NVIDIA is also announcing game and interactive avatar developers are pioneering ways ACE and generative AI technologies can be used to transform interactions between players and non-playable characters in games and applications. Developers embracing ACE include Convai, Charisma.AI, Inworld, miHoYo, NetEase Games, Ourpalm, Tencent, Ubisoft and UneeQ.
Getty Images Releases Generative AI by iStock and AI Image Generation Tools Powered by NVIDIA Picasso
Generative AI empowers designers and marketers to create concept imagery, social media content and more. Today, iStock by Getty Images is releasing a genAI service built on NVIDIA Picasso, an AI foundry for visual design, Fisher announced.
The iStock service allows anyone to create 4K imagery from text using an AI model trained on Getty Images’ extensive catalog of licensed, commercially safe creative content. New editing application programming interfaces that give customers powerful control over their generated images are also coming soon.
The generative AI service is available today at istock.com, with advanced editing features releasing via API.
NVIDIA Introduces GeForce RTX 40 SUPER Series
Fisher announced a new series of GeForce RTX 40 SUPER GPUs with more gaming and generative AI performance.
Fisher said that the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER can power fully ray-traced games at 4K. It’s 1.4x faster than the RTX 3080 Ti without frame gen in the most graphically intensive games. With 836 AI TOPS, NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation delivers an extra performance boost, making the RTX 4080 SUPER twice as fast as an RTX 3080 Ti.
Creators can generate video with Stable Video Diffusion 1.5x faster and images with Stable Diffusion XL 1.7x faster. The RTX 4080 SUPER features more cores and faster memory, giving it a performance edge at a great new price of $999. It will be available starting Jan. 31.
Next up is the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. NVIDIA has added more cores and increased the frame buffer to 16GB and the memory bus to 256 bits. It’s 1.6x faster than a 3070 Ti and 2.5x faster with DLSS 3, Fisher said. The RTX 4070 Ti SUPER will be available starting Jan. 24 for $799.
Fisher also introduced the RTX 4070 SUPER. NVIDIA has added 20% more cores, making it faster than the RTX 3090 while using a fraction of the power. And with DLSS 3, it’s 1.5x faster in the most demanding games. It will be available for $599 starting Jan. 17.
NVIDIA RTX Remix Open Beta Launches This Month
There are over 10 billion game mods downloaded each year. With RTX Remix, modders can remaster classic games with full ray tracing, DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex and generative AI texture tools that transform low-resolution textures into 4K, physically accurate materials. The RTX Remix app will be released in open beta on Jan. 22.
Check out this new Half-Life 2 RTX gameplay trailer:
Twitch and NVIDIA to Release Multi-Encode Livestreaming
Twitch is one of the most popular platforms for content creators, with over 7 million streamers going live each month to 35 million daily viewers. Fisher explained that these viewers are on all kinds of devices and internet services.
Yet many Twitch streamers are limited to broadcasting at a single resolution and quality level. As a result, they must broadcast at lower quality to reach more viewers.
To address this, Twitch, OBS and NVIDIA announced Enhanced Broadcasting, supported by all RTX GPUs. This new feature allows streamers to transmit up to three concurrent streams to Twitch at different resolutions and quality so each viewer gets the optimal experience.
Beta signups start today and will go live later this month. Twitch will also experiment with 4K and AV1 on the GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs to deliver even better quality and higher resolution streaming.
‘New Wave’ of AI-Ready RTX Laptops
RTX is the fastest-growing laptop platform, having grown 5x in the last four years. Over 50 million devices are enjoyed by gamers and creators across the globe.
More’s coming. Fisher announced “a new wave” of RTX laptops launching from every major manufacturer. “Thanks to powerful RT and Tensor Cores, every RTX laptop is AI-ready for the best gaming and AI experiences,” Fisher said.
With an installed base of 100 million GPUs and 500 RTX games and apps, GeForce RTX is the world’s largest platform for gamers, creators and, now, generative AI.
Activision and Blizzard Games Embrace RTX
More than 500 games and apps now take advantage of NVIDIA RTX technology, NVIDIA’s Senior Consumer Marketing Manager Kristina Bartz said, including Alan Wake 2, which won three awards at this year’s Game Awards.
NVIDIA Consumer Marketing Manager Kristina Bartz spoke about how NVIDIA technologies are being integrated into popular games.
It’s a list that keeps growing with 14 new RTX titles announced at CES.
Horizon Forbidden West, the critically acclaimed sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, will come to PC early this year with the Burning Shores expansion, accelerated by DLSS 3.
Pax Dei is a social sandbox massively multiplayer online game inspired by the legends of the medieval era. Developed by Mainframe Industries with veterans from CCP Games, Blizzard and Remedy Entertainment, Pax Dei will launch in early access on PC with AI-accelerated DLSS 3 this spring.
Last summer, Diablo IV launched with DLSS 3 and immediately became Blizzard’s fastest-selling game. RTX ray tracing will now be coming to Diablo IV in March.
More than 500 games and apps now take advantage of NVIDIA RTX technology, with more coming.
Day Passes and G-SYNC Technology Coming to GeForce NOW
NVIDIA’s partnership with Activision also extends to the cloud with GeForce NOW, Bartz said. In November, NVIDIA welcomed the first Activation and Blizzard game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 are coming soon.
GeForce NOW will get Day Pass membership options starting in February. Priority and Ultimate Day Passes will give gamers a full day of gaming with the fastest access to servers, with all the same benefits as members, including NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 and NVIDIA Reflex for Ultimate Day Pass purchasers.
NVIDIA also announced Cloud G-SYNC technology is coming to GeForce NOW, which varies the display refresh rate to match the frame rate on G-SYNC monitors, giving members the smoothest, tear-free gaming experience from the cloud.
Generative AI Powers Smarter Robots With NVIDIA Isaac
NVIDIA Vice President of Robotics and Edge Computing Deepu Talla addressed the intersection of AI and robotics.
Closing out the special address, NVIDIA Vice President of Robotics and Edge Computing Deepu Talla shared how the infusion of generative AI into robotics is speeding up the ability to bring robots from proof of concept to real-world deployment.
Talla gave a peek into the growing use of generative AI in the NVIDIA robotics ecosystem, where robotics innovators like Boston Dynamics and Collaborative Robots are changing the landscape of human-robot interaction.
Explore generative AI sessions and experiences at NVIDIA GTC, the global conference on AI and accelerated computing, running March 18-21 in San Jose, Calif., and online.
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