NVIDIA GTC 22 — Announcements and Omniverse Advances

GTC SPRING 2022 STARTED WITH A BIG BANG keynote from CEO Jensen Huang who started GTC with many announcements to Omniverse and to NVIDIA hardware.

Omniverse is expanding with visualization contributing to the growth with 3D collaboration with artists and AI assistants for photo-real virtual worlds, plus the hybrid work environments for both home and work, and Omniverse & AI simulating virtual worlds enabling the creation of digital twins and the growing ecosystem of creatives, designers and engineers, digital assistants, avatars, and video conferencing.

Omniverse Updates

Virtual worlds are part of the evolution of AI. Omniverse, from creation to the operation of virtual worlds, uses 3D assets created by 3D artists and AI assistants to operate digital twins to connect robots. VP Richard Kerris is one of the driving forces behind Omniverse and creating partnerships that will help Omniverse grow exponentially.

Omniverse: Major updates include:

• Omniverse Kit 103
• Create 2022.1
• View 2022.1
• Nucleus
• Code
• Replicator
• Showroom
• Omniverse XR App

New hardware to support Omniverse was also announced at the GTC keynote.

NVIDIA RTX A5500

NVIDIA announced the RTX A5500 Desktop GPU which is a more powerful cousin to the A5000. The new GPU is available now. The specs include:

• 24 GB GDDR6 w/ ECC graphics memory
• 4x DP 1.4 Display Outputs
• Support for up to 2 8K displays
• NVIDIA NVLink
• Quadro Sync II
• PCIe-Gen4
• NVIDIA Virtual Workstation (vWS)

The NVIDIA RTX A5500 is built for demanding multi-application workflows and will be available in new workstation computers, such as those announced last week by BOXX Technologies in the United States. (see: Architosh, “New BOXX Workstations To Feature New NVIDIA RTX GPUs,” 25 Mar 2022).

NVIDIA’s newest RTX A5500 is optimized for multi-app workflows. It features up to 24 GB of DDR6 memory.

“My team can handle larger CAD and CAE datasets and critically, we can interact with and iterate these larger datasets simultaneously by making use of the extra GPU memory and computing capabilities of the NVIDIA RTX A5500,” said Brian Rotty Senior Engineer, M4 Aerospace Engineering.

NVIDIA announced NVIDIA RTX Laptop GPU’s including NVIDIA RTX A5500, A4500, A3000 12 GB, A2000 8GB, and NVIDIA RTX A1000. NVIDIA’s RTX technology is now available across all segments. These GPUs are AI optimized with 4th generation NVIDIA Max-Q Technology, with up to two times faster than the previous generation, with access to NVIDIA Omniverse, Cloud XR, NGC, and more. Availability coming in spring 2022. The company’s flagship model is now the NVIDIA RTX A5500 with 16GB of memory and has double the rendering performance of the previous RTX 5000.

NVIDIA announced NVIDIA OVX, a data central scale Omniverse computing system for Industrial Digital Twins. OVX is the first Omniverse computing system with 8 NVIDIA A40 GPUs, 3 NVIDIA Connect X-6 Dx NICs, 2 Intel Xeon Platinum 8362, 16 TB NVMe, NVIDIA certified.

NVIDIA also announced new RTX GPUs for mobile laptops, including thinner chassis models with powerful workstation graphics capabilities.

These new workstation-level laptop GPUs should be appearing in available systems shortly, such as the BOXX Technologies systems we wrote about last week. (see: Architosh, “New BOXX Workstations To Feature New NVIDIA RTX GPUs,” 25 March 2022)

The Omniverse

The Omniverse Ecosystem expanse is now ten times larger in all aspects including digital twins and robotics with a key announcement from Bentley Systems of LumenRT powered by iTwin for Omniverse. Bentley LumenRT provides simple visualization workflows by linking directly to a single infrastructure digital twin powered by iTwin and quickly creates 4D visualizations of assemblies or individual parts of the underlying digital twin model with AI-enhanced lighting and environmental effects.

LumenRT powered by iTwins is available now in Omniverse. Other companies available in Omniverse include ESRI, Siemens Energy, Trimble, Graphisoft, Autodesk, Maxon, Rhinoceros. SideFX and Adobe, and many more.

At GTC22 NVIDIA announced the further expansion of the Omniverse Ecosystem. Key AEC companies include Autodesk, Bentley, Graphisoft, Maxon, Esri, Trimble, and McNeel’s Rhino.

The value of Omniverse Digital Twins allows factory planners to work inside the digital twin of the real plants to design production flow and work out the bugs before implementing it in the real world. Software engineers can test a “software build” on the digital twin of a self-driving car to see how it performs before releasing it into the fleet.

Isaac for AMR announced it is now included in Omniverse with Isaac GEMs, Isaac Sim, Replicator, CuOpt, DeepMap, and Metropolis.

Omniverse Avatar is an intelligent avatar useful for live customer support, web customer support, video conferencing telepresence, robots, and virtual worlds. GTC keynote demonstrated Toy Jensen responding to questions with real Jensen. Imagine an intelligent avatar helping you with a building design in 3D or helping you in your car with directions.

Key industrial applications for NVIDIA Omniverse include the following: Product design, factories, cities (including building and infrastructure design), and earth sciences.

New Omniverse connections recently released include Adobe Substance 3D Designer, Substance Materials, PTC Creo, Unreal Engine, and new USD support for Maxon 4D. Omniverse includes 26 new CAD USD Converters (including LumenRT by Bentley for NVIDIA Omniverse powered by iTwin by Bentley Systems), and Asset Libraries located in the Asset Browser like actor core, Sketchfab, and Turbosquid and the new Omniverse Ready Assets in twinbru by A23D.

Omniverse Enterprise is now on Launchpad allowing companies to try Omniverse without a huge investment in hardware.

Omniverse Cloud—Mac Support

Omniverse Cloud is an exciting announcement that provides one-click design collaboration, uniting designers in shared scenes no matter what their hardware is. Mac Users can use Omniverse Cloud. Omniverse Cloud is OS neutral and hardware neutral.

The services available inside the Omniverse Cloud include Nucleus Cloud, a simple one-click-to-collaborate sharing tool that gives artists access to edit large 3D scenes from anywhere from any device. Omniverse Create is an app for technical designers, artists, and creatives to interactively build 3D assets in worlds in real-time while the View app for non-technical users allows clients to view Omniverse scenes streaming full simulation and rendering capabilities using the GeForce NOW platform powered by NVIDIA RTX GPU’s in the cloud. Mac users have access to GeForce NOW.

Jensen Huang is CEO of NVIDIA and led the GTC22 keynote address.

The full Omniverse Cloud collection of services is under development. Nucleus Cloud for one-click simple sharing is accepting applications for early access.

In the keynote, Jenson Huang showed off a demo of human design architects and one specialist Omniverse Avatar collaborating in real-time virtually in the Omniverse Cloud making changes to an architectural project. The team spoke to each other using a standard web conference tool while connected to a scene hosted in Nucleus and two of the clients streamed Omniverse View from GeForce NOW to their laptops and tablet.

“At KPF, a global leader in architectural design, we value the ability of our designers to collaborate as seamlessly as possible by making cloud-first technologies available to them when they need it,” said Cobus Bothma, director of Applied Research at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. “Omniverse Cloud fits perfectly into that practice with the promise of excelling our visual and 3D design collaboration abilities by enabling our teams to work in Omniverse from any device, anywhere.”

Global leaders building in Omniverse include Double Negative in the UK, Lowe’s, Siemens Gamasa, Kroger, and Amazon Robotics.

Other GTC22 Announcements

Other announcements from NVIDIA at the GTC Keynote include:

• Hopper Architecture, the successor to Ampere architecture.
• DGX H100
• Grace ARM-based CPU Superchip
• NVIDIA AI for speech, recommender system, hyperscale inference
• NVLink Custom Silicon Integration
• CUDA-X Libraries — updates
• Jestson AGX Orin
• Drive Orin, DRIVE Hyperion

Final Analysis

Omniverse is an incredible, versatile, multi-connected virtual world but there are questions about Omniverse I still have as a creative and end-user. Will Omniverse have a standard for entering these virtual worlds? If USD is the HTML of the Metaverse, how will we navigate in the virtual world without a URL address? What if I want to create a world in Omniverse, how does that work?

NVIDIA’s new Grace CPU is a custom ARM-based chip and was announced at GTC22. Despite the fact that NVIDIA gave up its acquisition of ARM Limited of the UK, currently owned by SoftBank of Japan, NVIDIA’s Grace CPU marks a clear vector of interest in creating specialized and general ARM-based semiconductors (chips) for a multitude of needs. Architosh will be taking a deep dive into the Grace CPU in another article.

How will software licenses work in Omniverse? How do I navigate from work in Omniverse to playing Fortnite or switch to Minecraft seamlessly? How do I protect proprietary work under non-disclosure in Omniverse and limit who has access to it?  How will these virtual worlds connect safely? How will privacy, copyrights, trademarks, and proprietary information be protected? How will government regulation of data be implemented in Omniverse policies, for example, the “Do not sell my data” law in California?

There are many questions lingering about NVIDIA’s Omniverse that I want to be answered. I will be looking to get some of these answers soon in a part 2 report. 

For more information, please go to http://www.nividia.com.