NVIDIA OptiX Engine Joins Groundbreaking Suite of Application Acceleration Engines


SIGGRAPH 2009, NEW ORLEANS-Aug. 4, 2009- NVIDIA, the leader in GPU computing, today introduced the NVIDIA®® OptiX™ ray tracing engine, part of a suite of application acceleration engines for software developers. NVIDIA acceleration engines make it easy to incorporate valuable, high-performance capabilities into applications, while simultaneously reducing development time.

NVIDIA application acceleration engines unveiled at Siggraph 2009 include:

* NVIDIA®® OptiX™ engine for real-time ray tracing
* NVIDIA®® SceniX™ engine for managing 3D data and scenes
* NVIDIA®® CompleX™ engine for scaling performance across multiple GPUs
* NVIDIA®® PhysX®® 64-bit engine for real-time, hyper-realistic physical and environmental effects

As the world's first interactive ray tracing engine to leverage the GPU, the NVIDIA OptiX engine is a programmable ray tracing pipeline enabling software developers to easily bring new levels of realism to their applications using traditional C programming. By tapping into the massively parallel computing power of NVIDIA®® Quadro®® processors, the OptiX engine greatly accelerates the ray tracing used across a spectrum of disciplines, including: photorealistic rendering, automotive styling, acoustical design, optics simulation, volume calculations and radiation research. Application developers are utilizing the OptiX engine to redefine what's possible for designers, engineers and researchers.

"In one year, NVIDIA has gone from proving interactive GPU ray tracing is possible, to making it available to all," said Jon Peddie, founder and president of Jon Peddie Research. "Intricate design tasks, such as examining the play of reflection and refraction across surfaces and within glass, can now be examined in real-time by utilizing the OptiX acceleration engine running on Quadro processors. This is a phenomenal milestone for developers and designers alike."

"Thousands of applications are being created today that harness the phenomenal power of GPUs, a clear sign that GPU computing has reached a tipping point. The world of computing is shifting from host-bound processing on CPUs to balanced co-processing on GPUs and CPUs," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. "NVIDIA application acceleration engines arm developers with the tools they need to further revolutionize both real-time graphics and advanced data analysis."

The NVIDIA SceniX scene management engine provides the interactive core for demanding real-time, professional 3D graphics applications. Whether used in leading products such as RTT DeltaGen, Autodesk Showcase and Anark Media Studio, or in scores of in-house tools used for advanced visualization, simulation, broadcast graphics, medical imagery, and energy exploration, developers look to the SceniX engine for the interactive framework to manage 3D data and convey results in real-time at high fidelity.

The NVIDIA CompleX scene scaling engine enables applications to maintain interactivity when working with extremely large and complex models. By automatically utilizing the combined memory and processing power of multiple GPUs within Quadro Plex visual computing systems, applications that utilize the CompleX engine enable users to explore and visualize all their data in full context, instead of piecemeal.

The NVIDIA PhysX 64-bit physics engine brings hyper-realistic, real-time physics to professional applications. Already a proven and popular solution within the computer games industry, the 64-bit version of PhysX will permit more accurate calculations on far larger data sets for engineers, designers and animators wanting to interrogate their data, model physical properties and breathe life into their work.

"The SceniX acceleration engine has been a critical part of our success in the automotive styling industry," said Christian Matzen, COO, ICIDO, a global leader in virtual engineering solutions. "Based on the ease of integrating OptiX within SceniX, and its stunning visual results, we plan on delivering interactive ray tracing to our design customers later this year."

"The CompleX engine is essential for our application to accommodate the massive data sets of customers like StatoilHydro," said Thorolf Horn Tonjum, Director of R&D Stormfjord, a Norwegian development company serving the visualization needs of the energy industry. "By using the SceniX engine to power our scene graph, we easily incorporated the CompleX engine to keep navigation smooth for 10 GB scenes, and the PhysX 64-bit engine to study the challenges off shore oil rigs must face. These engines from NVIDIA accelerate not only our product, but also our time to market."

NVIDIA will be showcasing the new suite of application acceleration engines this week at the SIGGRAPH 2009 conference and exhibition in New Orleans; booth #2101. For more information on NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH, visit: http://www.nvidia.com/engines.


Pricing and Availability
NVIDIA application acceleration engines are available from the NVIDIA Developer Zone at no charge. The SceniX and CompleX engines can be downloaded at http://developer.nvidia.com/page/home.html. The OptiX and PhysX 64-bit engines will be available in fall of 2009. Interactive ray tracing examples using the pre-release OptiX engine can be downloaded at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/optix-examples.html and run on NVIDIA Quadro FX processors.


About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce®® graphics products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro®® graphics products and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ computing solutions products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas. For more information, visit www.nvidia.com.

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Certain statements in this media alert including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, features, impact, and capabilities of NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and NVIDIA application acceleration engines, including the NVIDIA OptiX engine, the NVIDIA SceniX engine, the NVIDIA CompleX engine and the NVIDIA PhysX engine; are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended April 26, 2009. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

©© 2009 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, OptiX , SceniX, CompleX, PhysX, Quadro, GeForce, and Tesla are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

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