Awesome Nvidia

Valve’s classic 3D puzzle game Portal has been upgraded to run on Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. The new version has dramatically better ray-traced graphics with new textures, volumetric lighting, fog, smoke, and shadows. Best of all, it’s a free download for all players with Portal in their Steam game library.

Two Minute Papers shows off a computer graphics tech that can create 3D objects from 2D images. Developed by NVIDIA, the University of Toronto, and the Vector Institute, the tech can work with as little as a single reference photo to produce a 3D model, materials, and lighting. The longer the AI runs, the more detail it extracts.

Based on NVIDIA’s GauGAN research project, Canvas is an AI-powered computer graphics app that can produce realistic landscapes from doodles. It can even export parts of the drawing as Photoshop layers. The Beta version of the app is available for Windows 10 users with any RTX graphics card.

With the increased need for video calls these days, those with low-bandwidth connections may experience poor video quality. This tech being developed at NVIDIA dramatically reduces bandwidth needs by sending a fixed image, then using an AI-controlled avatar to track and replicate their facial movements in real-time.

NVIDIA’s powerful Android TV streaming media player not only supports 4K and HDR, but it has a Plex server built in, support for USB peripherals, and can stream games from NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW cloud gaming service. It also features AI-enhanced 4K upscaling for lower-resolution content, and works great as a game emulator.

This amazing software uses deep learning tech to create photorealistic nature scenes by sketching fields of color which represent objects and materials. The results are impressively convincing, complete with reflections. Learn more on Nvidia’s blog.

The crazy expensive HP Omen X Emperium 65 is the first commercially available NVIDIA Big Format Gaming Display. The 65″ monitor has HDR, a 144Hz refresh rate, 4ms response time, and NVIDIA G-Sync. It also has an NVIDIA Shield built-in and comes with a soundbar.

Researchers from NVIDIA demonstrate “A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks,” which is a fancy way of describing artificial intelligence that’s capable of creating human face variants and other objects that never actually existed in real life.

Two Minute Papers presents a look at an amazing bit of image enhancement tech from Nvidia, Aalto University, and MIT which uses machine learning algorithms to identify noise in an image, and dramatically reduce it, recovering details that were thought to be lost.

Turing is the latest tech from GPU experts NVIDIA. It represents a breakthrough in real-time ray tracing – long thought of as the holy grail of CGI due to its ability to replicate reflections. The tech is currently pricey, but we hope to see it in gaming systems someday.

NVIDIA is working on algorithms which can turn regular speed video footage into smooth slow motion, by creating convincing – albeit simulated – frames in between which look extremely close to the real deal. They even slowed down The Slow Mo Guys.

Nvidia’s Big Format Gaming Display is meant to be a 4K TV for gamers. It has a 65″ 4K HDR screen with 120Hz refresh rate and compatibility with G-Sync technology. It also has Nvidia’s Shield streaming built-in. Look for BFGDs from Asus, Acer and HP in 2018.

NVIDIA GeForce Now is an upcoming video game subscription service for Mac (and later for Windows as well). The beta currently supports over 100 games including Battlegrounds and The Witcher 3. You have to own the games on Steam or Battle.net to stream them.

Built to run the latest VR games, the GT83VR Titan SLI is a monster of a gaming laptop, with an 18.4″ display, Intel’s quad-core i7-6920HQ or 6820HK CPU, 512GB to 1TB SSD, Nvidia GTX 1080 Dual SLI GPUs, and a mechanical Steelseries keyboard with RGB backlighting.

To promote its SHIELD gaming system, NVIDIA dropped professional skydiver Jeff Provenzano from a C-130 Hercules transporter while playing games in his living room. They want us to question whether it’s real or fake, but we’re thinking it’s real, given Jeff’s credentials.

Not to be confused with the portable gaming device, the new NVIDIA Shield is a media streaming device for HDTVs. It runs Android TV and is capable of 4K streaming. It can also stream games from a PC with a compatible NVIDIA GPU.

The Grid lets you stream PC games at 720p. The demo is free from 11/18/14 to 6/30/15 but only works on the Shield Tablet and Shield portable, though we wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes available on other devices down the road.

NVIDIA’s first mobile gaming device is available for pre-order and shipping soon. It runs Android Jelly Bean and comes with two games, with more on Google Play. Also streams games from your PC if you have a compatible graphics card.

A handheld Android gaming system which offers a powerful Tegra 4 CPU, can play games on your TV, and stream games from PCs with a compatible graphics card. Price and release date TBD.

Bill Owen’s NVIDIA ION Cube PC is a working work-of-art: the aluminum and acrylic case rotates 360 degrees on a pedestal, with an Atom CPU running on an ION 330 motherboard.

Most likely the fastest single-GPU available, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 285 is about 10% faster than its GTX 280 brethren; it sports 240 stream processors and 1GB of GDDR3 memory.

Nvidia’s CS4-friendly Quadro CX features parallel processing abilities, a 1.5GB frame buffer and 76.8GBps of bandwidth; it can also support dual displays of up to 2560×1600 pixels.

NVIDIA’s Quadro Plex 2200 D2s are targeted towards 3D modelers and scientists, but we dig the design and power under the hood: two Quadro FX 5800 GPUs and 8 GB of memory.