NVIDIA says it can make VR worlds sound and feel real

Tonight at NVIDIA’s event in Texas, the company showed off some new tools that should help developers make VR experiences even more realistic. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said its VR Works suite of APIs is getting a “major” upgrade, with the ability to connect haptic controllers to its Physx physics engine for more realistic feedback, and the “world’s first real time physically modeled acoustic simulator.” As he described it, the audio engine works on top of the optics API to help it match what you can see. “

Using VRWorks, we’ve created VR Funhouse – a new standard in audio, haptic, and physics in VR. pic.twitter.com/yE23l6R7qU

— NVIDIA (@nvidia) May 7, 2016

“When you walk into a hallway, it sounds like a hallway. When you walk into a stadium, it sounds like a stadium,” according to Huang. We haven’t tried it out for ourselves yet, but he showed bits of an NVIDIA VR Funhouse demo (above) that puts all the new abilities together, and it looks very interesting. You can watch the live stream of the event right here, and we’ll post any more announcements (GTX 1080) as they happen.

NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 GPU is twice as fast as Titan X, lands May 27

NVIDIA gave us a taste of its new Pascal architecture with the P100 graphics card last month, which is aimed at servers for heavy duty computing. Now, it’s ready to show off how that technology will be adapted for consumers with its new GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. As you’d expect, it’s fast: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that it’s twice as fast as its current performance king , the Titan X, as well as three times as power efficient. Of course, those stats likely only come from certain gaming scenarios, like VR. The 1080 also faster than two GTX 980 cards running together using SLI technology. Like the P100, the 1080 is built with a new 16nm FinFET (a type of 3D transistor) manufacturing process, which makes it more power efficient, on top of just being faster.

The GTX 1080 is the “largest GPU endeavor, largest chip endeavor, largest processor endeavor, in the history of humanity,” said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. He added that the R&D budget for the new card was “several billion dollars” over the span of more than two years. “I’m pretty sure you can go to Mars [for that],” he said.

NVIDIA is basically positioning the GTX 1080 as the gamer’s dream card. Prior to its unveiling, Huang showed off several new titles like The Division and Rise of the Tomb Raider running at max settings in a high resolution over 60 frames per second. He later revealed that all of the games were running on the new card, to the delight of the entire crowd.

The Tomb Raider demo made it clear just how fast the 1080 is. When Huang pulled up the GPU’s stats, it was running at 2.1 GHz and the memory was running at 5.5 GHz. That’s faster than any GPU today, except for one of its last generation cards with liquid nitrogen cooling. Most remarkable? The 1080 was just just relying on air cooling. (Of course it was also running at 67 celsius, which is far hotter than I’d like my video card to run.)

Among other new technology, the 1080 offers “simultaneous multi-projection,” which helps games look less distorted for triple monitor setups or ultra-wide 21×9 screens. It also makes the card more efficient at VR rendering (which is far less forgiving about low frame-rates).

The GTX 1080 will be available for $599 on May 27, and you can also snag a special NVIDIA-designed “founders edition” for $699 (which looks like it includes a stylish new cooler). Almost as an afterthought, NVIDIA also revealed that the GTX 1070 is coming on June 10 for $379 (the founders edition will run you $449).

NVIDIA didn’t have too many technical details to share about either card, but it gave out a few stats: The 1080 pumps out 9 teraflops and packs in 8GB of RAM. The 1070, which is also faster than the Titan X, spits out 6.5 teraflops and also has 8GB of RAM. For the smart gamer, it sounds like the GTX 1070 will be a pretty good deal (just like the 970 was).

But of course, NVIDIA won’t be alone with new hardware this year. AMD is expected to debut new cards with its Polaris technology this summer, which will focus on power efficiency as well. It sounds like Polaris is better suited for gaming laptops at the moment, but it could also be a way for AMD to deliver some powerful cards that you can actually afford (think under $300).

(Photo credit: GTX 1080;NVIDIA)

Watch NVIDIA announce some big news tonight at 9pm ET

If you’ve been eagerly awaiting NVIDIA’s next batch of high-end video cards, you might want to tune into its Twitch channel at 9 pm Eastern. The company will be livestreaming an elaborate media event it’s holding in Austin, Texas. While they’re not saying much about what’s being announced (only that there will be “lots” of news), recent rumors suggest that it’ll be the first public unveiling of its new cards, the GTX 1080 and 1070. They’re said to be based on NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture, which debuted on its P100 card last month.

The event also follows a mysterious marketing campaign for something called the “Order of 10,” wherein unmarked packages were sent to several technology media folks (including me) leading them to a website filled with puzzles. It didn’t take long to figure out that the whole thing was an NVIDIA joint, and that it was a not-so-thinly veiled reference of its upcoming 10-series video cards. NVIDIA is also hosting a major media event in Austin this week, so it makes sense for the company to try to make a big news splash.

I’ll be covering the event live from Austin (keep an eye on my Twitter account for updates), and you can also view the whole thing on Twitch below.

Source: Twitch (NVIDIA)