At SIGGRAPH 2017, NVIDIA announced it is working with a number of partners towards the development of external graphics enclosures that can power - and increase mobility - of their professional-geared GPU solutions. Namely, NVIDIA has announced external GPU solutions featuring the powerful Titan Xp and Quadro graphics cards. These external GPU solutions are meant to upgrade the capability of notebooks to support new workflows such as video editing, interactive rendering, VR content creation, AI development and more. Such has been enabled by the latest, high-bandwidth Thunderbolt 3 protocol. For the Quadro eGPU program specifically, Nvidia is working with established manufacturers like Sonnet, Magma, Akiti, and Bizon. The company says there are more to come.

Pricing information has not been revealed for now, but Titan Xp can already be ordered, while the Quadro solutions will see availability in a few weeks.

At SIGGRAPH 2017, NVIDIA introduced the latest version of their AI-based, GPU-enabled ray-tracing OptiX API. The company has been at the forefront of GPU-powered AI endeavors in a number of areas, including facial animation, anti-aliasing, denoising, and light transport. OptiX 5.0 brings a renewed focus on AI-based denoising.

AI training is still a brute-force scenario with finesse applied at the end: basically, NVIDIA took tens of thousands of image pairs of rendered images with one sample per pixel and a companion image of the same render with 4,000 rays per pixel, and used that to train the AI to predict what a denoised image looks like. Basically (and picking up the numbers NVIDIA used for its AI training), this means that in theory, users deploying OptiX 5.0 only need to render one sample per pixel of a given image, instead of the 4,000 rays per pixel that would be needed for its final presentation. Based on its learning, the AI will then be able to fill in the blanks towards finalizing the image, saving the need to render all that extra data. NVIDIA quotes a 157x improvement in render time using a DGX station with Optix 5.0 deployed against the same render on a CPU-based platform (2 x E5-2699 v4 @ 2.20GHz). The Optix 5.0 release also includes provisions for GPU-accelerated motion blur, which should do away with the need to render a frame multiple times and then applying a blur filter through a collage of the different frames. NVIDIA said OptiX 5.0 will be available in November. Check the press release after the break.

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announces from the SIGGRAPH 2017 Conference the immediate public availability of the OpenGL 4.6 specification. OpenGL 4.6 integrates the functionality of numerous ARB and EXT extensions created by Khronos members AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA into core, including the capability to ingest SPIR-V shaders.

SPIR-V is a Khronos-defined standard intermediate language for parallel compute and graphics, which enables content creators to simplify their shader authoring and management pipelines while providing significant source shading language flexibility. OpenGL 4.6 adds support for ingesting SPIR-V shaders to the core specification, guaranteeing that SPIR-V shaders will be widely supported by OpenGL implementations.

In a video presentation posted on the company's official YouTube channel, AMD CEO Lisa Su talked at length about the two new lines of Ryzen desktop processors the company plans to launch later this month. This includes the Ryzen Threadripper HEDT socket TR4 processor at the higher-end of the lineup, and the new Ryzen 3 series socket AM4 processors at the lower-end. AMD is announcing market-availability of two SKUs for each of the two brands. To begin with, AMD will launch two quad-core SKUs in the Ryzen 3 series, beginning with the Ryzen 3 1200 and the Ryzen 3 1300X. Both of these are quad-core parts which lack SMT, leaving them with just four threads. AMD is expected to price them on par with Intel's dual-core "Kaby Lake" Core i3 SKUs.

The Ryzen 3 1200 is clocked at 3.10 GHz, with 3.40 GHz boost, the 1300X is clocked higher, at 3.50 GHz, with 3.70 GHz boost, and XFR (extended frequency range) enabling higher clocks depending on the efficacy of your cooling. Both parts will be available worldwide on July 27. The Ryzen Threadripper HEDT processor lineup is designed to take Intel's Core X series head-on, and will launch with two SKUs, initially. This includes the 12-core Ryzen Threadripper 1920X, and the 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X. Both parts further feature SMT and XFR. The 12-core/24-thread 1920X features clock speeds of 3.50 GHz, with 4.00 GHz boost; while the 16-core/32-thread 1950X ticks at 3.40 GHz, with 4.00 GHz boost. AMD also ran live demos of the Threadripper chips, in which the 12-core 1920X was shown to beat 10-core Intel Core i9-7900X at Cinebench R15 multi-threaded benchmark. The 16-core 1950X was shown to be close to 50% faster than the i9-7900X. The company also confirmed pricing.

In a bid to increase interest and feed the Radeon rebels with hope for their latest high-performance GPU architecture, AMD is beginning a celebration of sorts, a road trip that will span two continents. Now this community tour won't be a non-stop travel and showcase - it's really only going to stop in two places. Still, AMD will be giving those lucky enough to be in attendance a chance to visit their Radeon RX Vega Experience area, where you'll be able to game on the upcoming graphics card and take in the experience, trade-show-style.

The first stop is in the old continent: the Radeon Experience will be setting up shop in the Akvárium Klub in Budapest, Hungary, from 2 to 7 CET. Then, the Radeon team will travel across the pond towards the USA, more specifically, towards PDXLAN in Portland, from July 21st to July 23rd. Finally, the last stop is one we knew about already: SIGGRAPH in the City of Angels. As we knew, they confirm that "Details on the Radeon RX Vega are coming during SIGGRAPH 2017, so you'll want to pay attention to what's happening during this technology summit taking place in the last week of July." So now you know. Are you going to go out of your way to attend?

Disclaimer things first: take this with a grain of salt, since this hasn't seen the amount of confirmations we'd like. 3D Center has come out with a table that supposedly demonstrates the schedule of RX Vega manufacturing and integration work from AMD's add-in-board partners (which includes the likes of Sapphire, XFX, PowerColor, and others.) Remember that manufacturers receive a suggested reference design from AMD as to how to incorporate their GPUs into an actually operable graphics card, with varying degrees of customization according to the particular partner we're talking about. And this process takes time.

According to the leaked schedule, the BOM (Bill Of Materials) for the required parts to properly manufacture an RX Vega graphics card was to be released sometime in June, with engineering validation tests going through the end of June towards the beginning of this month (July.) Actual working samples from AIB partners are scheduled to be available in the middle of this month, with product validation tests (PVT) stretching towards the beginning of August (you'll remember AMD has confirmed they'll be formally announcing the RX Vega graphics card(s) at SIGGRAPH 2017, which stretches through July 30th and August 3rd.)