NVIDIA today introduced the Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card - the company's first midrange professional GPU powered by the NVIDIA Turing architecture and the NVIDIA RTX platform. Unveiled at the annual Autodesk University Conference in Las Vegas, the Quadro RTX 4000 puts real-time ray tracing within reach of a wider range of developers, designers and artists worldwide.

Professionals from the manufacturing, architecture, engineering and media creation industries witnessed a seismic shift in computer graphics with the launch of Turing in August. The field's greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and next-gen Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible.

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, today announced a new configuration option for the Razer Blade Pro, now with a Full HD display and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 GPU. This new build - at a lower price point than the Razer Blade Pro with a GeForce GTX 1080 - is targeted toward gamers and creative professionals that need a slim, powerful desktop replacement.

Equipped with a 7th gen Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor, the latest Razer Blade Pro is a performance-focused system with stunning 17.3-inch Full HD, 120Hz screen. The 1920 x 1080 matte panel offers users a beautiful display that is ideal for pushing out high framerates, and providing amazing color with wide viewing angles.

At GTC (GPU Technology Conference) today, NVIDIA has gone on to show how much VR is in the company's cards for future expansion. After giving us a ray-tracing solution for gaming audio with their VRWorks Audio SDK, and a VR stitching solution via their 360 Video SDK, NVIDIA has now showcased a system capable of running what could be defined as a "local VR party". I would like to point out, however, that such a system may find itself of much more use to businesses, education, and the military segments than local LAN parties, though I wouldn't mind embracing the skin of a VR-driven Darth Vader.

NVIDIA's proof-of-concept system can drive four different VR headsets. It makes use of four of the company's Quadro P6000 GPUs running four virtual machines on a PC server, which are paired with four HTC Vive Business Edition headsets and HTC's Lightroom tracking system. The system appears to be tiny for such a powerful configuration, though having a system powered by four video-cards shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone at this point in time - even if such an approach is now bordering on virtual impracticality for most consumers. NVIDIA is offering a look at the design guide technical document for such a system, though, which can prove an interesting read, right here.

Further planting its roots on the VR SDK and development field, NVIDIA has just announced availability of two more SDK packages, for their VRWorks Audio and 360 Video suites. Now a part of NVIDIA's VRWorks suite of VR solutions, the VRWorks Audio SDK provides real-time ray tracing of audio in virtual environments, and is supported in Epic's Unreal Engine 4 (here's hoping this solution, or other solutions similar to it, address the problem of today's game audio.) The VRWorks 360 Video SDK, on the other hand, may be less interesting for graphics enthusiasts, in that it addresses the complex challenge of real-time video stitching.

Traditional VR audio ( and gaming audio, for that matter) provide an accurate 3D position of the audio source within a virtual environment. However, as it is handled today, sound is processed with little regard to anything else but the location of the source. With VRWorks Audio, NVIDIA brings to the table considerations for the dimensions and material properties of the physical environment, helping to create a truly immersive environment by modeling sound propagation phenomena such as reflection, refraction and diffraction. This is to be done in real time, at a GPU level. This work leverages NVIDIA's OptiX ray-tracing technology, which allows VRWorks Audio to trace the path of sound in real time, delivering physically accurate audio that reflects the size, shape and material properties of the virtual environment.

While the Unity Engine isn't one used for cutting-edge triple-A releases, its workflow is considered by many to be one of the most scalable and platform-adaptable there is. The engine can be scaled all the way from 2D, text-based mobile games all the way towards 3D, VR presentations, which makes it a popular choice - particularly, to Indie studios. A slight sideline here as NVYVE Studio's P.A.M.E.L.A. is powered by Unity, and I have high hopes for that one piece of 3D interactivity.

According to Nvidia, adding VRWorks to titles created with the Unity Engine will now be significantly easier thanks to the recently released Unity 2017.1.0 Beta 2. Unity now doubles down as one of the most popular game engines for VR development (SuperHot VR was powered by it, for example), with Nvidia also stating that the Unity Engine is an important tool for other interactive experiences such as film, medical, tourism, design, education, and training, as well, proving the engine's versatility. As to VRWorks, it functions much like GameWorks: it's a suite of developer tools, APIs, libraries, and engines that are now available as a plugin in the Unity 2017.1.b2 update. Nvidia said that this provides developers an easy path to taking advantage of the SDK in their games and VR experiences. Namely, Unity Engine now includes plugins for Nvidia VRWorks technologies such as Multi-Res Shading, Lens Matched Shading, Single Pass Stereo, and VR SLI, and you can download the latest Beta version of the engine right from NVIDIA.