With its eye-popping LED displays that span about 750,000 square feet both inside and outside the arena, Sphere Studio, a new kind of entertainment in Las Vegas, is set to follow in the footsteps of other iconic circular performance venues like Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the Roman Colosseum.
The world’s largest LED screen, the Exosphere, is located outside the venue and has 1.2 million programmable LED pucks. Behind the screens, about 150 NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs power the breathtaking images on floor-to-ceiling, 16x16K monitors throughout the Sphere’s interior.
NVIDIA RTX A6000 Performance Improvement
With the world’s most potent GPU for desktop workstations for visual computing, the NVIDIA RTX A6000, you can unlock the next wave of innovative ideas, scientific discoveries, and immersive entertainment. The RTX A6000, with its state-of-the-art features and performance, enables you to operate at the speed of inspiration to meet the demanding challenges of the future and address the pressing demands of the present.
Magnificent Results via Design
An NVIDIA Ampere Architecture CUDA Core
Considerable performance gains for graphics and simulation workflows, including intricate 3D computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE), are possible with double-speed processing for single-precision floating point (FP32) operations and enhanced power efficiency.
Second-Stage RT Cores
Second-generation RT Cores can run ray tracing with shading or denoising and have up to 2X the throughput of the previous generation, speeding up job tasks like photorealistic rendering, architectural design evaluations, and virtual prototyping. For quicker outcomes with better visual accuracy, this approach also accelerates the rendering of ray-traced motion blur.
Tensor Cores of the Third Generation
AI and data science model training may be accelerated without requiring code modifications thanks to the new Tensor Float 32 (TF32) precision, which offers up to 5X the training throughput over the previous generation. Inferencing throughput doubles with hardware support for structural sparsity. AI for graphics is also made possible by Tensor Cores, which offer features like DLSS, AI denoising, and improved editing for specific uses.
NVIDIA NVLink for Third Generation
A single scalable memory to speed up graphics and computation tasks and handle more datasets is made possible by increased GPU-to-GPU link capacity.
48 GPU Memory Gigabytes (GB)
With NVLink, ultra-fast GDDR6 memory can be scaled up to 96 GB, providing data scientists, engineers, and creative professionals with the enormous memory needed for applications like data science and simulation involving large datasets.
Prepared for Virtualization
A personal workstation with support for NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) software can be transformed into several high-performance virtual workstation instances, allowing distant users to pool resources to support tasks in high-end design, artificial intelligence, and computation.
Generation 4 PCI Express
For data-intensive workloads like artificial intelligence and data research, support for PCI Express Gen 4 offers double the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 3, accelerating data transfer speeds from CPU memory.
Power Effectiveness
The RTX A6000 is designed to fit into a variety of workstations from global OEM manufacturers and boasts a dual-slot, power-efficient design that can save up to twice as much power as Turing GPUs.The NVIDIA BlueField DPUs and NVIDIA ConnectX-6 Dx NICs, which provide strong network connectivity, in conjunction with the NVIDIA DOCA Firefly Service and NVIDIA Rivermax software for media streaming, guarantee that every display panel functions as a single, synchronised canvas.
“With immersive LED content delivered at a scale and clarity that has never been done before, Sphere Studio is captivating audiences not only in Las Vegas but also around the world on social media,” stated Alex Luthwaite, senior vice president of show systems technology at Sphere Entertainment. “This would not be possible without the knowledge and creativity of organisations like NVIDIA, who are essential in enabling NVIDIA’s vision and collaborating closely with NVIDIA’s team to redefine the boundaries of what is achievable with state-of-the-art display technology.”
Sphere, which was listed as one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2023, presents signature marquee and corporate events in addition to concerts and residencies featuring the best names in music.
Rock group U2 performed 40 shows in Sphere as its opening act, which ended in March. The Sphere Experience featuring Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard From Earth is a multisensory cinematic experience that combines the venue’s immersive technologies, including high-resolution visuals, advanced concert-grade sound, haptic seats, and atmospheric effects like wind and scents.
Visual Technology Behind the Screens Fueling the Sphere: Sphere Studios produces video content at its location in Burbank, California, and sends it digitally to Sphere Studio, a Las Vegas venue. Then, using NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs, the content is streamed in real time to rack-mounted workstations, resulting in previously unheard-of performance that can provide three layers of 16K resolution at 60 frames per second.
Direct data transfers to and from the GPU are made possible by the NVIDIA Rivermax software, which aids in video streaming acceleration. Jitter is removed and latency is optimised when hardware and software acceleration work together.
Precision timing is made possible by NVIDIA BlueField DPUs via the DOCA Firefly Service, which synchronises clocks within a network with sub-microsecond accuracy.
Nir Nitzani, senior product director for networking software at NVIDIA, said, “The integration of NVIDIA RTX GPUs, BlueField DPUs, and Rivermax software creates a powerful trifecta of advantages for modern accelerated computing, supporting the unique high-resolution video streams and strict timing requirements needed at Sphere and setting a new This combination yields tremendous performance gains and extraordinary Sphere Studio experiences.
Equilibrium: Transitioning from Model to Sphere Level
Sphere Entertainment established Sphere Studios, which is tasked with producing the upcoming wave of innovative immersive entertainment, in order to produce fresh immersive content only for Sphere. Several development facilities can be found on the Burbank property, including the Big Dome, a quarter-sized replica of the Sphere screen in Las Vegas that doubles as a content lab, screening room, and production facility.
In order to film content for Sphere without having to combine several camera feeds, Sphere Studios also created the Big Sky camera system, which records uncompressed, 18K images from a single camera. Lenovo servers equipped with NVIDIA A40 GPUs power the studio’s own image processing software.
Additionally, 3D video, virtualization, and ray tracing are made possible by the A40 GPUs. The team utilises applications like as Unreal Engine, Unity, Touch Designer, and Notch to create graphics for various types of shows.
NVIDIA RTX A6000 Price
Nvidia rarely sells the professional graphics card NVIDIA RTX A6000. Retailer listings suggest the NVIDIA RTX A6000 will cost $4,799 USD.
NVIDIA RTX A6000 Specs
Feature | Specification |
---|---|
Architecture | NVIDIA Ampere |
Memory | 48 GB GDDR6 with ECC |
Memory Interface | 384-bit |
Memory Bandwidth | 768 GB/s |
CUDA Cores | 10,752 |
Tensor Cores | 336 (3rd Generation) |
RT Cores | 84 (2nd Generation) |
Single-Precision Performance | 38.7 TFLOPS |
RT Core Performance | 75.6 TFLOPS |
Tensor Performance | 309.7 TFLOPS |
Display Outputs | 4x DisplayPort 1.4a |
Max Power Consumption | 300 W |
Graphics Bus | PCI Express 4.0 x16 |
Form Factor | Dual-slot, full height |
Cooling | Active |
VR Ready | Yes |