By Karl Rosenberger, Director of Product Development at RAVE Computer

Ken Burns aside, every filmmaker needs their audience to willingly suspend disbelief and fully buy into the cinematic world that’s been created for them. That was easier before everyone had a supercomputer in their pocket and a high-end gaming system in their home. Today’s tech leaves zero margin for error in virtual production. One digitally rendered hair out of place, one mixed-reality frame out of sync, and the spell is broken. Modern viewers are simply too tech-savvy and too accustomed to high-end digital experiences in their everyday lives to let errors slip by unforgiven. The result? A maddening gap between what filmmakers can imagine and what they can safely bring to life on screen.

Nvidia’s GeForce 3000 series is here to close that gap like nothing before. It is – and we don’t use this term lightly at RAVE – a game-changer.

Here are three big reasons we’re so stoked for the GeForce 3000 series cards.

It delivers a stunning leap forward in performance. There’s a lot of buzz about exponential advances in technology, but in truth most new products only deliver incremental improvements. There’s nothing incremental about the 3000 series. This is one of the biggest generational leaps in performance we have seen out of the GeForce product line, EVER. In our testing in the RAVE labs, we usually see a jump of about 15% from one generation to the next. With its second-Generation RT cores and third generation Tensor cores––both providing 2x throughput over the previous Turing architecture––the new Ampere GPU architecture featured in the new GeForce RTX cards enables Real-Time Ray Tracing with Global Illumination on a single card via Nvidia's RTXGI SDK. "Global Illumination," the more advanced form of ray tracing, adds light that is reflected from surrounding surfaces to the objects in the scene. This is more comprehensive and more physically correct and produces more realistic images than local illumination. The new RTX cards support PCIe 4.0, which supports double the throughput of PCIe 3.0 at 31.508 GB/s.

Simply put, the 3090 is now the fastest gaming and creator GPU on the planet. Does everyone need 24G of VRAM, 8K editing, and a 100% improvement in rendering speed? Of course not. But for filmmakers creating live rendered content, the generational jump offers tremendous advantages and opens exciting new doors.

It lets you tell the stories you want, the way you envision them. There’s no question virtual production capabilities have evolved – anyone who’s seen both Avatar and Lion King can literally see the difference. More powerful GPUs and game engines have provided the software for real-time rendering and ray tracing. But as good as they are, even those advances have still fallen short of bringing filmmakers’ full visions to life. We expect the 3000’s boost in performance—and its impact on virtual production—will be nothing short of revolutionary in the film industry. The leap forward in ray tracing performance and the visual quality it brings also powers forward the evolution of storytelling, equipping directors and virtual production studios with more control over their creative vision, and the ability to successfully, seamlessly render every possible aspect of their shot. Whether it’s strands of hair on a virtual character or the first glimpse of sunrise on a screen behind a live actor, the possibilities and improvements in character animation and rendered imagery are endless.

It raises your productivity. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the GeForce 3000 series is the value delivered for the cost. Seriously. Whether measured in size, weight, and power (SWaP) or dollars spent on your rendering farm, The RTX 3090 is 50% faster than the previous generation Titan RTX, yet carries an MSRP that is $1,000 less than the cost of the Titan RTX at launch. That’s a straight-up game-changer for the entertainment industry.

Of course, a product this good is wasted on an outdated system. The GeForce RTX 3000 series is a powerful upgrade that requires virtual producers to adapt their system design to accommodate those changes. You don't want to simply install an RTX 3000 card into just any system––even if it was designed and built recently and the card fits. The 3090 model may be the fastest creator GPU available, but to support an RTX 3000-series card, you’ll need three expansion slots, a chassis with plentiful airflow, and a more robust power supply than the 2000-series required to reap its benefits. RAVE is also offering new designs that allow you to take advantage of the PCIe 4.0 connection to the host computer. That’s why back in RAVE’s labs, we rigorously measure and tune all aspects of a system to support power draw, acoustic output and thermal performance targets to ensure we’re giving filmmaking clients a balanced system that can run in boost mode for extended periods of time. RAVE’s balanced approach allows for highly efficient workflows and a way to extract maximum value from the powerful advantages of these new RTX 3000-series GeForce cards.

The new GeForce 3000 series cards unleash unbelievable opportunities for movie makers to tell their stories in new and compelling ways. Paired with the right systems and teams, filmmakers are now much closer to closing that gap between their imagination and what their viewers experience. We at RAVE can’t wait to see what they dream up.

About Karl Rosenberger

Karl Rosenberger is the director of product development at RAVE Computer. RAVE is a proud partner of 209 Group and specializes in developing purpose built computers for virtual production and media services, training and simulation, and product development and engineering. Follow RAVE on LinkedIn and visit www.rave.com to stay connected to our latest thoughts, and insight on the most innovative hardware technology that is shaping the future of the media and entertainment industry.