NVIDIA Reveals Gaming, Creator, Robotics, and Auto Innovations at CES

New GeForce RTX GPUs, a new generation of hyper-efficient laptops, Omniverse capabilities, and partnerships across the automotive industry were highlights of a news-packed NVIDIA address at the CES trade show in Las Vegas. “AI will define the future of computing and this has influenced much of what we’re covering today,“ said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president for gaming products at NVIDIA, as he kicked off the presentation.

Fisher said the performance and power efficiency of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series Laptop GPUs enable the greatest ever generational leap, including 14-inch gaming and creating powerhouse laptops, starting at $999 in February. New GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics cards for desktops are faster than last generation’s RTX 3090 Ti at nearly half the power, bringing the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture down to $799. DLSS 3 is being adopted by developers faster than any prior NVIDIA tech, with 50 released and upcoming titles.

In addition, RTX 4080 performance is coming to the NVIDIA GeForce NOW cloud-gaming service. As a result, Fisher said millions more gamers will have access to the NVIDIA Ada architecture with GeForce NOW’s Ultimate membership. The new tier will bring NVIDIA Reflex and 240 frames per second streaming to the cloud, along with full ray tracing and DLSS 3 in games like Portal With RTX.

Ray tracing and AI are defining the next generation of content, and NVIDIA Studio is the platform for this new breed of content creators. The heartbeat of Studio is found in NVIDIA Omniverse, where creators can connect accelerated apps and collaborate in real-time. Built with NVIDIA RTX, Omniverse is a platform enabling 3D artists to connect their favorite tools from Adobe, Autodesk, SideFX, Unreal Engine, and more. And Omniverse now has a new Connector for Unity, said Stephanie Johnson, vice president of consumer marketing at NVIDIA.

She introduced a suite of new generative AI tools and experimental plug-ins using the power of AI as the ultimate creative assistant. Audio2Face and Audio2Gesture generate animations from an audio file. The AI ToyBox lets users generate 3D meshes from 2D inputs. Johnson also announced that NVIDIA RTX Remix, which is built on Omniverse and is “the easiest way to mod classic games,“ will be entering early access soon.

Simulation plays a vital role in the lifecycle of a robotics project, explained Deepu Talla, vice president of embedded and edge computing at NVIDIA. Partners are using NVIDIA Isaac Sim to create digital twins that help speed the training and deployment of intelligent robots. To revolutionize the way the robotics ecosystem develops the next generation of autonomous robots, Talla announced major updates to the next release of Isaac Sim. This includes the improved sensor and lidar support to more accurately model real-world performance, a new conveyor-building tool, a new utility to add people to the simulation environment, a collection of new sim-ready warehouse assets, and a host of new popular robots that come pre-integrated.

For the open-source ROS developer community, this release upgrades support for ROS 2 Humble and Windows, Talla added. And for robotics researchers, NVIDIA is introducing a new tool called Isaac ORBIT, which provides operating environments for manipulator robots. NVIDIA has also improved Isaac Gym for reinforcement learning and updated Isaac Cortex for collaborative robot programming.

The NVIDIA DRIVE platform is open and easy to program, said Ali Kani, vice president of automotive at NVIDIA. Hundreds of partners across the automotive ecosystem are now developing software on NVIDIA DRIVE, including 20 of the top 30 manufacturers building new energy vehicles, many of the industry’s top tier one manufacturers and software makers, plus eight of the largest 10 trucking and robotaxi companies. It’s a number that continues to grow, with Kani announcing a partnership with Foxconn, the world’s largest technology manufacturer and service provider, to build electric vehicles based on NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion.

Kani also announced several DRIVE partners are integrating GeForce NOW, including Hyundai Motor Group, BYD, and Polestar. While gamers will enjoy virtual worlds from inside their cars, tools such as the metaverse are critical to the development and testing of new autonomous vehicles. Kani announced that Mercedes-Benz is using digital twin technology to plan and build more efficient production facilities.