PNY recently caught up with Clinton Jones, a director, photographer and visual effects artist, as well as the Judge in PNY's latest contest, to get his feedback on his transition from using a consumer graphics card to the professional NVIDIA® Quadro® RTX™ 6000.
What is your experience working with the NVIDIA Quadro RTX™ 6000 so far?
"It’s been incredible. The 24GBs of Vram and its RTX capability has sped up my workflow by a considerable amount. I can create much larger 3D scenes, navigate them smoothly, and render a lot faster."
What is your system configuration?
"CPU: Intel Core i7-6700k CPU @ 4.00GHz
GPU: NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000
RAM: 64GBs System Memory"
Was it difficult to upgrade from your GeForce graphics card to the new NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000?
"The most difficult part was keeping my cats out of my case. I easily swapped the Quadro GPU with my old GeForce GTX 1070 (what an upgrade), booted, and got rendering. Installing was a breeze."
What GPUs have you used before the new NVIDIA Quadro card?
"Ah my trusty GeForce GTX 1070... I can’t recall older cards because I’ve had it for so long. And for a brief time I was using an RTX 2080, but the Quadro RTX 6000 truly blows it out of the water."
NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 supports RTX technologies such as Real-Time Ray Tracing, have you started to leverage RTX in your workflow? Can you share an example with us?
"I’ve slowly been learning Unreal Engine this year, and remember the moment when I finally got Ray Tracing up and running. Unreal Engine is not an easy program to use, so finally discovering how to enable real-time ray tracing had me speechless. It’s inspiring to know we can create real-time, photoreal scenes if we have a bit of persistence, an imagination and the hardware to help us through the process.
NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 has a massive 24GB frame buffer compared to 4GB or 8GB found on a typical consumer level graphics card, can you share an example of you leveraging the 24GB frame buffer in your workflow?
"The 24GBs of Vram is what made this test scene possible. Before Quadro, I would have had to find creative workarounds in order to save memory to make a similar image. The models themselves would have been lower resolution, and my texture maps would have been 2k images rather than 4 and 8k."
Will you recommend a professional NVIDIA Quadro card for creative artists like yourself? And Why?
"Absolutely!! There’s so much power packed into one card. The 24GB frame buffer allows me to create much larger scenes now, and I have yet to hit the cap. I guess it’s time to get more ambitious."
How did the contest come around, what made you think of this idea for the contest?
"I love travelling to other countries, getting lost with a camera, and listening to music that amplifies that place's feeling. If I have those three things, I’m truly in another world. So when creating 3D environments, I’m heavily inspired by these adventures, images and feelings. And at the same time, I miss collaborating on art like this, so the idea for Parallel Dimensions came about. But I can’t take all the credit. Big shout out to Jay and the PNY team for making this contest a thing! And also to Digital_Ridge on IG for inspiring me with his awesome collaboration renders."
What are you hoping to see from the entries for the contest?
"The idea is to combine the best 20 community renders into an amazing audio/visual montage. This means the video will only be as cool as everyone's collective work, so I’m hoping people will put in the time to make something great, but more importantly, it’s an opportunity for us to learn something new together. Hopefully we all grow as 3D artists, and people, as we overcome technical problems and push ourselves towards the awesome images we’re imagining in our heads."
Although the Parallel Dimensions contest closed on November 5, 2020, the exciting part is that you will be able to view the results of this collaborative project and enter our new contest "Expanding Dimensions" on Friday November 13, 2020. It is easy to enter, simply sign up and get entries by viewing the project and liking it on social for your chance to win an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 GPU and other great prizes!
If you would like to find out about the winners of the Parallel Dimensions Contest sooner, check out Clint’s live stream on Saturday November 7, 2020 at 10:45 AM PST on youtube.com/pwnisher, or the Parallel Dimensions Contest page on November 10, 2020.