Las Vegas Sphere uses NVIDIA hardware
NVIDIA today revealed that its hardware is powering the iconic Sphere, one of the most talked-about entertainment venues in Las Vegas. Completed in 2023, the Sphere will deliver an immersive video and audio experience with its 16x16K LED display inside and 1.2 million programmable LED displays outside.
The video content for the Sphere isn’t created on location, but at a California-based studio called Sphere Studios that uses RTX A6000 GPUs. This content is rendered “in three layers of 16K resolution at 60 FPS.” While the Sphere doesn’t use 150 graphics cards to render its content, that kind of GPU power is necessary for content generation.
Sphere Studios creates video content in its Burbank, California facility and then digitally transmits it to Sphere in Las Vegas. The content is then streamed in real time to rack-mounted workstations equipped with NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs, enabling unprecedented performance capable of delivering three layers of 16K resolution at 60 frames per second.
The Sphere is one of the most expensive and innovative venues, with a price tag of $2.3 billion. However, the graphics card alone was worth only $1 million at launch.
It’s worth noting that the RTX A6000 isn’t NVIDIA’s latest GPU. This professional visualization graphics card uses the GA102 GPU based on the Ampere architecture, with 10,752 CUDA cores and 48GB of VRAM apiece. For comparison, the RTX 6000 ADA has 7,424 more cores. An ADA-based system would only need 88 cards, but would have significantly less memory (4.2TB instead of 7.2TB).
In 2017, NVIDIA announced the NVIDIA Spot, a product designed for Google Home AI that ultimately never saw release. While it had nothing to do with the Sphere, it could have fulfilled Jensen’s vision of keeping tabs on everything and everyone.
NVIDIA Spot, Source: Engadget
Source: NVIDIA