NVIDIA has introduced Iray Visual Computing Appliance (VCA), a GPU rendering appliance that dramatically accelerates ray tracing, enabling professional designers to interact with computer models of such high visual fidelity that it can largely replace the lengthy, costly process of building physical prototypes.

Honda Research and Development is an initial user of NVIDIA Iray VCA, with a prototype cluster made up of 25 nodes to refine styling designs on future cars.
Iray VCA combines hardware and software to greatly accelerate the work of NVIDIA Iray — a photorealistic renderer integrated into leading design tools like Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA and Autodesk’s 3ds Max. Because the appliance is scalable, multiple units can be linked, speeding up by hundreds of times or more the simulation of light bouncing off surfaces in the real world.

As a result, automobiles and other complex designs can be viewed seamlessly at high visual fidelity from all angles. This enables the viewer to move around a model while it’s still in the digital domain, as if it were a 3D physical prototype.

“Iray VCA lets designers do what they’ve always wanted to — interact with their ideas as if they were already real,” said Jeff Brown, Vice President and General Manager of Professional Visualisation and Design at NVIDIA. “It removes the time-consuming step of building prototypes or rendering out movies, enabling designs to be explored, tweaked and confirmed in real time. Months, even years — and enormous cost — can be saved in bringing products to market.”