When it was unveiled a year ago, we described the Sphere in Las Vegas perhaps a little harshly as the world’s most mesmerising eyesore. The immersive venue with its nearly 750,000 square feet of LED displays, has since been the stage for U2 concerts, Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard From Earth and, er, ‘mega minion’ Jerry.
Graphics card producer Nvidia reckons the venue is up there with legendary circular performance spaces such as the Roman Colosseum and Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. And it’s revealed more about how all of those displays are powered (see our pick of the best graphics cards for deals on consumer GPUs from Nvidia).
Sphere in Las Vegas (Image credit: Sphere Entertainment)
In a blog post, Nvidia says Sphere’s floor-to-ceiling, 16x16K interior displays and the 1.2 million programmable LED pucks on the exterior are powered by around 150 Nvidia RTX A6000 GPUs. Meanwhile, Nvidia BlueField DPUs, ConnectX-6 Dx NICs, its DOCA Firefly Service and Rivermax software for media streaming help ensure all those panels behave as as a single synchronised canvas.
According to Nir Nitzani, senior product director for networking software at Nvidia, the integration of RTX GPUs, BlueField DPUs and Rivermax software “creates a powerful trifecta of advantages for modern accelerated computing, supporting the unique high-resolution video streams and strict timing requirements needed at Sphere and setting a new standard for media processing capabilities.”
An image from Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard From Earth at Sphere, Las Vegas (Image credit: Sphere Entertainment)
Video content created by Sphere Studios in Burbank is streamed in real time to rack-mounted workstations equipped with those RTX A6000 GPUs to deliver three layers of 16K resolution at 60 frames per second. The Rivermax software helps provide streaming acceleration, enabling direct data transfers to and from the GPU and helping to eliminate jitter and optimise latency. The BlueField DPUs facilitate precision timing through the DOCA Firefly Service.
To develop its visuals for different kinds of shows, Sphere Studios works with apps including Unreal Engine, Unity, Touch Designer and Notch. It’s also developed the Big Sky camera system, which captures uncompressed 18K images from a single camera, so that the studio can film content for Sphere without needing to stitch multiple camera feeds together. The studio’s custom image processing software runs on Lenovo servers powered by Nvidia A40 GPUs.
