Last year, a new attraction named Sphere debuted in Las Vegas, and it is quintessentially Vegas with its eye-popping size and dazzling light shows. Now, Nvidia is sharing details on how Sphere runs behind the scenes and what hardware is required. This is the first time it’s been revealed that Sphere is an Nvidia-powered attraction, and the numbers involved are just as staggering as you would expect.
Nvidia posted new details about the hardware powering Sphere on its blog, revealing how everything is connected and how it’s involved in its operation. The Sphere essentially features two enormous displays, one inside and one outside. The internal “media plane” runs at 16K resolution and measures 160,000 square feet. The external display, called the ExoSphere, consists of 1.2 million LED pucks, each featuring 48 individual LEDs. Powering both displays are 150 Nvidia A6000 data center GPUs, fewer than we thought might be required. Each GPU is connected to 16 displays running at 16K for the internal light show, so we’re guessing each GPU is being maxed out every second it’s in operation.
In a surprising twist, Nvidia reveals that non-live content displayed behind artists or as part of a non-live show is developed at Sphere Studios in Burbank, CA, and then streamed to Sphere, also with Nvidia hardware. The blog says content is streamed to rack-mounted workstations with the A6000 GPUs inside, so it can run at 16K and 60fps. Nvidia’s BlueField DPUs and Rivermax software are employed to sync the displays and reduce jitter and latency so the huge displays appear as one massive screen.
Nvidia says content for Sphere is shot using a new camera system called Big Sky. It captures uncompressed 18K images that can be used for Sphere’s content, negating the need to shoot at a lower resolution and then stitch images together for final output to its 16k panels. The images are produced on Lenovo workstations running Nvidia A40 GPUs using custom software designed for Sphere’s unique requirements. Nvidia says the software includes Unreal Engine, Unity, Touch Designer, and Notch.
All that hardware requires a lot of power, too, as PCGamer notes Sphere can consume as much as 28,000,000 watts at its peak. The GPUs alone could be responsible for up to 45,000W of power draw, as each A6000 GPU has a TDP of 300W. Some of that massive power draw can be attributed to the 167,000 individual speakers inside Sphere, which deliver targeted 3D audio to each individual seat in the 20,000-seat internal theater.
