On Monday, August 12th, the company will debut its first-ever RTX Rendering Day, a full-day track dedicated to the cutting edge of GPU-accelerated rendering, real-time ray tracing, and AI-driven creative workflows.

The event marks a significant milestone for NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH, debuting a dedicated day that puts RTX technology at the center of modern content creation. Spanning seven sessions, the lineup brings together heavyweights like Pixar, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Chaos, and OTOY to showcase how RTX is reshaping real-world production workflows.

Topics range from real-time storytelling and virtual cinematography to final-frame GPU rendering in feature films and high-fidelity simulation for AI training. Whether it’s Pixar unveiling updates to RenderMan, Sony sharing how RTX fits into its VFX pipeline, or Chaos exploring hybrid rendering with V-Ray, the day offers a clear takeaway: RTX isn’t just speeding things up — it’s changing how creative teams build, iterate, and deliver.

At the heart of it all is a simple message: rendering is evolving fast, and real-time workflows are no longer reserved for game engines or technology demos. They’re being used today in animation, VFX, simulation, and even robotics with NVIDIA RTX at the core powering the next evolution.

The day begins with a technical deep dive into the latest advancements in GPU-accelerated ray tracing, where NVIDIA engineers will walk through how AI is being fused directly into the rendering pipeline. Attendees can expect insights into real-time path tracing methods, including neural radiance caching, AI-assisted light sampling, denoising filters, and RTXDI (Ray Traced Direct Illumination), all designed to deliver cinematic lighting and global illumination at interactive speeds.

These capabilities are no longer confined to internal technology demos; they’re already integrated into production tools like NVIDIA Omniverse, Unreal Engine, and V-Ray, powering real projects in animation, visualization, and virtual production.

Pixar will present how its legendary RenderMan renderer is evolving with the adoption of XPU, a hybrid CPU+GPU engine designed to accelerate look development and final rendering without sacrificing quality or flexibility. It’s a major step for a studio known for pushing the limits of offline rendering, and a sign that GPU acceleration is gaining serious traction in high-end film production.

Sony Pictures Imageworks will follow with a behind-the-scenes look at how RTX GPUs are being used not just for previews or interactive sessions, but for full production rendering.  This will include final frames for animated as well as hybrid features. Their session is expected to dive into performance tuning, pipeline integration, and the practical realities of scaling GPU rendering for large teams and big data sets.

Later in the day, the focus shifts toward simulation and AI. One session will explore how RTX-powered rendering is enabling photorealistic environments for training physical AI — from robotic vision to autonomous vehicles — using synthetic data rendered with physically accurate lighting, shadows, and materials. Another session will demonstrate AI-driven material generation inside Omniverse, including NVIDIA’s use of diffusion models and machine learning to accelerate surface creation, shading, and lookdev.

The final sessions of the day will dive into foundational pipeline technologies like OpenUSD and the Material Definition Language (MDL), both of which are seeing expanded adoption across studios and platforms. With tight integration into Omniverse and support from major partners like Adobe, Autodesk, and Pixar, these open standards are becoming central to building scalable, collaborative rendering workflows across tools and teams.

Taken together, RTX Rendering Day isn’t just a series of product demos — it’s a clear statement on where high-end rendering is today, and where it is heading in the future. From real-time storytelling and AI-assisted production to physically accurate simulation and open, interoperable pipelines, NVIDIA and its partners are laying the groundwork for a new era of content creation; one that’s faster, smarter, and built to scale. Real-time rendering is no longer a futuristic goal. It’s already changing how content is made, and it’s ready for prime time.