Sphere, a new kind of entertainment medium in Las Vegas, is joining the ranks of legendary circular performance spaces such as the Roman Colosseum and Shakespeare's Globe Theater - captivating audiences with eye-popping LED displays that cover nearly 750,000 square feet inside and outside the venue.
Behind the screens, around 150 NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs help power stunning visuals on floor-to-ceiling, 16x16K displays across the Sphere's interior, as well as 1.2 million programmable LED pucks on the venue's exterior - the Exosphere, which is the world's largest LED screen.
Delivering robust network connectivity, NVIDIA BlueField DPUs and NVIDIA ConnectX-6 Dx NICs - along with the NVIDIA DOCA Firefly Service and NVIDIA Rivermax software for media streaming - ensure that all the display panels act as one synchronized canvas.
Sphere is captivating audiences not only in Las Vegas, but also around the world on social media, with immersive LED content delivered at a scale and clarity that has never been done before, said Alex Luthwaite, senior vice president of show systems technology at Sphere Entertainment. This would not be possible without the expertise and innovation of companies such as NVIDIA that are critical to helping power our vision, working closely with our team to redefine what is possible with cutting-edge display technology.
Named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2023, Sphere hosts original Sphere Experiences, concerts and residencies from the world's biggest artists, and premier marquee and corporate events.
Rock band U2 opened Sphere with a 40-show run that concluded in March. Other shows include The Sphere Experience featuring Darren Aronofsky's Postcard From Earth, a specially created multisensory cinematic experience that showcases all of the venue's immersive technologies, including high-resolution visuals, advanced concert-grade sound, haptic seats and atmospheric effects such as wind and scents.
Postcard From Earth is a multisensory immersive experience. Image courtesy of Sphere Entertainment. Behind the Screens: Visual Technology Fueling the Sphere Sphere Studios creates video content in its Burbank, Calif., facility, then transfers it digitally to Sphere in Las Vegas. The content is then streamed in real time to rack-mounted workstations equipped with NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs, achieving unprecedented performance capable of delivering three layers of 16K resolution at 60 frames per second.
The NVIDIA Rivermax software helps provide media streaming acceleration, enabling direct data transfers to and from the GPU. Combined, the software and hardware acceleration eliminates jitter and optimizes latency.
NVIDIA BlueField DPUs also facilitate precision timing through the DOCA Firefly Service, which is used to synchronize clocks in a network with sub-microsecond accuracy.
The integration of NVIDIA 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, said Nir Nitzani, senior product director for networking software at NVIDIA. This collaboration results in remarkable performance gains, culminating in the extraordinary experiences guests have at Sphere.
Well-Rounded: From Simulation to Sphere Stage To create new immersive content exclusively for Sphere, Sphere Entertainment launched Sphere Studios, which is dedicated to developing the next generation of original immersive entertainment. The Burbank campus consists of numerous development facilities, including a quarter-sized version of Sphere screen in Las Vegas, dubbed Big Dome, which serves as a specialized screening, production facility and lab for content.
The Big Dome is 100 feet high and 28,000 square feet. Image courtesy of Sphere Entertainment. Sphere Studios 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.
The A40 GPUs also fuel creative work, including 3D video, virtualization and ray tracing. To develop visuals for different kinds of shows, the team works with apps including Unreal Engine, Unity, Touch Designer and Notch.
For more, explore upcoming sessions in NVIDIA's room at SIGGRAPH and watch the panel discussion Immersion in Sphere: Redefining Live Entertainment Experiences on NVIDIA On-Demand.
All images courtesy of Sphere Entertainment.
More from Nvidia
28/08/2025
Brace yourself, COGs - the Locusts aren't the only thing rising up. The Coal...
28/08/2025
Last week at Gamescom, NVIDIA announced the winners of the NVIDIA and ModDB RTX ...
27/08/2025
AI models are advancing at a rapid rate and scale.
But what might they lack that (most) humans don't? Common sense: an understanding, developed through rea...
25/08/2025
Robots around the world are about to get a lot smarter as physical AI developers...
25/08/2025
As autonomous vehicle systems rapidly grow in complexity, equipped with reasonin...
22/08/2025
As the latest member of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture family, the NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPU builds on core innovations to accelerate training and AI reason...
22/08/2025
AI reasoning, inference and networking will be top of mind for attendees of next...
21/08/2025
Japan is once again building a landmark high-performance computing system - not ...
21/08/2025
From AI assistants doing deep research to autonomous vehicles making split-second navigation decisions, AI adoption is exploding across industries.
Behind ever...
21/08/2025
Across the globe, AI factories are rising - massive new data centers built not to serve up web pages or email, but to train and deploy intelligence itself. Inte...
21/08/2025
Get a glimpse into the future of gaming.
The NVIDIA Blackwell RTX architecture is coming to GeForce NOW in September, marking the service's biggest upgrade...
20/08/2025
Editor's note: This blog is a part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused o...
18/08/2025
With over 175 games now supporting NVIDIA DLSS 4 - a suite of advanced, AI-power...
18/08/2025
At Gamescom, NVIDIA is releasing its first major update to Project G Assist - an...
15/08/2025
Of around 7,000 languages in the world, a tiny fraction are supported by AI lang...
14/08/2025
NVIDIA is partnering with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a...
14/08/2025
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition is marching onto GeForce NOW,...
13/08/2025
Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] image editing model is now available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice.
FLUX.1 models allow users to edit existing imag...
11/08/2025
Using NVIDIA digital twin technologies, Amazon Devices & Services is powering bi...
11/08/2025
Packing the power of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture in compact, energy-effici...
11/08/2025
Physical AI is becoming the foundation of smart cities, facilities and industria...
07/08/2025
This GFN Thursday brings an offer members can't refuse - 2K's highly ant...
05/08/2025
Two new open-weight AI reasoning models from OpenAI released today bring cutting...
05/08/2025
In collaboration with OpenAI, NVIDIA has optimized the company's new open-so...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA and OpenAI began pushing the boundaries of AI with the launch of NVIDIA D...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA GPUs are at the heart of modern computing. They're used across industries - from healthcare and finance to scientific research, autonomous systems an...
31/07/2025
August brings new levels of gaming excitement on GeForce NOW, with 2,300 titles now available to stream in the cloud.
Grab a controller and get ready for epic ...
31/07/2025
Interest in generative AI is continuing to grow, as new models include more capabilities. With the latest advancements, even enthusiasts without a developer bac...
29/07/2025
FourCastNet3 (FCN3) is the latest AI global weather forecasting system from NVID...
28/07/2025
The electrical grid is designed to support loads that are relatively steady, such as lighting, household appliances, and industrial machines that operate at con...
24/07/2025
For media company Black Mixture, AI isn't just a tool - it's an entire p...
24/07/2025
Sharpen the blade and brace for a journey steeped in myth and mystery. WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers has launched in the cloud.
Ride in style with skateboarding leg...
23/07/2025
In today's fast-evolving digital landscape, marketing teams face increasing ...
22/07/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores th...
17/07/2025
Listen up citizens, the law is back and patrolling the cloud. Nacon's RoboCop Rogue City - Unfinished Business launches today in the cloud, bringing justice...
15/07/2025
Submissions for NVIDIA's Plug and Play: Project G-Assist Plug-In Hackathon a...
14/07/2025
This month, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang promoted AI in both Washington, D.C. and Beijing - emphasizing the benefits that AI will bring to business and s...
11/07/2025
Ceramics - the humble mix of earth, fire and artistry - have been part of a global conversation for millennia.
From Tang Dynasty trade routes to Renaissance pa...
10/07/2025
In the race to understand our planet's changing climate, speed and accuracy are everything. But today's most widely used climate simulators often strugg...
10/07/2025
As one of the world's largest emerging markets, Indonesia is making strides toward its Golden 2045 Vision - an initiative tapping digital technologies and...
10/07/2025
Grab a friend and climb toward the clouds - PEAK is now available on GeForce NOW, enabling members to try the hugely popular indie hit on virtually any device.
...
10/07/2025
Coding assistants or copilots - AI-powered assistants that can suggest, explain and debug code - are fundamentally changing how software is developed for both e...
08/07/2025
Modern AI applications increasingly rely on models that combine huge parameter c...
03/07/2025
The forecast this month is showing a 100% chance of epic gaming. Catch the scorching lineup of 20 titles coming to the cloud, which gamers can play whether indo...
02/07/2025
Black Forest Labs, one of the world's leading AI research labs, just changed the game for image generation.
The lab's FLUX.1 image models have earned g...
01/07/2025
In many parts of the world, including major technology hubs in the U.S., there's a yearslong wait for AI factories to come online, pending the buildout of n...
26/06/2025
As of today, NVIDIA now supports the general availability of Gemma 3n on NVIDIA RTX and Jetson. Gemma, previewed by Google DeepMind at Google I/O last month, in...
26/06/2025
Editor's note: This blog is a part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused o...
26/06/2025
Mark Theriault founded the startup FITY envisioning a line of clever cooling products: cold drink holders that come with freezable pucks to keep beverages cold ...
Sphere, a new kind of entertainment medium in Las Vegas, is joining the ranks of legendary circular performance spaces such as the Roman Colosseum and Shakespeare's Globe Theater - captivating audiences with eye-popping LED displays that cover nearly 750,000 square feet inside and outside the venue.
