The MSG Sphere entertainment center located in Las Vegas, is a unique structure whose external and internal surface are LED displays with a total area of about 70 thousand m². The inner one has a resolution of 16K, and the outer one is made up of 1.2 million puck-shaped blocks, each containing 48 LEDs.
This system is powered by Nvidia's RTX A-series graphics cards, BlueField DPU coprocessors, ConnectX-6 Dx adapters and DOCA Firefly Service and Rivermax streaming software solutions to ensure all panels work as one synchronized space .
The entertainment center hosts performances by major artists and other events called the Sphere Experience. One of them is “Postcards from Earth” of Darren Aronofsky, specially filmed for Sphere – the show includes not only high-definition video and high-quality sound, but also tactile effects in the seats and atmospheric effects, such as wind and smells.
Content for the entertainment center is created at Sphere Studios in Burbank, California and then sent digitally to the entertainment center itself. Here it is streamed in real-time to rack-mounted workstations with approximately 150 Nvidia RTX A6000 GPUs.
In particular, they provide the unprecedented performance needed to transmit three streams at 16K resolution at 60 frames per second. Nvidia Rivermax software helps accelerate media streaming with direct connections to GPUs, eliminating rendering errors and delays. Data synchronization is provided using the BlueField DPU and the Firefly DOCA service, which is used to synchronize network clocks with microsecond accuracy.
Sphere Studios contains a quarter-sized version of the Las Vegas screen called the Big Dome, which serves as a dedicated content screening and production facility as well as a production lab. The company also developed the Big Sky camera system, which captures uncompressed 18K video specifically for the Sphere. The image processing software used by the studio runs on Lenovo servers with Nvidia A40 graphics - used for 3D video creation, virtualization and ray tracing. Visual effects were developed using Unreal Engine, Unity, Touch Designer and Notch. See more!