When Porsche announced the Speedster concept back in June we were immediately excited. This is exactly what the speedster should have been all along, a rakish two-seat topless sports car with GT-division power to the rear wheels. The 997 generation speedster didn’t make any sense with its incredibly outpaced pricepoint and power that simply matched the then current GTS power levels. If it was going to have the visual and dynamic flair of a short windshield and aero humps behind the driver and passenger seats, it should really have had a bit more power than you could get in the less special GTS. Therefore, this Speedster concept, should it enter production as-is (and it really should), is already our favorite.
Porsche actually did build the Speedster Concept and showed it off at a special 70th anniversary celebration in Stuttgart. The thing is, that Porsche is not featured in the video below. It may look exactly like the real thing, but it’s actually a digital copy built with Unreal Engine 4 software. Epic Games, the company behind the incredibly popular Fortnite online battle royale game and the “Unreal Engine” development tool for games designers. During SIGGRAPH 2018 (a computer animation festival) they used a real-time ray tracing of Porsche’s concept sports car to recreate the Porsche for the video display you see here. All of this was fed through NVIDIA’s new RTX 2080 Graphics Processing Unit.
What does that all mean?
Well, some computer guys took a visual scan of this Speedster and were able to recreate the whole thing, textures and all, in a video in essentially real time. That’s incredible technology that is absolutely groundbreaking. Very cool to see the results, and very cool of Porsche to realize the benefit of such technology to their core values. More importantly, given how important the gaming community has become to Porsche, this hyper realistic technology will only help enhance Porsche’s already growing presence in this space.