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NVIDIA Targeting Real-Time Cloud Rendering
MojoKid writes "To date, the majority of cloud computing applications have emphasized storage, group collaboration, or the ability to share information and applications with large groups of people. So far, there's been no push to make GPU power available in a cloud computing environment — but that's something NVIDIA hopes to change. The company announced version 3.0 of its RealityServer today. The new revision sports hardware-level 3D acceleration, a new rendering engine (iray), and the ability to create 'images of photorealistic scenes at rates approaching an interactive gaming experience.' NVIDIA claims that the combination of RealityServer and its Tesla hardware can deliver those photorealistic scenes on your workstation or your cell phone, with no difference in speed or quality. Instead of relying on a client PC to handle the task of 3D rendering, NVIDIA wants to move the capability into the cloud, where the task of rendering an image or scene is handed off to a specialized Tesla server. Then that server performs the necessary calculations and fires back the finished product to the client."
NVidia's offering performs full scene raytracing/pathtracing, with effects ranging from reflections and refractions to global illumination and caustics all the way through to sub-surface scattering and participating media.
Some of these things can be done in proper realtime (say, at least, 30fps at 720p) on existing GPUs, but typically by using hacks that look 'good enough', but aren't actually correct. Which is fine for gaming (where refresh rates matter), but not fine for product visualization, architectural visualization or to go to an extreme.. materials and lighting analysis, where you don't care if it's not 30fps, but are more than happy to wait 10 seconds for something that used to take 15 minutes.
That said... if the cards keep getting faster, then eventually 30fps@720p will be possible and there's no reason, in the time inbetween, that games couldn't add the more fancy effects and have the GPGPU solutions take care of those on a 'cloud' platform.