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NVIDIA Targeting Real-Time Cloud Rendering

Posted by Soulskill on from the hey-if-onlive-and-gaikai-can-do-it dept.

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."

1 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bandwidth & Latency? by Jthon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Which is why this isn't currently targeted at the gaming market (though there is some startup doing "streaming" games, I forget their name but you can play crysis!). The target here is for tasks which used to be sent off to render farms for a day or two and would return a half dozen high resolution pictures. Previously the architect had to anticipate all the possible views/angles that their clients wanted to see.

    Now you can get the same high quality ray-traced graphics in almost real time which allows the architect to change the view, lighting, etc based on the clients feedback. Heck you could even just give a pointer to your client and let them play around with in their "virtual" building without requiring them sit at your office.

    The other option is to go buy a bunch of NVIDIA quadroplex boards and setup your own render machine, but now you're tied to showing everything off to people in person, on your one machine.