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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."

8 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. No more!! by thisnamestoolong · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Please stop talking about "cloud" computing -- it is one of the dumbest buzzwords I have ever heard in my entire life -- not to mention the fact that it is a totally meaningless term.

    --
    To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
    1. Re:No more!! by Sockatume · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's got a very well-defined meaning: performing computing and storing data on an internet-connected server from an internet-connected client. It's a new term for, arguably, a very old thing, coined because the average end-user these days isn't familiar with the idea of doing their computing from a dumb terminal.

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      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    2. Re:No more!! by thisnamestoolong · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Umm... that was pretty much my whole point. It makes me want to claw out my own eyes when I hear these jack off tech companies talking about this new "cloud" computing phenomenon -- it is only a new (and exceptionally stupid) buzzword for something that we have been doing for a long, long time. It is not "cloud" computing -- it's just fucking regular old computing -- with CPU's and memory and HDD's and the like -- it just happens to be taking place somewhere else.

      --
      To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
    3. Re:No more!! by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 4, Insightful

      with CPU's and memory and HDD's and the like -- it just happens to be taking place somewhere else.

      That's an important distinction.

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      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  2. Pay to Play? by zcold · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Awesome! So instead of buying a video card, I will now have an option to pay yet another monthly fee to play games? Im so excited!

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    you know you can fry stuff putting things into things that dont like the things you put into it...
  3. Incomparable to OnLive - different goals by Animaether · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Why is rendering clouds so important? by suso · · Score: 4, Funny

    The gaming industry has been trying to jump start the flight simulator market again.

  5. Latency by gr8_phk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    There's one big reason - latency. 30 FPS is one frame every 33.333ms. What's your ping time? Add the rendering time to that, and that's what your interactivity is going to look like. Remember that many games have ways of hiding the latency between client and server - in particular they know the players POV and the static environment, so those things can be handled very well.

    As someone else said, cloud rendering is fine for making movies. It's not viable for games. And besides, if a GPU can do this stuff in real time, why do we need to push it into the cloud? This sounds like OTOY all over again.

    BTW, CPUs will be doing realtime ray tracing soon anyway - give me a bunch of bulldozer cores and a frame buffer.