Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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!
you know you can fry stuff putting things into things that dont like the things you put into it...
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.
The gaming industry has been trying to jump start the flight simulator market again.
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.