Nvidia's RealityServer to Offer Ubiquitous 3D Images

WesternActor writes "ExtremeTech has an interview with a couple of the folks behind Nvidia's new RealityServer platform, which purports to make photorealistic 3D images available to anyone on any computing platform, even things like smartphones. The idea is that all the rendering happens 'in the cloud,' which allows for a much wider distribution of high-quality images. RealityServer isn't released until November 30, but it looks like it could be interesting. The article has photos and a video that show it in action."

Comments

It takes chutzpah to use the term "RealityServer"

[jeffb (2.718)]

...for demoware.

Re:It takes chutzpah to use the term "RealityServe

[DeadDecoy]

It could have been a CloudServer for vaporware.

What about Data Transfer

[Monkeedude1212]

Aren't Photo-Realistic Images pretty big in size? If I want to get 30 Frames per second, how am I ever going to push 30 Photorealistic Frames through the internet - I can hardly get 5 Mb/s from my ISP.

Re:What about Data Transfer

[Monkeedude1212]

Video's pretty big - but its always compressed to a point I wouldn't call it photo realistic.

Re:What about Data Transfer

[cheesybagel]

Compression. You know, MPEG-4 AVC.

Re:What about Data Transfer

[lhoguin]

Many applications do not need 30 fps, though. For example, an house architect software would be able to use this for rendering various shots of the designed house.

Re:What about Data Transfer

[VeNoM0619]

RTFS

which purports to make photorealistic 3D images available to anyone on any computing platform, even things like smartphones. The idea is that all the rendering happens 'in the cloud,' which allows for a much wider distribution of high-quality images. RealityServer isn't released until November 30, but it looks like it could be interesting. The article has photos

Notice there is no emphasis on video or animation. This is for 3d images only. Or were you seriously hoping to play 3d realistic games on your phone?

Re:What about Data Transfer

[im_thatoneguy]

Really you wouldn't describe Netflix HD as photorealistic? Even things... originally shot on film? With a camera?

Re:What about Data Transfer

[LUH 3418]

Still, you can get fairly decent video quality at 720p on youtube nowadays, with connections that aren't so fast (mine is limited to 8mbps download). On a cellphone, you probably can't realistically get very fast speeds just yet (500 kbps?) but the screen is also much smaller. As connections get faster, approaches like this become more feasible.

Another way to see this is that Nvidia just wants to expand its marketshare. They are likely hoping that with something like this, they could sell expensive server equipment (to game companies) for you to play online games on, with the rendering being done remotely. This would make it possible for people to play 3D games that are very CPU/GPU expensives on any platform that can stream and render the video fast enough. Imagine playing WoW on your iPhone... They might just be able to sell this.

Re:What about Data Transfer

[JobyOne]

How big is your screen?

That's the real question here. "Photorealistic" (a meaningless term in the context of transferring image data) on a smartphone screen is a whole lot smaller than on my full 1920x1280 desktop monitor.

"Photorealistic" will only ever be as high resolution as the screen you view it on.

Re:What about Data Transfer

[vikstar]

Forget the data transfers, they'll increase, it's the latency that's the problem. Games using this technology will be almost useless, especially action games. Currently you get practically 0ms latency when you interact with a game, which is what makes it seem fast. If it's a multiplayer game then the only latency you get are from other people, and if they appear to go left 50ms later than when they pressed the button to go left it doesn't make a difference for you, since you don't know when they pressed the button. If you get 50ms latency on your own controls, then it's really really visible, since we have great motion vision... like T-Rexes.

Re:What about Data Transfer

[geekoid]

Yes, no one could ever get you 30 frames a second, that's why we can't watch tv shows and movies online~

Re:What about Data Transfer

[im_thatoneguy]

Not all games. Many genres would work great such as an RTS or many RPGs like WOW or Baldur's gate or any other game where the interface could be run locally on the portable's hardware and then let the server handle the rendering.

I imagine even a local 3D copy which is hidden from the user but handles all of the 3D Mechanics of detecting unit selection etc. Since it's not being shaded and it only needs collision meshes it would run fine on a cell phone. Then let the server render the well shaded and lit views.

Re:What about Data Transfer

[vikstar]

Good point, I didn't think about that way. More specifically the server could for example render expensive global illumination and then send the textures to the client, which can use simple GPUs to apply the textures to local meshes.

Stop saying "cloud"

[HockeyPuck]

FTFA:

By moving ray tracing and many other high power graphics algorithms off the client and into the cloud, lightweight-computing platforms like netbooks and smartphones can display photorealistic images in real time.

Why not just say:

By moving ray tracing and many other high power graphics algorithms off the client and onto nvidia's servers, lightweight-computing platforms like netbooks and smartphones can display photorealistic images in real time.

I guess it's just not as cool...

I wonder if this would work for cooking?

By moving cutting, peeling, baking, frying and many other food preparation techniques off the dining room table and into the food cloud (kitchen), lightweight-eating platforms like TV trays and paper plates can be used to eat off of in real time.

Re:Stop saying "cloud"

[HBI]

For me, I just hate the marketing cocksuckers who come up with these terms. Some asshole saw too many Visio diagrams with a big cloud in the middle representing the intervening networks and decided that there are computers out there that will magically do what they want. Every time I hear the term 'cloud' I think 'botnet'. Because essentially, that's the only thing extant that resembles what they are proposing.

Re:Stop saying "cloud"

[Spad]

Shhhhh! You'll ruin the scam (of convincing uninformed people that an old idea is a new idea by renaming it).

Thin client -> fat client -> thin client -> fat client. *yawn*

Every time, this happens; things move away from the client for "performance" and "flexibility" and "scalability" reasons and then everyone realises it's a pain because of the lack of control or reliability and by that point the client hardware's moved on to the point where it can do the job better anyway so everyone moves back to it.

Re:Stop saying "cloud"

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Thin client -> fat client -> thin client -> fat client. *yawn*

We were forced to stop using the term "fat client' here at Big Bank; our end-users got offended when they heard the term, apparently they thought we were talking about the /users/ and not the systems... Instead, we must call it "thick client"* -- which is odd, since if they interpret it the same way it's just as insulting from another direction.

*go ahead, laugh, but it really happened!

Re:Stop saying "cloud"

[HockeyPuck]

We were forced to stop using the term "fat client' here at Big Bank; our end-users got offended when they heard the term, apparently they thought we were talking about the /users/ and not the systems... Instead, we must call it "thick client"* -- which is odd, since if they interpret it the same way it's just as insulting from another direction.

You forgot how we used to refer to IDE devices as either a "master" or a "slave"... this wasn't back in the 50s either.

Re:Stop saying "cloud"

[nurb432]

Don't worry, in 6 months we will have another buzz word we can hate and cloud will be history.

Re:Stop saying "cloud"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm all about the "river computing" system. You dump whatever crap you want in, and its downstream's problem.

Re:Uh oh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not your personal army.

Re:Does it serve up glasses too?

[Rockoon]

I believe the term you were looking for is Stereo Images
,br> Anyways, this is just nVidia's attempt to come up with market for its soon to be irrelevant GPU business.

note: I actualy LIKE nVidia video cards, but the writing is on the wall. AMD is going to be putting out a veritable monster with CPU + GPU on a single chip, and Intel is going to be doing similar with larrabee (more general purpose, tho.)

nVidia can't compete without its own line of x64 chips, and they are just too far away from that capability right now.

Games make no sense...

[GameMaster]

Wanna know what playing games on a system like this would be like? Go to your favorite video streaming site and change the player settings (if you can) to 0 caching. The end result is, approximately, what you'd get here. The internet is a very unstable place. The only reason online games work is that programmers have gotten really good at developing latency hiding tricks which all stop working when the video rendering is done by the server. And, don't think this will just effect fps games. Just because it doesn't make or break a game like WOW doesn't mean you'd want the stuttering game-play you'd have to put up with. As far as I can see, the only kind of game this would be useful for it photo-realistic checkers.