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Nvidia's RealityServer 3.0 Demonstrated
robotsrule writes "As we discussed last month, RealityServer 3.0 is Nvidia's attempt to bring photo-realistic 3D images to any Internet-connected device, including the likes of Android and iPhone. RealityServer 3.0 pushes the CPU-killing 3D rendering process to a high-power, GPU based, back-end server farm based on Nvidia's Tesla or Quadro architectures. The resulting images are then streamed back to the client device in seconds; such images would normally take hours to compute even on a high-end unassisted workstation. Extreme Tech has up an article containing an interview with product managers from Nvidia and Mental Images, whose iray application is employed in a two-minute video demonstration of near-real-time ray-traced rendering." Once you get to the Extreme Tech site, going to the printable version will help to preserve sanity.
such images would normally take hours to compute even on a high-end unassisted workstation
Now, they take hours to download over your GSM network.
Don't forget the six minute ping time!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
... like two days ago ...
I got some reality served to my phone last week in the form of a break up text from my girlfriend. It took four months to render.
Summit, in TFA, goes on at different points about a car application -- ie, a system that one might use to preview and/or order new cars. Pick your wheels, your paint, your trim, your seats, and get a few views of the thing in short order*.
All I can think is that if it were really so important for Ford to give you a raytraced view of the car you're ordering, that the options are so limited that all of them could easily be pre-rendered and send all together. How big are a few dozen JPEGs, anyway?
Even if a few dozen JPEGs isn't enough: Don't we do this already with car manufacturer websites, using little more than bog-standard HTML and a whole bunch of prerendered images? In what way would having this stuff be rendered in real-time be any more advantageous than doing it in advance?
Do we really need some manner of fancy client-server process, with some badass cloud architecture behind it, when at the end of the day, we're only going to be shown artificat-filled progressive-JPEG still frames with a finite number of possibilities?
Everyone, please, go look at the demo video. Neat stuff, I guess, but it's boring. Office with blinds open; same office, blinds partly open. Then, closed. Office at night. Different angle. Woo. It's simple math to figure out how many options there are, and it's just as simple to see that it's easier, cheaper, and better to just go ahead and render ALL of them in advance and be done with it and just serve out static images from then on out.
If I'm really missing the point here (and I hope I am), would someone please enlighten me as to how this might actually, you know, solve a problem?
*: Just like a lot of auto manufacturer's websites already do TODAY, using only HTML, static images, and a sprinkling of javascript or (less often) flash.
Kid-proof tablet..
dude, think of the porno
One answer: Gaming. :)
OK, one more reason: 3D Work at home. I do that (as an amateur) and sometimes even my pretty fast machine takes hours at a time to render some scenes. I could as well send the file to RealityServer 3.0 and then render my scenes faster via a web browser, without having to wait hours and hours. That would be great for several reasons:
1. While I wait for my machine to render a scene, I do other things and more than often I ask myself what the hell was that thing that I awas trying to accomplish? With RealityServer, no more (long) interruptions.
2. Power consumption: a CPU at max thrust will eat more power and generate more heat. I'd rather not have it do that.
3. Higher efficiency. Hours of waiting equals lost productivity.
Useless technology? Maybe. But thjat's what they said about the train and the plane, back in the days. Time will tell. For now, new tech? Bring it on! The more, the merrier. Hey, at least we get to choose
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
This is a great advancement for high end virtual reality systems, but the current state of "rendering in the cloud" sounds like either a solution looking for a problem or the wrong application of the technology.
On a future Internet with sub 30 ms latency, this would ROCK. [You could have low-powered wearable augmented reality devices, "Rainbows End" style gaming, and maybe even the engine behind a Snow Crash style metaverse that remote users can log in to].
NVidia is NOT doing itself a favor with the lame empty office with boring blinds demo. They'd better come up with something sexier quick if they want to sell this (and I don't mean the remote avatar someone posted a link to).
This reminds me of the "thin client" hype circa 1999. "Thin clients" exist now in the form of AJAX enabled web browsers, Netbooks, phones etc, but that technology took about a decade to come to fruition and found a different (and more limited) niche than all the hype a decade ago [they were supposed to replace worker's PCs for word processing, spreadsheets, etc].
NVidia make shit, their drivers are horrible.
Since I don't live in an area where lots of NVidia employees are driving around, I don't care too much about their driving skills :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The uses are probably not yet understood. This is cool technology and some of the tens of millions of developers will find good use for it. The interesting bit is that you gain access to a huge render farm without buying a lot of servers. If your load is uneven, this service will save you a lot of money (and power too).
Anyhow, from the top of my head: Cars, architecture, city planning, visualizing climate change, next-generation GPS navigation devices.
Stop the brainwash
But you wouldn't really need even SD, much less HD for that, would you? From what I've seen they use pretty crude story boards or very basic computer animation just to get the fell for it, and then after everything is approved go full res. So I'm afraid I'm with the other poster, I just don't get it.
Most folks I know don't give a crap about high def gaming on their phones, they are happy with those "lunch break" style games. So I really don't see the "killer app" this is supposed to sell. And considering how much major money this is gonna cost, and Intel and AMD having pretty much locked out nVidia by having their own cheaper "full stack" approach with CPU+GPU+north/south bridge, I just don't see how nVidia thinks this is gonna be the killer app. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope that I am for sake of competition, but more and more it looks to me like nVidia is grasping at straws. Can they even sell chips for Core I 5/7 yet? And last I checked all the big seller AMD boards had ATI chipsets.
So this to me looks like a way to try to make a new market because their existing one is drying up fast. I wish them luck but I just don't see this as the "killer app" that will save the company.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's called RealityServer 3.0 That has the "buzzwords" of a version number, Server in the name and the ultimate buzzword "Reality"