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.

Comments

Hours and hours

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hours and hours

[adolf]

Whatever.

I used to do some raytracing stuff with POV under MS-DOS back in the day, on hardware far slower than the 6-year-old Palm Zire that I recently retired. Nowadays, the iPhone/droid/whatever is way faster.

Was it slow? Of course. But it was nowhere near "months." Long hours, or days -- yes. Not months. Nowhere near. Especially if I were targeting something the size of a modern mobile screen, instead of the fairly high-resolution stuff I was interested in back then.

[I already moderated this article, and posting will undo all of that. Oh, well -- that's the bane of the lack of the -1, Disagree moderation . . .]

Re:Hours and hours

[Romancer]

Better demo of the capabilities here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atcIv1K_gVI&feature=related

Re:Hours and hours

[Fred_A]

I'm thinking rendering a birds eye shot in LOTR would have taken a damn long time on a phone...

How come ? Did LOTR feature birds with unusually complex irises ? For, say, most eagles, a yellow disc, a black disk and you're done. Takes milliseconds.

Granted, the rest of the bird might take a bit longer.

Re:Yay!

[ArchieBunker]

Don't forget the six minute ping time!

Didn't we see this slashvertisement before

[tomhudson]

... like two days ago ...

This is Old Technology

[webbiedave]

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.

One question: Why?

[adolf]

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.

Good for VR

[cowtamer]

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].

Re:Who cares

[maxwell demon]

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 :-)