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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.
... like two days ago ...
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 . . .]
Kid-proof tablet..
Better demo of the capabilities here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atcIv1K_gVI&feature=related
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
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..