Slashdot Mirror
Cloud-Based, Ray-Traced Games On Intel Tablets
An anonymous reader writes "After Intel showed a ray traced version of Wolfenstein last year running cloud-based streamed to a laptop the company that has just recently announced its shift to the mobile market shows now their research project Lalso running on various x86-tablets with 5 to 10 inch screens. The heavy calculations are performed by a cloud consisting of a machine with a Knights Ferry card (32 cores) inside. The achieved frame rates are around 20-30 fps."
I've got a CloudPad running CloudOS 0.99. It is freakign cloudtastic.
It may barely work with desktops (if you're close to the servers), but with mobile devices I'm quite sure that they're unplayable in reality.
The first product codenamed "Knights Corner" will target Intel's 22nm process and use Moore's Law to scale to more than 50 Intel cores.
Nonsense marketing babble. Moore's Law is predictive. You can't use it to MAKE anything happen.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
or gtfo
Who cares if it looks awesome if latency sucks. I'd rather have SuperNES StarFox quality graphics with no lag than ray-traced graphics with horrible latency. It can be reduced, but I don't yet believe it's possible to make it unnoticeable. I guess I'll believe it when I see it.
Will this be news everytime a new device is targeted?
Wasn't Wolfenstein ray traced to begin with?
Just yesterday, I used the law of gravity to make myself fall down. So there!
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
This story would have been "Bluetooth-Based Game blablabl" a couple of years ago.
So, basically Intel is saying, fuck Online with its 100ms lag times! We can go for SECONDS! No MINUTES even. Infinite lag! We can do it!
All you need is to run an old game on hardware that can easily run the real game with an insane data plan.
The bubble is indeed back, remember all those ideas of sites that wanted 100kb avatar images on real time updating forum posting sites with 500kb flash animated signatures? When most people were happy with a 56kb modem? Served from Sun hardware? Well this is the same thing.
I am quite willing to accept that you can render a game beautifully on a server. I am quite willing to believe tablet can be a lot cheaper if they only got to show a movie. I am even willing to believe that response time over the internet can in theory be fast enough not to produce outlandish lag in ideal circumstances.
In real life?
It is interesting geek stuff but the same thing that killed so many "great" ideas during the last bubble still is there. Bandwidth and latency are still not solved enough for this. We now finally can do the instant messaging people had dreamed up around 2000. 10 years later. (Check how long it has been since your mobile phone became truly capable of doing IM without endless waiting or insanely high prices)
Another piece of proof? Slashdot itself. Take the new "ajax" method of posting. No feedback, endless lag, errors, missing posts. It is clear what they wanted but the tech just ain't there yet. For the instant feel to work you need servers that can process a request in a handful of miliseconds, not seconds Mr Slashdot.
Nice idea Mr Intel, now get out your mobile phone and make a post on slashdot. Then you will know how unrealistic your dream is.
There is a reason we carry crotch burning CPU's and insane amounts of storage with us. Moore's law doesn't apply to the internet. AT&T won't allow it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I thought it was bad that the Blackberry tablet requires your phone to get email and function correctly. This Intel tablet requires a 32 core 'cloud' machine? Am I going to need a co-location service provider for my backend to ensure I can play a tablet based fps? Or is Intel planning to provide unlimited cloud capacity for each low power (and low cost) tablet processor they sell?
If this could work over a wireless lan to a beefy desktop computer it might be feasible.
They are streaming content to a device; in other words, calculation happen on a central server and your device acts as a (somewhat) dumb terminal.
It's the mainframe world of Multics again, only 30 years later, much more complex, and servicing trivialities instead that business critical apps.
The "cloud" has become a buzzword for many, but deep down it's just some central servers doing the grunt-work, and you displaying that data. The reverse of a decentralized, democratic and transparent system; more control to the companies, less control to the user.
42.
I'm a big fan of real-time ray tracing, but this doesn't sound all that exciting, considering that about three years ago I was able to play a real-time ray-traced game on a middle-of-the-road laptop. Resolution and framerate weren't great, but it was playable. The game I refer to is Outbound an open-source game based on the Arauna engine.
It's great that this is on Intel's radar, but whenever Intel demonstrates some new real-time ray-tracing demo that requires a cluster of machines, or some other kind of expensive, specialized hardware, I just think they've kind of missed the boat. We can already do that sort of thing on an ordinary desktop. (The linked site is down, so perhaps there's more to this announcement than the slashdot summary would lead me to believe.)
Bull. The Wii is dead, nobody(*) wants one or plays the one they have. That's why Nintendo is hurrying out with a new console while the Xbox/PS3 have been around much longer and will continue to be around for a few more years.
Gameplay _and_ graphics matter.
* - Yes, I know there are a few wierdos out there who do still play their Wii.
Ummm polygons are faster than what? Spheres? NURBs?
Perhaps you meant scanline/raster rendering is faster than ray tracing? Both use polygons though...
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Would it be feasible to pre-render every possible scene in the game and then just throw that up based on which direction the user moves? (I realize you'd then have to superimpose the bad guys over the screen, but that's what the original Wolf3d did anyway.) It would be a lot of computation up front, but then you wouldn't be having to have the cloud computer constantly render a new frame. (Possibly some that's it's already rendered).
Or would that take so much time that it's not worth it?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Maybe not for an FPS or racer but if it was a really cool Starcraft killer that would have interesting possibilities. Handle the 2D GUI with the tablet processor and then raytrace a photorealistic game engine. [url=http://www.cheapesthandbagsforsale.com/goods-182.html]Chanel Fashion Handbags Ball Grain Leather Red 47976[/url] [url=http://www.cheapesthandbagsforsale.com/goods-176.html]chanel handbags collection[/url] [url=http://www.cheapesthandbagsforsale.com/goods-182.html]chanel handbags for cheap[/url]