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.
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
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.
Intel's PR department keeps releasing press statements and journalists keep eating it up.
Input latency is a real issue. I'm not impressed that Intel can take a bank of servers to produce content for one client. The business model for that just frankly doesn't work yet, and even when the business model for that does work, input latency will remain.
Write a story when they solve input latency.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Ray-cast to begin with. But I think Voxelstein 3D was raytraced before Intel got around to doing it.
Isn't it just one server with a 32-core chip?
I never thought OnLive would work, but it kinda, sorta does. Over my office connection.
Not my home connection, that's too slow. Or my friend's connection, which is fast enough, but suffers from occasional hiccups that break the stream... but at work, it works great, so this should work anywhere that a mobile device can receive and sustain a 5Mbps stream of data without going over their data cap in a month.
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.
The algorithm used rays, but not in the sense that ray-tracing uses. Wolfenstein would fire one ray for each horizontal column on the screen, to see where it intersected with the wall. That would be 320 rays for the full screen, and was why the maps were effectively 2d. Ray-tracing, of course, uses at least one ray per pixel.
Just yesterday, I used the law of gravity to make myself fall down. So there!
No you didn't. You used the law of gravity to predict that you would fall down. You utilized gravity to make it happen.