NVIDIA Targeting Real-Time Cloud Rendering 184
MojoKid writes "To date, the majority of cloud computing applications have emphasized storage, group collaboration, or the ability to share information and applications with large groups of people. So far, there's been no push to make GPU power available in a cloud computing environment — but that's something NVIDIA hopes to change. The company announced version 3.0 of its RealityServer today. The new revision sports hardware-level 3D acceleration, a new rendering engine (iray), and the ability to create 'images of photorealistic scenes at rates approaching an interactive gaming experience.' NVIDIA claims that the combination of RealityServer and its Tesla hardware can deliver those photorealistic scenes on your workstation or your cell phone, with no difference in speed or quality. Instead of relying on a client PC to handle the task of 3D rendering, NVIDIA wants to move the capability into the cloud, where the task of rendering an image or scene is handed off to a specialized Tesla server. Then that server performs the necessary calculations and fires back the finished product to the client."
Re:Stupidest idea ever (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, the new name is supposed to be for the specific case of moving traditionally local computing tasks off to farms. Doing a movie on a remote render-farm is hardly cloud computing, but re-encoding your holiday video is.
Latency aside, my worry is that you're buying a gaming timeshare. It's cheaper to pay for the computing time you actually use, in principle. However online game communities depend on lots of people playing at the same time, which is exactly the sort of thing that would make online gaming uneconomical. Example:
Somebody's got to pay for the shedloads of hardware.
If you have six users, and their usage is distributed over the whole day so each is on for 4 hours with no overlap, then you only have to invest in one "virtual games PC" worth of hardware for those six users. You've got six paying customers for an investment in one games PC! Charge them each a quarter of the cost of an up-to-date games machine over a year, and there's your profit margin (you get back 1.5 times the cost of the hardware), and the value for the end user (they only have to pay 0.25 the cost of the hardware).
If you have six users, and four of them are online at the same time because they're in the US and Western Europe and playing against each other, then you need four "virtual games PCs" worth of hardware to handle that peak demand. The rest of the day, you have two users, sharing the four computers. So over the day you're bringing in an average of three users over four "virtual games PCs" that you've invested in. It's hard to find a way to make that profitable, except having off-peak discounts to try to smooth out the usage patterns.
I guess what I'm saying is that when it comes to gaming, computing power isn't fungible.
Re:Bandwidth & Latency? (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is why this isn't currently targeted at the gaming market (though there is some startup doing "streaming" games, I forget their name but you can play crysis!). The target here is for tasks which used to be sent off to render farms for a day or two and would return a half dozen high resolution pictures. Previously the architect had to anticipate all the possible views/angles that their clients wanted to see.
Now you can get the same high quality ray-traced graphics in almost real time which allows the architect to change the view, lighting, etc based on the clients feedback. Heck you could even just give a pointer to your client and let them play around with in their "virtual" building without requiring them sit at your office.
The other option is to go buy a bunch of NVIDIA quadroplex boards and setup your own render machine, but now you're tied to showing everything off to people in person, on your one machine.