Nvidia's RealityServer to Offer Ubiquitous 3D Images 82
WesternActor writes "ExtremeTech has an interview with a couple of the folks behind Nvidia's new RealityServer platform, which purports to make photorealistic 3D images available to anyone on any computing platform, even things like smartphones. The idea is that all the rendering happens 'in the cloud,' which allows for a much wider distribution of high-quality images. RealityServer isn't released until November 30, but it looks like it could be interesting. The article has photos and a video that show it in action."
What about Data Transfer (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't Photo-Realistic Images pretty big in size? If I want to get 30 Frames per second, how am I ever going to push 30 Photorealistic Frames through the internet - I can hardly get 5 Mb/s from my ISP.
Re:What about Data Transfer (Score:3, Insightful)
Video's pretty big - but its always compressed to a point I wouldn't call it photo realistic.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop saying "cloud" (Score:5, Insightful)
Shhhhh! You'll ruin the scam (of convincing uninformed people that an old idea is a new idea by renaming it).
Thin client -> fat client -> thin client -> fat client. *yawn*
Every time, this happens; things move away from the client for "performance" and "flexibility" and "scalability" reasons and then everyone realises it's a pain because of the lack of control or reliability and by that point the client hardware's moved on to the point where it can do the job better anyway so everyone moves back to it.
Re:What about Data Transfer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What about Data Transfer (Score:2, Insightful)
Many applications do not need 30 fps, though. For example, an house architect software would be able to use this for rendering various shots of the designed house.
Re:What about Data Transfer (Score:3, Insightful)
which purports to make photorealistic 3D images available to anyone on any computing platform, even things like smartphones. The idea is that all the rendering happens 'in the cloud,' which allows for a much wider distribution of high-quality images. RealityServer isn't released until November 30, but it looks like it could be interesting. The article has photos
Notice there is no emphasis on video or animation. This is for 3d images only. Or were you seriously hoping to play 3d realistic games on your phone?
Re:What about Data Transfer (Score:4, Insightful)
Really you wouldn't describe Netflix HD as photorealistic? Even things... originally shot on film? With a camera?
Re:Does it serve up glasses too? (Score:3, Insightful)
note: I actualy LIKE nVidia video cards, but the writing is on the wall. AMD is going to be putting out a veritable monster with CPU + GPU on a single chip, and Intel is going to be doing similar with larrabee (more general purpose, tho.)
nVidia can't compete without its own line of x64 chips, and they are just too far away from that capability right now.
Re:Stop saying "cloud" (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry, in 6 months we will have another buzz word we can hate and cloud will be history.
Re:What about Data Transfer (Score:3, Insightful)
Another way to see this is that Nvidia just wants to expand its marketshare. They are likely hoping that with something like this, they could sell expensive server equipment (to game companies) for you to play online games on, with the rendering being done remotely. This would make it possible for people to play 3D games that are very CPU/GPU expensives on any platform that can stream and render the video fast enough. Imagine playing WoW on your iPhone... They might just be able to sell this.
Re:It takes chutzpah to use the term "RealityServe (Score:1, Insightful)
Any "new" technology that is marketed with the phrase "cloud computing" is starting to get a really bad reputation with software developers.
The "cloud" is the sort of idea that managers and other fucking morons like that think is totally great, but those of us who actually have to work with such systems know how shitty most of them are.
"Cloud computing" is this year's version last year's "web services", "SOA" and "SaaS". So many bold claims, but in the end nothing but a steaming pile of fecal matter pushed by the peckers in marketing.
I wonder what next year's stupidity is going to be. I wonder what radical claims the marketing fools will make, only to find out that what they propose is stupid, costly and inefficient. There's just so much anticipation!
Re:What about Data Transfer (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point, I didn't think about that way. More specifically the server could for example render expensive global illumination and then send the textures to the client, which can use simple GPUs to apply the textures to local meshes.