Nvidia's RealityServer 3.0 Demonstrated 91
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.
Re:Hours and hours (Score:3, Insightful)
One question: Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hours and hours (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One question: Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
dude, think of the porno
Re:One question: Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
OK, one more reason: 3D Work at home. I do that (as an amateur) and sometimes even my pretty fast machine takes hours at a time to render some scenes. I could as well send the file to RealityServer 3.0 and then render my scenes faster via a web browser, without having to wait hours and hours. That would be great for several reasons:
1. While I wait for my machine to render a scene, I do other things and more than often I ask myself what the hell was that thing that I awas trying to accomplish? With RealityServer, no more (long) interruptions.
2. Power consumption: a CPU at max thrust will eat more power and generate more heat. I'd rather not have it do that.
3. Higher efficiency. Hours of waiting equals lost productivity.
Useless technology? Maybe. But thjat's what they said about the train and the plane, back in the days. Time will tell. For now, new tech? Bring it on! The more, the merrier. Hey, at least we get to choose
Re:Hours and hours (Score:3, Insightful)
A car model will fill about 4GB of RAM while rendering. Does your phone have 4 GB of nice highspeed RAM? Nope? Ok you'll be swapping to slow memory. It takes a modern quad core with 8GB of RAM about let's say 5 hours to render a 1200x1200 rendering. Mobile screens are a quarter that so 5/16 = ~20 minutes. Now let's say a mobile phone now a days is about 1/100th the speed of our quad core 8GB modern system. Even generously giving it only a 1/100th speed hit which is probably 10x-100x off , you're looking at about a day and a half to render on your iPhone. Honestly I would expect a week. Truly honestly I would expect it to overflow its cache and crash immediately, I don't think it would even be possible to load into memory. But hey a week! That's... interactive...
Too specific (Score:3, Insightful)
The uses are probably not yet understood. This is cool technology and some of the tens of millions of developers will find good use for it. The interesting bit is that you gain access to a huge render farm without buying a lot of servers. If your load is uneven, this service will save you a lot of money (and power too).
Anyhow, from the top of my head: Cars, architecture, city planning, visualizing climate change, next-generation GPS navigation devices.
Re:Bad name, no buzz? (Score:3, Insightful)