Offloading part of light rendering to remote servers

[ZZZ]

 

Nvidia recently published this. Pretty neat. But pretty unusable in games because I don't think any game maker is willing to trade heavy lighting computation for latency and possible "what if online goes down?".

Edited October 7, 2013 by 0kelvin

[DrywallDreams]

Sponza Atrium, AKA "Prepare to see some fancy lighting!"

[AlexM]

Reminds me of the XBox1 thing where they said the system would be something like X times more powerful using the cloud.

 

Anyways I'm highly skeptical of this method. Even if you entirely rule out any latency concerns there are hardware cost concerns and bandwidth cost concerns. I notice on that demo they say the server is running a Titan. Imagine a game required at least that for offline rendering. Now the publisher has to buy enough titans to support all concurrent players. At the very worst that's like buying a 900$ piece of hardware for someone who bought a 50$ game.

 

Of course in reality not everyone would be playing the console at the same time but the costs associated with rendering hardware and bandwidth make me wonder what company would want to do this.

 

Anyways all that is irrelevant if they are recomputing radiance every frame. 200msec is a lifetime compared how long it would take to transfer data across a local bus.

[Rick_D]

this doesn't seem like it's aimed towards videogames at all, though, so why bl;ah bah fuck it fuck you lel