Nvidia CloudLight demo shows cloud-based lighting tech
Nvidia CloudLight is an inexpensive way for developers to apply real-time lighting effects into their game using the cloud. I wont try and act like I understand how it all works as the research paper published online is very technical and I don't ever want to insult you good people. Check out the video here.
This diagram explains how the effects get from Nvidia's CloudLight base to the games using it and again, it's too technical for my feeble journo-brain to comprehend, so check it out and let us know what you think.
Speaking of technical, here's Nvidia's own explanation of how CloudLight works:
"We introduce CloudLight, a system for computing indirect lighting in the Cloud to support real-time rendering for interactive 3D applications on a user's local device. CloudLight maps the traditional graphics pipeline onto a distributed system. That differs from a single-machine renderer in three fundamental ways.
"First, the mapping introduces potential asymmetry between computational resources available at the Cloud and local device sides of the pipeline. Second, compared to a hardware memory bus, the network introduces relatively large latency and low bandwidth between certain pipeline stages. Third, for multi-user virtual environments, a Cloud solution can amortize expensive global illumination costs across users.
"Our new CloudLight framework explores tradeoffs in different partitions of the global illumination workload between Cloud and local devices, with an eye to how available network and computational power influence design decisions and image quality. We describe the tradeoffs and characteristics of mapping three known lighting algorithms to our system and demonstrate scaling for up to 50 simultaneous CloudLight users."
Does CloudLight sound like a cheaper option of getting lighting effects into a developer's game? Let us know what you think below.
Thanks GamesHQMedia.