NVIDIA announces CloudLight, a cloud-based "system for amortizing indirect
lighting in real-time rendering." They say this new 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."
This video offers a
look at what this means in case the following explanation isn't crystal clear:
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.