NVIDIA's to deliver realtime rendering on Netbook/IPhones

[Sabre]

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NVIDIA demonstrated RealityServer 3 at their web event, with relatively mixed results. There's no doubt that the Tesla server off in the atmosphere shot back gorgeous visuals, at speeds that would take weeks to render on the small netbook the company used for its demonstration, but the speed of the updates didn't remotely come close to "approaching an interactive gaming experience," unless said experience involved attempting to run Doom on your 16MHz 386 with the screen size set at maximum. Update times varied from 10-20 seconds, and that's a significant lag when discussing online usage patterns.

To be fair, NVIDIA's backend Tesla server was built with just 16 GPUs, but said server presumably had just one client. Photorealism levels of detail were a fine way to display the capabilities of the iray rendering engine, but probably had a negative impact on the actual service demo—a bit less detail and a lot more speed would've made the rendering demonstration more impressive. Ideally, visitors to a company's website would be able to select a level of detail between the speed and quality of a given program—NVIDIA didn't address if this is the case, or if the device-agnostic nature of the platform means it would default to a one-size fits all.

Only thing, the frame rates are not playable.... yet. Reminds me of the game company that is trying to do this over broadband... They've had some fairly good looking demos though.