VG247

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.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/07/29/nvidia-cloudlight-demo-shows-cloud-based-lighting-tech/

looks nice but is in no way practical any time soon

You could use it at 200ms latency, but that means little things like beam weapons starting to illuminate the surroundings some frames after you started the shot, your shadow popping up some frames after you stepped into sunlight and so on might have a bit of a toll on immersion. No idea how big the influence is without having tried that myself though (and it might vary alot for different people).

For those more technically inclined

http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/CloudLight13/Crassin13Cloud.pdf

No wonder Epic ditched Voxel cone tracing in UE4, it is a real performance hog.

"We consider the town or city-wide scale to be the most plausible
deployment scenarios. One could envision existing Internet access
and content providers extending their local server nodes with 3D
rendering capabilities in the same way that they already have ex-
tended those nodes to support media caching, digital goods stores,
video streaming services, and massive multiplayer games. Our
scalability results are reported for the college campus network be-
cause it provided a network under real-world load circumstances on
which we could physically manage 50 client machines."

"The choice of global illumination algorithm has major implications
for target bandwidth and client devices. Our voxel approach allows
extreme amortization of resources and places almost no computa-
tional burden on client devices. However, voxels do not scale to
large scenes. We mitigate this limitation via a multiresolution ap-
proach, underestimating distant indirect illumination in the process."

"Irradiance mapping requires the lowest bandwidth of our algo-
rithms, with latency lower than voxels due to utilization of client
computational resources. It also integrates easily into existing game
engines. Unfortunately, irradiance maps require a global geometric
parameterization. While decades of research have provided a mul-
titude of parameterization techniques, these do not address prob-
lems specific to global illumination: handling light leaking where
texels lie below walls or keeping world-space samples close in tex-
ture space for efficient clustering into basis functions. We see the
authoring burden of parameterization as one reason developers are
moving towards other techniques, e.g., light probes."

"In comparison to irradiance maps, photons require significantly
more bandwidth and client computation; however, they eliminate
the need for a global parameterization and allow smaller, progres-
sive updates that enable fast reaction to significant scene changes."

"For our scenes, we tuned batch size to maximize transferred lighting
without delaying updates more than a frame over base network la-
tency. With increasing client connections, we reach maximal band-
with quite quickly; while we can easily afford emitting additional
photons on the server, this would increase bandwidth (and hence
latency) for every batch of photons sent to clients. This suggests
we could afford additional computation to select more intelligent
photons, e.g., using photon relaxation to compute better photons.
Alternatively, finding an optimal photon compression would reduce
per-photon bandwidth. This is a somewhat unique situation for in-
teractive global illumination techniques: having excess computa-
tion to spend on optimizing sampling"

I may be wrong here...but correct me if I am.

Let's say, for example, Microsoft releases the Xbox One with no Cloud-Powered gaming until..let's say..2017.
By 2017(random year), wouldn't everyone need some sort of broadband internet with no lag? Or would the Graphical quality just fluctuate?

Of course, by then, Google fiber will be in more locations and 1gbps internet will be pretty affordable.

Google Fiber is in the US only, AFAIK. - Consoles are world wide.
1Gbps internet access is a pipedream for the next decade for most of the planets population, especially those who are still stuck with copper based broadband technologies.

Cloud-powered gaming can be done on the current consoles, if it was such a big ticketed performance option, more developers would have used it this generation.
It simply has 2 big fat caviets that really prevents the technology from shining, one being bandwidth and the other being latency with the latter bound by the laws of physics, the only way to reduce it is to have servers near-by.

Impractical yet.