Tuesday, October 19, 2010

OTOY and path tracing for games in the cloud UPDATE: video presentation!

Here's a link to Jules Urbach's presentation about OTOY at GTC 2010: http://www.nvidia.com/content/GTC-2010/pdfs/4008A_GTC2010.pdf

Some interesting stuff in there:

- "Games/Apps –100% in the cloud by 2014" !!! this doesn't sound too far-fetched considering the success of OnLive and the growing interest from major game publishers and developers in the cloud platform.

- "High level web services enable path-tracing and LightStage rendering in any 3D engine"

- "Crytek engine on Facebook"

Real-time path tracing and GPU cloud servers, it's a match made in heaven (or in the cloud actually) .

UPDATE: Found a link to the full video presentation from Jules Urbach at GTC in HD + there's also a Q&A session afterwards: http://www.nvidia.com/content/GTC-2010/flvs/4008_GTC2010..wmv

Notice Jules talking about unbiased rendering at 04:26 and path tracing at around 08:20!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Many thanks for posting this

I looked into the pdf and it does seem strange. What has happened to the AMD fusion render cloud. The more I look into this, I feel that perhaps Jules Urbach felt that he didn't want to restrict his otoy platform to just AMD and they didn't like that. So he left them and went to Nvidia. I don't know. But anyway does this mean Otoy is not coming this year anymore. It's now 2014 through nvidia?

Sam Lapere said...

I admit, OTOY's future is a bit "cloudy" at the moment. I don't think it's going to be Nvidia only, but it's quite clear that the exclusivity deal with AMD has ended. It could be due to problems with OpenCL, I honestly don't have a clue. Maybe the imminent release of the Radeon HD 6800 series on Oct 22 might clear up some things.

Anonymous said...

Good find. Thanks for the links. It seems sensible for OTOY to develop for Nvidia as well. Blue Mars (probably their first real customer) uses the Cry-Engine to run their virtual world. This game engine is optimized with PhyX and CUDA so ATI/AMD is shut out. For OTOY to run PC games off-the-shelf at its highest setting, both GPUs should be supported.

But if we're talking about ray-tracing and voxels, I think that's where tesselation and other secret sauce might give ATI the edge.

It seems to me that OTOY fell into the cloud biz when Jules realized that moving his real-time renderer onto massive servers pushed the image quality to cinematic levels. I remember he had experimented with 4 GPU to create those early Transformer demos. Lightstage or the Gaiking demos are way more processor heavy.

RC

Anonymous said...

Lo and behold. A very interesting interview of Jules Urbach of OTOY:

http://www.research2zero.com/Resources/Documents/R2%20Thought%20Leader%20Interview%20OTOY%20Sept%202010.pdf

RC