Gently down the stream
It looks as if Nvidia may be gearing up to challenge AMD's Fusion render cloud, as CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off a device running high-definiition video, streaming straight over the web in Flash.
Indeed, Adobe was a guest of honour in the Nvidia chief's keynote, with John Loiacono, senior vice president of Adobe's creative solutions business unit, explaining that two years ago, Adobe had measured video streamed to desktop via Flash to be between three to four petabytes a month, whilst today it's closer to 70 petabytes a month.
As Jen-Hsun nodded in approval, Loiacono went on to say that Flash also happened to be sitting on over 1.2billion mobile handset devices worldwide, noting "we see mobile devices moving far beyond laptops and notebooks." Hmmm. Smells like Tegra.
But streaming films onto mobile handsets seems to be just one aspect of Nvidia's strategy for cloud rendering, with photorealism for enterprise being another - and a potentially more lucrative one at that.
Mental Images
One such potential money-maker is ‘iray', created by Nvidia subsidiary Mental Images, which can stream and then display a 3D image, perfectly, in real-time, using any old laptop as a thin client - the heavy-lifting work is done by stream-sided GPU(s). Light changes, reflections, textures, you name it, it materialised before our eyes in seconds. House decorators and architects rejoice.
But in case you're less into virtually tiling your kitchen and more into your lean, mean driving machines, Jen-Hsun also showed off a streamed Ferrari customisation application, said to become a standard in every Ferrari showroom. The app lets potential customers pimp out their Ferraris in minute detail, from the colour of the seat stitching, to the texture of the dashboard.
The need for speed
Speeding on to the next demo, Jen-Hsun and a researcher from German firm RTT showed the audience what wheeler-dealing was really all about, doing an "augmented reality" showcase of a Ferrari wheel.
Kneeling next to ye bog standard Ferrari tire, which just happened to roll out on stage, Huang shone a flashlight on it as a camera filmed it, transmitting the image to a screen where it was ‘enhanced' instantly, in real time, with a simulated rim, a disk brake and the Ferrari logo. But more impressive was the fact the light from the torch Jen-Hsun was holding also appeared, perfectly simulated and accurately reflected, in the rendered image.
Announcing he'd buy a new Ferrari for his collection after the show, Jen-Hsun concluded "we've now moved the GPU from being a computer graphics-centric device to being a general-purpose device."
But whether this shift towards streaming and rendering for enterprise will be good, bad or non-news for gamers, we'll just have to wait and see.
