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AMD Reveals Cloud Supercomputer, Plans to Stream 'Next-Gen' Video Games via Server-side Rendering
by Chris Faylor, Jan 09, 2009 9:00am PSTDuring a presentation at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, computer hardware manufacturer AMD and middleware developer OTOY unveiled plans for a new supercomputer they believe will revolutionize entertainment.
By calculating all relevant data sever-side and then streaming the results to online devices, AMD claims the platform can bring video games and other "graphically-intensive applications" to "virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser without making the device rapidly deplete battery life or struggle to process the content."
"Imagine playing the most visually intensive first person shooter game at the highest image quality settings on your cell phone without ever having to download and install the software, or use up valuable storage space or battery life with compute-intensive tasks," teased AMD digital media and entertainment director Charlie Boswell.
In the announcement, video game publisher Electronic Arts expressed its optimism, saying that it looks "forward to the new customers we can reach and the new interactive expressions that emerge from revolutionary technology like the AMD Fusion Render Cloud," and was joined on-stage by Lucasfilm, Dell and HP.
A demonstration of the technology saw the EA-published, Pandemic-developed Mercenaries 2: World In Flames streamed to a HP Pavilion dv2 notebook.
Boswell detailed another possible use, suggesting that users could watch a movie on their cell phone, then "seamlessly" continue the movie on their HDTV in full resolution when they get home. The supercomputer is also said to provide "remote real-time rendering of film and visual effects graphics."
Dubbed the "AMD Fusion Render Cloud," the supercomputer will be powered by AMD Phenom II processors, AMD 790 chipsets and ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics processors. OTOY noted plans for the system to be ready by the second half of 2009, but it was unclear if OTOY was referencing its software or the supercomputer itself.
"Gaming companies can use the AMD Fusion Render Cloud for developing and deploying next-generation game content, to serve up virtual world games with unlimited photo-realistic detail, and take advantage of new delivery channels as open and diverse as the web itself," boasted AMD.
Comments
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Let's say... 1920x71080 resolution (1080p), 24-bit color, 60 fps...
1920 * 1080 pixels = 2073600 pixels
786432 pixels * 24 bits/pixel = 49766400 bits
49766400bits / 8 bits/byte = 6220800 bytes
6220800 bytes / 1024 bytes/kB = 6075kB per frame
6075kb kb/frame * 60 frames/sec = 364500 kb/sec
That's like 360 mb per sec? Who has that kind of throughput? Add to that the latency of the connection...
I've very curious to see how this works... Of course, my math could be entirely off.
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On a serious note: I think an idea like this can't take place on this kind of level with our current technology. Did anyone ask how many people they had playing on that Mercs 2 game? Was it a 30-man server? Or was it just a duplex connection? I could see something like this happening with future tech (and I mean, FUTURE), but not with current physical and cost limitations, as much as it would be cool to headshot someone on my cell phone.
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I waited until the Phenoms came out to upgrade my computer because I've always liked supporting AMD since their CPUs were usually more bang for the buck. The Phenoms were a fucking flop though, so I bought a Core 2 Duo instead and OCd it by 50%.
I worry about lack of competition in the desktop CPU market. And I fail to see how Cloud is going to help AMD stay afloat, let alone stay in competition with Intel.
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10 years from now, is this what will happen?
Hardware, File Storage, everything is going to be 'on the net' and you just log in with a keyboard/mouse + monitor only??
Goods and Bads?
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Realistically, if this takes off at all I don't see it getting used for highly-interactive games. Turn-based, sure. "Myst"-like adventures, absolutely (I can just imagine some bastard offspring of Myst and Myspace -- beautiful landscapes populated by lol-txting teenage avatars... a ray-traced Sims Online, ugh).
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For any realtime games this is years or decades off imo.
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A (debatably) underdog company is trying something really wacky and new. It may fail miserably... but hell, it could be great, if it works out. I'm rooting for them.
(I'm not buying AMD stock, though.)
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Basically you just buy the rights to play the game rather than the software itself. They're talking about mobile devices but what about PC and console games? Of course it means everyone needs a net connection and FPS lag issues blah blah blah but if they could make it work properly and devs took to it then surely that would kill piracy stone dead never to return.
And if people didn't need to upgrade their PC's all the time then that would be a larger market for PC gaming and more cash in peoples pockets to spend on the games.
Isn't this where they should be going or am I being really fucking stupid.
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I'd be surprised if they could get this shit working in a state that we'd actually want to use on a LAN, much less over the internet. I don't really care if they can get something low-res and sorta not laggy working as a proof of concept if just running locally is going to always produce vastly superior results. And that's the thing, even if they got it working pretty well, unless hardware advancement stops the options for running locally are going to stay FAR better.
Though I'm judging this mostly based on the "next gen" description. I see in the article that they seem to be targeting mobile devices, which makes more sense. However, I could see there being many applications of this that make sense much more than real gaming. (with smooth framerate, low latency, high resolution, etc)
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http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=17859762
Perhaps they stealed my idear!!!!!!!
:)
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I prefer games that I don't have to connect to the internet in order to play it thank you very much. This is another form of DRM.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8W0bpvGGO8&eurl=http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/09/otoy-developing-server-side-3d-rendering-technology/
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Bad idea when you need several megabytes/sec transfer to make it work. You've got all the CPU power to render it, then you need to compress it in real time and send it, but you're still talking several megaBYTES/sec. Over the internet.
I've really seen thin client mentality as a boon for system admins for ease of administration, NOT to save money on hardware. Not going to be a good idea any time soon. Not until we all have FIOS and they figure out the latency issues.
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1280x720x4 bytes per pixel = 3,686,400 bytes or 29mbit. At 30fps that is 0.9 gbit/s
Even if they drop to 16 bpp you're in the half gbit/s range. Of course you can compress the video for streaming, but that is going to add latency on the encode and decode.
I'm they've thought about all of these issues, but they must be planning it mostly for LAN environments, or point and click style games. There's no way this could work online unless you're talking cell phone resolutions of ~320x240.
And then what, do you plug your mouse and keyboard into your phone for input?
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Your inputs are sent over the internet to a master server which renders your game on the site and then streams back the video content that matches the movements you make from your pc? I thought of this a long time ago but pretty much discounted the possibility of this working due to latency issues (which its seems ISPs care little about).
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it is for this reason that technology like this DOES HAVE a place in the world. there are people who don't care about 900ms latency between pressing buttons on the cell phone and getting a response from their single player game. So you could sell the cloud version of crysis to them, and they'd buy it, and you'd make money from it, even though it sucked for certain other people.
that said, we can't see the ceiling for mobile device performance yet, and so mobile hardware developments will continue to chase after the abilities granted by cloud computation. even though there could be a niche for this now, it could be snuffed away just as fast as it arrived
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While some remote software solutions already seem incredible, like NX and some others when it comes to smooth response on input, I still....hmm, gonna go try out Quake3 over NX, that should be interesting...
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If they have a solution to that, I'm intrigued.
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