14 DAY TRIAL // In-game lighting is one of the main factors behind poor frame rates. Because each light casts a shadow and affects the colors in a scene, and each new light exponentially increases the performance cost.
Right now, there are, of course, high-end CPUs and graphics cards that can handle even the toughest games.
However, this dependency on powerful hardware has kept the number of sold game copies at a much lower level than it would otherwise be.
To solve this, NVIDIA has proposed an ambitious solution: CloudLight.
The company has only showed a demo, but the idea definitely has merits. Basically, it suggests delegating, for lack of a better term, the processing of indirect lighting to a remote server.
It's like NVIDIA's GRID server initiative, only that instead of running the whole game in the cloud, only the indirect lighting processing is accomplished there.
There are three NIDIA CloudLight variants at present:
First off, we have Nvidia CloudLight Voxel Variant, which works with a Voxel Injection and a Voxel Cone Trace. The final frame is rendered on the cloud and converted to H.264 and streamed to Local devices. Tablets will benefit from this the most.
Secondly, NVIDIA proposes the Nvidia CloudLight Irradiance Map Variant, which will work with Optix Ray trace. The Irradiance Map is reconstructed on the cloud and streamed over the network in H.264 format. Laptops are the intended beneficiaries here.
Finally, NVIDIA revealed the Nvidia CloudLight Photon Variant, the one for mid-high end desktop PCs. It will have only the Optix Photon Trace happening in the cloud and being streamed Lossless to local devices. The PC will have to reconstruct, render and display it though.
NVIDIA is bound to score big with lots of people if it gets this latest project going. Then, the logical next step will be to add other heavyweight computations to the cloud.
Sadly, CloudLight is just in proof of concept stage right now. NVIDIA has an ulterior reason to do its best too. Implementing CloudLight will open the door for a much cheaper lineup of GPUs that rely on the cloud. Better gaming at half the price will never make anyone frown in distaste.
