Nvidia unveils Cloud Based Indirect Lighting

CloudLight: A system for amortizing
indirect lighting in real-time rendering

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.

Nvidia Research - Technical Report