Nvidia showcases cloud-based CloudLight lighting system

Nvidia has released a new video that shows off some new lighting technology that the company has been working on. The technology enables developers to use a complex lighting system and offload all the number crunching to the cloud. There are a couple of ways that the tech can go about doing this.

For low-powered devices like laptops, the lighting data is converted to a compressed h.264 file, which is then streamed to the device. This allows notebooks to use advanced lighting systems that the hardware wouldn't be able to support otherwise.

For more powerful devices like gaming desktops, the tech tracks light photons as they move around the game world and then directly streams them to the computer. This allows a much better and advanced lighting system than the notebook equivalent. The tradeoff here is that the front-end device that gamers are using need to be powerful enough to do some of photons' number crunching.

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Another feature of the tech is based on voxel injection. This lets less-powerful devices, such as an iPad, to pull off lighting systems that it wouldn’t have been capable of otherwise. It computes indirect light by tracing voxel cones. The interesting thing about this is that there is no 3D rendering happening locally on the device. Instead, the device is simply acting as a decoder for h.264 videos.

The video released by Nvidia shows all of these in action, with the last bit of the video showing off the tech's lighting capabilities in real-world situations.