That said, it is an awesome PoC. Just not something I see being practically applicable.
No, a serious (AAA) studio would not. OTOH, the platform might intend to support producers that aren't AAA studios, and whose limited pre-release resources are focussed on gameplay more than art assets, and those producers might view it very differently than AAA studios.
I have been thinking about a process where a procedurally generated template is completed by artists and subsequently used as a base for training an AI to apply to further procedural generations.
I also wonder if you can do micro style adjustments to unify artistic style, train a net on one particular artists work, the rest of the team copy the general style but use a final pass of a style transfer to make it a closer match.
It is another example of forced intrusion of DL techniques creeping into places where it is not needed in the first place.
I doubt that was the point. IMO it is more of a palette testing tool.
Before I get downvoted, yes I do think it could be useful for prototyping and conceptualization during development, but I doubt anyone would actually ship a complete game with the entire camera view transformed by style transfer.
this suggests that we may soon have better AMD support in TensorFlow.
I wish someone who had >actual< practical experience in the domain would comment.
It's an important question.
If you go through the issues you can get a sense of what it's like from people who do have practical experience.
That being said, I don't have any personal experience because, well, I don't have AMD GPUs to play around with.
Maybe because I have a friend working on a video game as a solo developer, and putting a /lot/ of energy/money/time into art--I really see the potential in this (type of thing).
This is not really for the player's benefit to put on whatever mods they want.
This is for fast iteration for artists and creators to automate a huge (sometimes necessary evil) burden.
For that usage Nvidia's thing was way more interesting: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/03/18/gaugan-photorealist...
That gets you usable texture assets super quickly, which is probably what your solo developer friend spends the most time on. That or models. Neither of which Stadia's style transfer helps with. They probably aren't spending much time tweaking a shader-applied post-process effect, but hey, maybe they are, and this style transfer ML thing is useful. Very, very unlikely, but maybe.
If you're building a photorealistic game. And there's already lots of tools on the market to generate these sorts of textures.
I could see this Nvidia thing used for much better looking mockups / concept art. But it doesn't seem suited for final asset generation.
Impressive sense of realism in level of detail variety..show the potential...BUT consistency, sharpness and realism of object boundaries would not survive close inspection.
Even for 2d visualization it could be very useful if you could drop images into your website mockup files and have it intelligently apply color palette and texture information to your existing content.
It won't look good, but it might look good enough to save you from having to manually tweak the design 20-30 times to explore a range of styles.
This seems gimmicky at best. Prediction has to take place on the client though - so the challenge is making it cheap.
Predicting 2-3 frames should't beyond what we can do at least roughly. Especially for some important inputs such as turning in first person view it should basically just start moving the screen. I belive John Carmack tried some kind of rotational prediction (Not based on AI) for Oculus.
Playstation Now - required Sony to buy/use a cloud service, maintain it, and expensive Sony hardware just as a force of habit.
Google - negligible instance running on their existing infrastructure, maintained under existing processes, playable on chromecasts already in hotels and homes everywhere, alongside browsers and mobile devices.
If Google doesn't shut it down within the 5 years for people to notice this is even an option, they could focus more on titles and developers more than any other entrant to this market.
And perhaps the gaming is just the application to get people's attention.
The only reason they can do that today without specialised hardware a-la OnLive is because Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory.
When OnLive started they had to do it themselves.
I don’t believe you have any idea what you are speaking about.
Are there actually Chromecasts in hotels? I have never seen one and curious which chains have them.
1) Wait until it seems there's enough comittment from Google before using it. 2) Start using it right away knowing that it might not be around forever. 3) Don't use it because you don't trust Google to maintain it.
Given these 3 options, does Google launching a service really have that much impact on consumer's lives? I'm a huge Gmail user and have been for over a decade. If they shut it down it will suck but I'll find another way to email people.
I get the philosophical arguments but curious why some people have the level of concern or angst when Google announces a product.
(for the sake of this comment let's forget about competition and monopolies)
IMO, a more valid argument against its success would be that any consumer who is in a position to ensure they have fast enough internet for this service, is also in a position to buy a gaming console. But the counterargument to that is that there is no reason someone cannot have a gaming console and also use Stadia.
I'm normally very skeptical of Google's motivations, respectful of their cloud technology, and doubtful about many of their products. But I think this one will be a success, and shortly followed by competing products from Amazon and Microsoft.
Look at how angry people are at epic right now. Taking a brand that already has a bad rap and trying to start a new market (that has already failed several times over) is not a great angle, especially with an audience as skeptical and anal retentive as gamers.
Additionally, who is the audience for this? Casual gamers use consoles, and those more invested use PCs. This is too out of the box for the former and completely useless to the latter. I could also see Google trying to get exclusives which would be a PR disaster.
Sure, it's a novel idea and looks like a decent execution, but its by no means a new one. Onlive did this 10 years ago and couldn't get market share. PSnow is available right now and its completely unusable even with a great connection because they dont have enough servers. The game selection is also terrible considering they should be able to load up any game in their ecosystem. I cant play MGS4, the PS4 remaster of last of us, nor horizon as they want me to buy a console to play it. So what's the point?
It's possible that tech like this could offer a user-definable solution to these issues.
Well yes, of course, and neither is Google's Style Transfer ML. These are both just prototyping tools, not a magic wand to make production-quality assets.
For now Chromecast just being there and part of the TV will let users do what they want with music and now this.
Isn't 5G on a wavelength that has poorer penetration than 4G? It might work in the USA but signal is a constant issue in stone housing here in the UK (though it may be better where you are based). I had to get a femtocell from EE in order to get signal in my house :\
(different) Stylization as a medium in games isn't that explored, and the opportunity for indie devs to play with that is, IMO, really cool.
I can imagine walking down the street in Call of Duty game or something like Cyberpunk 2077 and seeing ads overlaid on wall textures of buildings.
First they're on a bus-stop wall, that's thematic okay. Then they're on random walls - getting annoying. Then the loading screen and the parachutes, nows it's annoying. Like, guys I'm from the US and I don't want to go to your stupid competition!
And this is just a trivial graphic filter through a neural network. A lot more can be done with AI.
True.
Actually Google is just seeing the wealth of innovation in procedural generation and in computer creativity, knowing where this is going, and just want in on the action.
And since as a cloud gaming provider, they stand to make much more money than tool vendors, their incentive is much bigger.
Could you clarify what you (and the comments mentioning NVENC below) are talking about ?
As far as I understand it, NVENC and the ilk are solutions that capture video output and encode it to H264. So they are x264 encoding accelerators, nothing more.
If you were running a datacenter this way, you'd be much better of having a bank of Matrox capture cards (which support multiple simultaneous inputs) in dedicated hardware converting your video game output to x264 streams for broadcast. They even support capturing, x264 encoding and streaming to IP addresses on your network for further distribution.
What would be interesting is if they bypass the video display output phase completely and render the finished framebuffers to memory (or an encoder chip via DMA over PCI) instead. I assume this would cut down manufacturing (+licensing for HDMI ?) costs a bit.
I know AMD has DirectGMA that allows other devices on the PCI bus access to limited chunks of GPU memory. There are signalling mechanisms in DirectGMA so that devices can basically implement producer-consumer pairs.
As far as I know this doesn't exist in consumer chips though. You need "workstation" GPUs. Which might explain Google's particular GPU choice, now that I think about it.
>> As far as I understand it, NVENC and the ilk are solutions that capture video output and encode it to H264. So they are x264 encoding accelerators, nothing more.
Me:
>> allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory.
You're being pedantic. What I meant is that OnLive actually needed specialised hardware because they could not provide their service without it (as in: there was no capability in hardware, without changes to the codebase - to render not to an external display). You, on the other hand - are speaking about the conceptualised "perfect" implementation.
Google doesn't need that hardware in order to provide that service because by now there's a hardware capability that allows you to capture the screen of the device you are rendering to. They could try to be more efficient by using other hardware, but that's not a prerequisite for their Gaming Service.
That's exactly what NVENC, Capture SDK, AMD's AMF, and Intel's QuickSync do. Just encode the framebuffer output of whatever game engine you're using with one of those API's. (And remember to make sure your game engine license allows you to use it that way. As always, if you use Unity, you're out of luck, they specifically forbid you from doing this.)
Can you give a little more info on this? Is this standard to consumer level GPU's? What is the tech called?
The NVENC API allows you to do this on your commodity NVidia card. If you have the good stuff from NVidia, you can likely use the Capture SDK, which is a bit more scalable. If you use AMD there is AMF. And if you're cheap, you can just use QuickSync from Intel. All of the encoding API's will likely be unified with an industry wide API a la opengl at some point in the future, but it won't be implemented by everyone in a timely fashion, so you have to pick your poison right now.
One gotcha though, you can only do this if your game engine's license allows. Which means anyone who uses Unity is out of luck. Unreal and other engines? I don't know, I think you can talk to the companies and they'll probably? give you permission? (At least I'd hope they would give you permission until they go into the cloud gaming business.)
Your best shot though is just to take an open source engine, like Godot, and "NVENC it up" so to speak. It'll take maybe a couple of hours and it'll save you a lot of headache.
They may be referring to ShadowPlay, a feature that keeps a buffer of the output so you can save something that just happened. Again, available for 4-5 years.
You are gatekeeping based on irrelevant details when my point is that prior entrants had higher or untenable costs and Google might not, which I think you agreed on.
Google's advantage is that it doesn't need a dedicated hardware play, has saturation in relevant markets in their existing hardware plays, and has existing capacity in their large compute infrastructure. Whether consumers care is another story, but they can throw more money at things to make them care without having other untenable overhead costs as a distraction.