this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
957 points (95.5% liked)

Technology

59132 readers
4134 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
957
Las Vegas' dystopia-sphere, powered by 150 Nvidia GPUs and drawing up to 28,000,000 watts, is both a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat | PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
430 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Wikipedia says it's 16,000x16,000 (which is way less than I thought). The way the math works, that's 16x as big as a 4k monitor, so 16 GPUs would make sense. And there's a screen inside and one outside, so double that. But I also can't figure out why it needs five times that. Redundancy? Poor optimization? I dunno.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (3 children)

But wouldn't that be only necessary if it needed to render real-time graphics at such a scale? If I'm correct, all its doing is playing back videos.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I think it's doing some non-trivial amount of rendering, since it's often syncing graphics with music played live.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Live audio visualization in game engines is definitely a thing ex. https://youtu.be/IZL7VAt97ws?si=H74SwrLZYfsYNTY8

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Even if it's just playing back videos, it still should compensate for the distortion of the spherical display. That's a "simple" 3d transformation, but with the amount of pixels, coordinating between the GPUs and some redundancy, it doesn't seem like an excessive amount of computing power. The whole thing is still an impressive excess though...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I work for a digital display company, and it is definitely redundancy. There will be at least two redundant display systems that go to the modules separately so they can switch between them to solve issues. If a component fails on one side they just switch to the other.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Ah, nice. Thank you for bringing your expertise to my nonsense.