Nvidia Maxine

NVIDIA Maxine can reduce bandwidth usage to one-tenth of H.264, by sending pose and generating image onsite. It uses the initial image and the facial key points to reconstruct subsequent images on a local GPU. It has other features bundled with this such as background image denoising etc.

Nvidia

Google Stadia

Rather than streaming pose they will stream rendered frames of gameplay. It’s not innovation, it’s a more business oriented product, targeting at Play Station and Xbox. With each new release of Xbox and Play Station, people have to buy new hardware to play new games. So the pitch will be like, “hey, ps/xbox is x billion dollar market, we are targeting that”.

Contrast

Video Streaming - Historically we have streamed frames of data rather than pose data, for easier and faster rendering but at a cost of higher bandwidth.

Online Gaming - Historically we have streamed pose of players and environment, rather than frames of data, and the image is rendered on site. But at the cost of hardware getting obsolete.

Environmental Effect of Streaming

We love spotify and youtube right. Ref

From a carbon emissions perspective, however, the transition towards streaming recorded music from internet-connected devices has resulted in significantly higher carbon emissions than at any previous point in the history of music.

But then as you don’t have the time to read the whole article you should know that it actually dives into the fact of plastic waste generated due to previous method of offline streaming.

Tradeoff

So you might think that there is a tradeoff of carbon footprint due to streaming vs carbon footprint due to waste produced due to hardware becoming obsolete and thrown in garbage.

Not Exactly

Even the servers will require a huge level of maintenance, hence it will lead to waste production. Some counters to this argument

  1. At scale there is few orders of magnitude less production of carbon footprint.
  2. Due to centralisation of waste production, they can manage the waste in a better way.

So from an environmental perspective, even if you consider all these factor divide is still huge and favouring towards streaming pose than frames. With a better decentralised waste management of silicon goods it will be far wider.

Insights

  1. Playstation and Xbox have tons (might not be right metric) of gpus, for rendering games at high fps. These systems can provide an out of box support for gan based image rendering for systems like nvidia maxine. But what can be the cut for these box developer. Well they get to be tesla of Game box developer, offering a far more environment friendly way to do video streaming at higher fps.
  2. When less bandwidth is used, it also makes way for great p2p/D apps. P2p streaming and new encoding is going to be the new normal.
  3. Might be in the coming decade, that there are custom built devices for ed-tech and remote work.

Other Counters

  1. Maxine will have to use gpu farm to support these. Which again increases carbon footprint. True but Maxine and Stadia are more representative of idea, the won’t be there in the next decade. You can do all of these on playstation/Xbox and stream, no need of farms.
  2. Playstation/Xbox itself uses more electricity than a normal pc. Might be true, but still, I think (not sure) sending orders of magnitude more data across the world will create more carbon footprint.