In January, AMD and OToy announced Fusion Render Cloud, a centralized rendering server system which would perform rendering tasks for film and even games, compressing the resulting video and sending it over the internet.  In March, OnLive announced a similar system, but for the entire game, not just rendering.  Now NVIDIA has announced another cloud rendering system, called RealityServer, running on racks of Tesla GPUs (presumably using Fermi in future iterations).  This utilizes the iray ray tracing system developed by mental images, who also make mental ray (mental images has been owned by NVIDIA since 2007).

The compression is going to be key, since it has to be incredibly fast, extremely low bit rate and very high quality for this to work well.  I’m a bit skeptical of cloud rendering at the moment but maybe all these companies (and investors) know something I don’t…