Brigade, a photorealistic cloud game engine (shots inside)

Sorry if old. Anyway...

"Brigade has been under development at OTOY for some time and they've been making steady improvements to its ability to render photorealistic images in real time. Especially with the improvements of overall noise to the final product. All of the images below have been rendered using Brigade.

Today's announcement for Brigade pertains to the fact that Brigade is now a cloud-enabled application that works in Amazon's EC2 cloud, enabling you to get much better instantaneous performance, regardless of your hardware.

OTOY says that they'll be demonstrating demos of the latest version of Brigade with the Amazon EC2 instances at The 2014 Game Developers Conference next week as well as Nvidia's 2014 GPU Technology Conference the week after that.

Through Brigade, OTOY is now helping leading game developers explore the potential of cloud computing for the delivery of next-generation games. Brigade is a powerful graphics API that can easily replace Microsoft DirectX® or OpenGL® graphics within popular game engines such as Epic Games’ Unreal Engine or Unity, serving as a backend for superior graphics without disrupting the game logic. Harnessing the power of the cloud, Brigade’s sophisticated technology enables real-time ray tracing and path tracing of game environments, simulating light as it appears in the real world to deliver in-game interactive graphics that are on par with the best movie effects of today. Frames that traditionally have taken minutes or longer to render now do so in fractions of a second, allowing for a fluid game experience streamed to consumers’ homes without the need for expensive hardware."

If I understood correctly, it basically says, the Brigade engine will allow developers to make games with this kind of graphics quality, whenever and wherever, thanks to the cloud-based environment, without the need for a powerful hardware.

More here.

What do you think?

so all the cloud stuff MS is talking about is real. Still waiting to see actual games though but it all looks promising.

So not only is it doing real time ray tracing and looking nice it's going to use magical cloud power too...I'll believe it when I see it.

Um.... I don't see any clouds. Oh. Never mind. It's cloud as in the Internet cloud.

looks really nice! only time will tell if we start seeing games look like this.

This is all very possible, the ONLY problem with this is the latency between user and mainframe back to user input/output. Cloud rendering is nothing new. There are some awful looking textures in these shots with give weight to it being a game engine :P. It'll be interesting how they can advance something that OnLive started.

this cloud nonsense needs to stop

This will put an end to graphics war. Every game in future will be photorealism lol. We will start to have art war, characters, story etc war

This kind of stuff is the future. But lets face the truth here. Nothing like this is going to take of and get larger then digital sales, or even physical sales anytime soon for the simple fact, the infrastructure isn't and won't be available for the majority of the people in the world to even use such a thing for another 15-20 years from now.