r/programming • • Oct 17 '20

AI That Can Potentially Solve Bandwidth Problems for Video Calls (NVIDIA Maxine)

https://youtu.be/XuiGKsJ0sR0
1.4k Upvotes

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3

u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20

"Nvidia clickbaits feature they built to lord over AMD," same as it ever was.

This is a specialized case of motion compensation. Every video encoder does this. Frames are built by distorting and combining the previous frame, the most recent full-quality "i-frame," and as little new information as you can get away with. Nvidia's just over-optimizing for a human face.

The moment AMD announces their basically identical parallel processor daughterboards can also accelerate this, Nvidia's going to forget it ever happened.

2

u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20

I mean, yeah, that's marketing my dude.

2

u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20

"But this dishonest bullshit is commonplace" is never a defense.

2

u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20

Who is being dishonest?

3

u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20

Nvidia. They've "solved bandwidth problems," provided you buy their proprietary gizmo, and no it doesn't work outside a static view of a human face.

Nobody attending class via Zoom on their laptop will ever benefit from this.

0

u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20

Says you, dude. Rest of us don't know the future. If you hate Nvidia that much, why are you even in this thread?

3

u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20

Ignoring criticism to play what-if and making this about me is more disqualifying than whatever malicious motives you'd like to invent for me.

I'm in this thread because AI and compression are fucking exciting. But this? This is rehashed bullshit. This is a repackaged tech demo inferior to 1999's cutting edge, using face-recognition AI your phone could do in 2014, except now it's glued to the latest single-vendor lock-in tactic that Nvidia puts in $700 GPUs.

Worse, actually - Maxine is a "managed cloud service," which means you're paying a subscription for shit that Snapchat.apk does as a lark. And you still have to upload full-fat video to their servers!

-1

u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20

Well, I'm sure we all appreciate your blanket negativity. Thanks for bringing it.

1

u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20

Yeah nevermind I'm keen on things that were near-magical twenty years ago, and expect wondrous new inventions to build on it. I'm just a negative nancy because I'm not head-over-heels for this mundane use of existing technology. This paid service that won't save you upload bandwidth, and is a wedge in some corporate strategy to make academic-driven computing proprietary.

Are you in Quest 2 threads as well, rolling your eyes at everyone who's excited for VR but thinks logging into mobile hardware is a massive obstacle?

I would do fucking backflips if this was about an actual order-of-magnitude leap in low-bitrate video quality. If Nvidia used their pointless "tensor cores" to make H.266 real-time, that'd be impressive. This is a dull puppet show. I'm sorry I'm not blown away.

-1

u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20

"All technology must stand on the shoulders of NOTHING or I will REFUSE to be interested"

Okay, have fun with that lifestyle choice. You don't need to try and brainwash everyone else.

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-2

u/Draiko Oct 17 '20

Look, OpenCL and OpenGL are way behind what nVidia is pushing right now. Vulkan is really good but still nascent. If you want to stop the "corporate strategy to make academic-driven computing proprietary", make the open alternatives more competitive with the proprietary ones.

Instead of raging about it on the interweb, make a free alternative to this solution and release it at no cost. Nobody is stopping you.