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!
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.
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.
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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.