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Plus some stuff, the cloud choice is made for you. I've been using OnShape for browser-based CAD for 3d printing design, and so far it's been simple enough that it hasn't choked. But I expect it to choke if I try anything too complex. So I have to upgrade laptop anyway.
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Oh, web app kind of "cloud". These actually run in your browser, so what you need is just good hardware. I define cloud as computing happening elsewhere. Also, why use a web apps for models? There are dozens of better options.
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I want to have the option for all 3: native apps (including on a VM in a guest OS), browser-based cloud-apps, and true cloud apps. I think some of these browser based apps offload heavier compute to the backend and only do low-latency bits locally, like renders.
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Uh, kinda doubt that. Renders are the heaviest part, everything else is just trivial geometry. AI stuff is what tend to be offloaded.
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I guess if it's not super interactive and you can predict a bit and do some parts of it offline. Like track the slew of the camera and predictively process and pipe parts of a scene that are coming into view.
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Uh, no. For a CAD thingy calculations only happen when you alter stuff, and these are trivial unless you are doing large scale CSG stuff or run physics sims. The relatively non-trivial part is rendering, including the what's in the scene magic. And you aren't making movies there.
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So for consumer level apps, photo-realistic 3d with offscreen action like maybe in multiplayer games, is where some predictive cloud processing would help, like google's cloud gaming thing
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Predictive cloud processing? Are you sure this isn't an xkcd #451 moment? But broadly speaking yes, you need a stream-a-movie level connection and a fairly dedicated machine on the other end to do tasks like video editing, CAD, photoshopping, gaming and so on fully off your hands
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Like, there is a send-voice-to-cloud,-get-text kind of offloading, and then there is game-runs-remotely,-send-video-back kind of offloading. Or take-picture,-send-to-cloud,-get-filtered-back kind of offload. Different requirements.
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Take a game of chess. You can have the browser render the board, and a cloud computer do the thinking. Whatever latency, tiny bandwidth connection. Or you can have a remote computer do the board rendering and thinking. Low latency, movie-grade bandwidth, and a GPU on remote end.
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predictive cloud processing is literally how one startup described what they were trying to do for this kind of stuff :D latency is partly a hard roundtrip floor time constant, but also partly a "when do you know you'll need the result of this computation and where?" thing