And a waste of electricity?
Its one of the smaller atrocities in Vegas, particularly when compared to the Bellagio Fountain or the food waste generated by all those casino dining halls.
The fountains aren’t quite as wasteful as they seem. They use a lot of water compared to a house, but way less than some car washes.
Plus it is recycled. They would only replace what is lost due to evaporation or after a drain and cleaning.
I looked it up (because the air is very dry in Nevada) and about 32,000 gallons of water per day are evaporated at the Bellagio fountains.
Source: The Las Vegas Sun
A car wash uses 80 gallons per car. The car wash by my office probably washes a thousand cars a day.
Car washes recycle water, too.
Yeah we should have never invented televisions or records either! And don’t even get me started on cell phones. Just waste waste waste.
Why, if it were up to me we would all still be hunting and gathering!
Apples to oranges dude, this is for pure spectacle that wears off after five minutes. Plus any data gained from it was at the lab they prototyped it I believe in Burbank. This aint really a sign of progress, and itll be funny to see what happens to it when it inevitably breaks.
I believe that’s implied in the “hubris” bit.
They tried to build this abomination in London and it got shot down.
Before the Sphere, the largest spherical building in the world (since 1989) was the Globe in Stockholm.
On it they sometimes project stuff on, which seems to be a way cheaper and energy efficient way than adding a billion LEDs.
Fun fact about the arena Globen, it’s actually the biggest piece in a art installation about our solar system, representing the sun. Pluto is about halfway up in Sweden.
It’s also the home arena of Swedens national ice hockey team.
We need more nuclear power ASAP
Vegas is almost entirely powered by the hoover dam. It’s already pretty green as far as energy goes. The question will be where do they get their power from in a few years when lake mead dries up.
That’s not true. The Hoover Dam contributes to Vegas’s power supply, but it’s nowhere near “almost entirely powered” by the dam, except in Fallout: New Vegas.
Turns out you’re correct. I appreciate the correction.
In addition to the other thing, dams have a dramatic and disastrous impact on the ecology in the immediate area and the entire riparian system they connect to. It’s “green” in terms of emissions but they’re still harmful and we should be phasing them out for lower impact alternatives as much as possible.
Should? Definitely, but let’s be realistic, we can barely get people off of coal and oil right now.
In the world we live in, Dams have some of the lowest environmental impact compared to the other places we get our energy.
So we probably shouldn’t be trying to phase them out while there are much more severe effects being felt from the other base load facilities.
There’s no such thing as “ASAP” for nuclear power. If you had the permits signed off today, it would take 10 years before a single GWh of new nuclear energy goes to the grid.
Instead, maybe we shouldn’t build giant spherical advertising displays?
There’s no such thing as “ASAP” for nuclear power
Sure there is. It’s just that the P stands for “20 years from now.”
That article gets stuck so much and makes my (relatively high end) laptop’s fan scream so hard you’d think the website was designed for that kind of hardware.
I guess they dont need to pay for heating when you have a bunch of high power computers pumping out a crap ton of heat
It also helps that it’s in Las Vegas.
That pretty much describes all of Vegas.
Normally I’d be suspicious of these kinds of megastructure projects but Vegas is the city that figured out how to get damn close to net zero water use from the Colorado so I’m willing to start off with the benefit of the doubt for the city leaders that ok’d this.
Kinda feels like humanity is in the process of jumping the shark on this one
It’s the last season anyway
In 2030 this will just be the standard system requirements for AAA games because optimization is hard.
because optimization
is hardcosts money and they dont have enough from the 60 USD you paid70*
Using the max power use of a video card to math this is ridiculous. It’s not at full TDP pushing this content. They aren’t playing max FPS 3D raytraced gaming, they’re playing videos.
What.
The article says that, for the GPUs, they can have a “maximum power draw of 45,000 W at full tilt”.
The 28 million W comes from the full system, and surely the massive displays, LEDs and eventually sound system makes up the bulk of that, the gfx cards are a rounding error…
28,000,000 watts
That’s usually written as 28MW. I know some Americans don’t like metric much, but one of the points of metric is that you don’t ever need to write that many zeroes - you just need to use the right prefix (kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc) on the unit.
you just need to use the right prefix (kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc) on the unit.
Oh, thanks.
Bruh, it’s PC Gamer.
quick edit: Hey! Why aren’t you converting it to Joules?
Because Joule is the SI unit of energy, meanwhile the Watt is the SI unit of power, equivalent to one Joule per second.
“Converting” joules to watts would be like converting m/s to US dollars.
I liked the analogy but I do think it would be clearer to say something like joules = money in bank account and Watt = spending per second
True, but 28 million watts really puts things in perspective when your average PSU is less than 1000w.
Exactly. This is literally a PC gamer article. Writing it out like that really puts it into perspective for the average reader.
Way easier to compare 28MW to 1KW.
That’s true.
average PSU is less than 1000w
Unrelated but I wish it was easier to find lower-wattage PSUs. My local PC store doesn’t have anything under 650W. I know modern GPUs use a lot of power, but not all PCs use a GPU! I have a home server where 400W would be more than enough, yet the smallest I could find was 550W, in stock from just one manufacturer (Be Quiet).
I mean, it should be fine, just because the PSU can provide more watts doesn’t mean the system is actually using that much power. I have an 800w PSU in my gaming rig, but its average load is only 240 - 320w during gaming (I’ve measured it by powering the system with a portable Ecoflow battery).
It runs fine, it’s just less efficient.
Where are you getting this from? Intuition?
I think the quiescent current and losses are less in a well engineered psu.
This is verifiable in manufactures data sheets.
Efficiency at less than 20% and greater than 80% loads isn’t great relative to in between those ends.
This is compounded by lower wattage PSUs being more limited with regard to features and benefits.
If you end up with a 650w PSU and your system idles at 80 watts for the bulk of a working day you spend long periods of time in this less efficient window.
We need to see some quality 300w to 600w designs come back onto the market.
You all go ooo and aaaa then yell at oil companies for climate change.
The power usage wouldn’t be a problem if the electricity were generated in a green way.
If only the energy sector had a workforce experienced in building offshore structures that could build offshore wind farms. And maybe a workforce that had experience in drilling that could develop geothermal energy.
Of course we also need an energy sector that had a lot of financial resources to put into these kinds of investments.
If only the energy sector had these kinds of resources, a big sphere drawing a lot of electricity wouldn’t be a problem.
So how is the total power over 500x that of the GPU power? If it’s all LEDs, that thing must get brighter than the damn sun.
Funny enough you can barely see it during the day
I don’t know what they need so many GPUs for. There’s 16 displays inside, and the sphere itself has fewer pixels than even 1 of the internal displays. You could probably run the sphere off a laptop if you aren’t trying to do anything fancy.
Maybe they plan on doing crazy live simulations on it or something. I can’t imagine what kind of displayed image would actually use all 150 of them. Nvidia A6000 cards are damn powerful.
I guess the practicality of the decision depends on the finances. Did they actually buy the cards or were they gifted by nvidia for free advertising?
It does seem suspiciously like they picked 150 completely arbitrarily to make the project sound impressive, when they could have easily done it with 20. I’m sure a bunch of people in the middle made a bunch of money off that transaction too. Or like you said, maybe this is Nvidia doing some guerrilla marketing
Probably have a few cards running the displays and the rest of them mining some sphere-themed memecoin
You don’t know. Full stop.
My job has been to run things on GPUs for almost 10 years now. The only thing anyone practical is doing on that many GPUs is AI training, massive scientific simulations, or crypto mining. 1 or 2 of them is enough to run something like ChatGPT.
Real-time graphics it turns out don’t scale well across multiple GPUs. There’s a reason SLI has gone away for consumer GPUs. At the current ratio, each of those $3000+ GPUs is only driving 8000 pixels (assuming each led puck is being used as 1 pixel, given their size). It makes no sense other than bragging rights
God you guys cant have any fun. Yeah it uses power but cant we have cool things once and awhile?
