Look upon my works ye mighty and despair.
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.
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.
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
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
Probably have a few cards running the displays and the rest of them mining some sphere-themed memecoin
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
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*
Add a solar array and battery bank, a you might even have electricity left over. It’s in the desert after all.
allow me to remind you about ✨opportunity costs ✨
Still a waste of energy because that could be used for the general grid
I saw several concerts there and it was awesome. You want to live a life without anything fun in it?
There wouldn’t be an incentive or the capital necessary to instigate the build out of solar without the sphere. Yes, it would be great if someone did that. But the owners of the sphere specifically have a financial incentive to do so for the sake of lower energy costs. There’s not a lack of land or sun, so whether they do or do not doesn’t amount to a “waste” of energy - anyone else can build out solar production too.
I wouldn’t say entertainment is a waste of energy even if there are nobler uses for the power.
Like those ass massaging power chairs.
Advertising may be entertaining but it’s not entertainment
I dunno man. You ever see the infomercials for the magic bullet, or the slapchop?
Fetticini
Linguine
Martini
Bikini.
You’re gonna love my nuts!
It may be entertaining, but it’s not entertainment.
Remember when he got his dick almost bitten off while doing coke with a hooker?
Wasn’t it his lip?
I’m in a good mood all day
…Las Vegas Sphere—a gigantic spherical entertainment arena sitting at the heart of Sin City…
I think he means the outside
Here’s a link. You can go inside of it and it’s essentially a huge concert venue. It’s clearly entertainment.
Have you ever seen a solar array that gives 28 MW?
So?
Or how about six wind turbines? It’s rather windy in Las Vegas.
I mean, have you seen it with your own eyes?
Is it bigger or smaller than a football field?
Rough calculation says it needs about 28 ha, this could be about 30 football fields (depending on whatever they mean in your area when they say football :))
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.
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.
True, but 28 million watts really puts things in perspective when your average PSU is less than 1000w.
Way easier to compare 28MW to 1KW.
Exactly. This is literally a PC gamer article. Writing it out like that really puts it into perspective for the average reader.
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 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
The power of 21000 homes for advertising.
What’s most impressive is that it is even legal.
I love this kind of shit. Building things for the sake of it is worth it. Not only as just expression, which may be hubris but it’s still expression. Also entertainment, inspiration, pushing the art of engineering, and just giving people something to do, and all the good that comes with that like personal and trade growth.
A purely utilitarian life is a life only spent on survival. Not a life I want to live.
Sure but we’re burning tons of coal to have this thing advertise minion movies, not anything artistic or worthwhile.
Worthwhile for who
This isn’t pushing any boundaries, though. This is off the shelf technology. Anybody can do something big by throwing a shit ton of money at it. It would be pushing boundaries of tech or art if it was for instance super power efficient, or mind bending in any way. This is a fucking sphere, it’s the simplest shape and a rip off of the pyramids but less original and not even comparable in terms of durability.
Could it not be argued that building this thing now gives people a chance at looking at the power draw and attempting to make it super efficient? Like now people have a tool to test things on.
They did mention that they are working on making 70% of this powered by solar panels. Maybe this will push forward solar technology in some way.
It is absolutely pushing boundaries to be driving this many pixels at a frame rate that doesn’t take minutes to refresh. I build a lot of projects with addressable LEDs and the typical hobbyist stuff chokes out when you start trying to control more than a thousand or so. This thing has 256 million pixels inside and 1.2 million outside.
I understand that perspective, but does it really have to be advertising?
I’d prefer if it weren’t. Though that’s not the only use for this thing.
We can do that, but first let’s make sure everyone on the planet has clean water first.
You sound like the people criticising NASA for spending money on science. “Who do X when Y is still an issue?”
I doubt you make that kind of prioritization with your own money.
The money spent on this would not have been spent on giving clean water to people thousands of miles away
So we might a well build some shit.
Hey, it’s just $2,300,000,000
Can’t even feed a packed homeless shelter for that much ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Doesn’t flint still not have clean water?
Maybe it would’ve if governments taxed them properly and spent that money to save the planet
Is that where guillotines come in?
It was privately funded, this money would not have gone to school lunches
We would rather have the children starve to death than being called a communist.
Does this really make it any less worthy of criticism, though…?
Yes?
This is the equivalent of saying “Eat all your dinner cause there’s starving children in Africa”.
Sure, this sounds nice, but this logic falls apart the instant you start thinking about it.
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If this is something you feel strongly about, then please stop eating factory farmed meat and animal products if you havent already. It is something you personally can actually do. It helps, and it will genuinely make you feel better. You may not have much power, but using the power you do have to help the team you claim to be on instead of the other team is a massive step forward.
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You came in here with your absolutist utilitarian life above all else or we all die post just to respond with this because someone suggested you to stop eating meat. Beautiful.
I don’t agree. The comment points out the single most easy and effektive move an individal without political nor financial power can make to cut personal co2-emissions with just a change of habit. It’s not about animal rights and not about your health. Us still eating meat even though we know better is an incredibly dumb waste of energy for the sake of pleasure, exactly like this shitty powereating globe.
Take a train instead of a flight. Cycle to work or take public transport instead of driving. Install a heat pump or solar in your house. There are a million things people can do to cut down their emissions that can be as effective as becoming herbivores, depending on each one’s personal situation.
Plus, I don’t have the numbers in my head but I’m pretty sure a locally grown fillet of chicken is more environmentally friendly than an avocado that has travelled across the Atlantic, so “buy local” would be probably better advice.
Yeah, so many things one should do. Yet nothing is as simple as paying for a different product next time you’re shopping your groceries.
Avocados are way less harmfull to our planet than local meat. People keep bringing this up so often it’s part of the Vegan Bullshit Bingo.
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And you are one of those “every problem on the planet is the fault of someone else other than me so I can do whatever I want with no regard for it’s affect on anyone else” people. Stay away from us if you can’t be bothered to carry your own weight, you just drag down people who actually give a shit about something other than their own immediate selfish gratification.
The comment points out the single most effektive move an individal without political nor financial power can make to cut personal co2-emissions with just a change of habit.
eating meat doesn’t emit co2
Producing that meat does.
Note that the commenter didn’t say to quit all eating meat. They just said to quit eating “factory farmed” meat.
It’s not about eating meat, it’s about factory farming the meat and the damage to the environment caused by it.
Yes it does, Commie. Fuck, am I debating 12 year old smartasses again?!
I’m not vegan, and I never said anyone should be. Factory farms are the issue, not the consumption of animal products. Get some eggs from a local farmer, no big deal, enjoy, they’re delicious. Just don’t think for an instant that you have no guilt if you are shoveling a huge portion of the cash you earn to billionaires who torture animals and destroy the planet. You are guilty if this is what you do, and no amount of idiotic anger towards vegans who point out the obvious will make you innocent. You have to actually change if you don’t want to be responsible for this. Angrily trying to shut down anyone who points out your disgusting selfish addiction won’t do you. Grow up or shut up.
It helps,
no, it doesnt. despite the existence of vegans, meat production increases every year, year over year.
No it doesn’t, Commie
you’re cherrypicking.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-production-tonnes?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL
What is your point?
And there’s crime so you might as well rape. What a pathetic cop out. You’re lucky there are so many people taking care of you.
And there’s crime so you might as well rape
the claim is that by not consuming factory farmed meat, you make an impact on the amount of emissions from its production. this is not true. it is also not analogous to raping anyone.
You honestly think that factory farm emissions font change if people don’t give them money for their product? If your head was any further down in the sand, the magma would melt it.
Analogies don’t indicate a similar level of morality. They are used to explain points to people who, for some reason, are unwilling or unable to otherwise understand.
Advertising? This thing is essentially a theater. Yeah, it can run advertisement but anything with a screen can do that. It’s like saying a movie theatre is for advertising.
It’s a 400 foot tall screen that’s constantly on and in view, even at night, which plays ads like 90% of the time. Calling it “essentially a theatre” is a huge understatement.
Horrible and should be illegal.
But the energy usage is quoted as peak for the entire venue - which is literally a theater / concert hall. It opened with a live U2 performance. The energy usage isn’t just for the displays, it includes all the power for the entire building, the concert speakers, heating/cooling, indoor lighting, any kitchen equipment, etc.
Or profitable
Is it? Last I‘ve heard it was bleeding money.
This way some faulty internet lore. The money losses were from a fluke of timing the opening date of operations versus when quarterly finances were reported. Big startup costs meant the first numbers looked silly until they had enough events to get steady profits. They’re doing fine now.
Internet should’ve known better too. It’s hard to lose in Vegas and the investors obviously knew what they were doing. The power costs are shocking for sure though. Yikes!
Makes sense. Gimmicks are gimmicks.
Probably because they’re not doing much with it. It’s $100/person to see the basic “Planet Earth” showing and almost $200 to see The Grateful Dead show. Previously they showed a Phish show. That’s it for options, and none of it sounds really appealing to me.
U2 played in it, too.
I’m sure these bands are all appealing to some, but it seems like they’re really squandering the potential with them playing the same two shows over and over for months.
U2 is the best band ever, Bono told me that.
The non-stop anti-humanity propaganda is exhausting.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Wouldn’t just one GPU be enough to run the Sphere, or a I getting something wrong?
I remember hearing about that it’s not exactly high resolution, each “pixel” being a bunch of pretty large lamps.
Wikipedia says it’s 16,000x16,000 (which is way less than I thought). The way the math works, that’s 16x as big as a 4k monitor, so 16 GPUs would make sense. And there’s a screen inside and one outside, so double that. But I also can’t figure out why it needs five times that. Redundancy? Poor optimization? I dunno.
But wouldn’t that be only necessary if it needed to render real-time graphics at such a scale? If I’m correct, all its doing is playing back videos.
I think it’s doing some non-trivial amount of rendering, since it’s often syncing graphics with music played live.
I work for a digital display company, and it is definitely redundancy. There will be at least two redundant display systems that go to the modules separately so they can switch between them to solve issues. If a component fails on one side they just switch to the other.
Ah, nice. Thank you for bringing your expertise to my nonsense.
I’m guessing it’s the department of redundancy department, is my guess.
Someone elsewhere in the thread suggested it might be a marketing thing on Nvidia’s part, and that makes a lot of sense.
The way I think it, it’s possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you’d just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.
Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there’s also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.
And a waste of electricity?
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.
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.
Useless
