Couple things: Great in theory. Horrible in practice.
As scalable as Roblox is, I don’t think that the amount of time, effort, etc is worth the absolute pain it would be to bring this to life. Roblox would never give us direct GPU access so what we’d get would be extremely limited.
On the server side, having a GPU with CUDA support & being able to handle all that would be extremely expensive. Roblox would have to overhaul at some point because, typically, a data center / server would have nothing to render / compute that extensively to justify having next-gen CUDA cards. For that investment to be worth it, we’d have to lose somewhere to the point where we’d be at a net-loss (usage, heavy rate-limits, etc).
On the client side, not all devices have that type of support. And not all graphic devices have the same level of support internally. As a developer, I’m not going to target niche things that very few users can truly appreciate. Therefore, less likely to spend or invest time into using it.
Fundamentally, the reason why Roblox exists and thrives is because people with ok-to-horrible devices can play the same quality on any device. In gaming or virtual experience building, that’s extremely rare to see. Most games that people play these days are on semi-beefy machines loaded with all these cool things. That’s why those studios can get away with it. Because they market to a niche user-base that can actively afford those things. I think if you compared the amount of people with that level of hardware to the games that they play, a minuscule amount of that would be actively playing Roblox.
I’d argue that it’s synonymous with each other in this context. If you don’t have hardware support, you have no reason to build an API. If the API doesn’t adequately utilize supported hardware, you lose appeal, time and money.
Not to mention, I’d generally be scared to play a Roblox game knowing that the developer has access to my GPU. You can run some crazy, malicious things. Even with the obvious safeguards that Roblox would put before it reached us, I still wouldn’t trust it. But that’s just me.
So it boils down to:
- Cost vs. Benefit
- Accessibility
- Inclusivity
Seen as Roblox thrives / survives off of scalability and accessibility, unless something changes drastically, I don’t see it happening and honestly, if you want to do that sort of stuff… that’s why other engines exist.
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FWIW – A lot of studios, at least outside of Roblox, rent out GPU compute instances. Since Roblox only supports REST, it would be cumbersome to use but not impossible.
- Nvidia has their NGC (Nvidia GPU Cloud) containers which can be deployed on supported hardware.
- AWS EC2 has Nvidia P and G instances. Varies from Nvidia A100 to V100 and beyond.
- IBM has the IBM Cloud.
- GCP provides access to Nvidia Tesla(s).
- MS Azure allows you to use Nvidia GPUs via VMs: NV, NC, ND series.
YMMV in terms of expense.