The power of 21000 homes for advertising.
What’s most impressive is that it is even legal.
Or profitable
Is it? Last I‘ve heard it was bleeding money.
Makes sense. Gimmicks are gimmicks.
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!
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.
Currently, an agreement is under review to ensure that 70% of the Sphere’s power needs will come from solar sources, with the other 30% from non-renewable energy that will be offset by renewable energy credits.
Ahh yes, energy credits. AKA bullshit.
We shouldnt call them energy credits, but rather indulgences.
We should call them FRAUD
Somewhere in an ancient crypt, the bones of Luther begin to twitch to life…
Hey!
They’re not always BS. Just most of the time!
Or are they? Some of the companies who are the best at it and seem to be genuinely trying have been shown not to be able to guarantee one way or the other.
“Wait, someone cut down that forest we planted?!” (no joke)
Edit: see REC clarification below (thanks!)
Just to be clear, renewable energy credits are different than carbon offsets, and easier to guarantee because they’re often tied directly to a metered renewable energy source.
That said, there are still junk RECs on the market, like those tied to energy that was produced up to 2 decades ago that nobody got around to claiming / retiring. Or RECs tied to energy sources that may have happened regardless of the REC sale.
Ohhh good point! Wanted to edit that into my comment there even, thank you.
The junk RE credits are really interesting. As is the “ha we were building that solar farm no matter what!” problem - reminds me of when that happens in… tax deductions I think.
At least I understand forests that are replanted over and over to be used for lumber, effectively reducing the use of old lumber for myriad products.
Energy credits — what a bunch of vacuous rhetoric.
The reality is that it’s energy being taken away from the overall grid, requiring a larger grid and thus prolonging our dependence on non renewable energy while we build up renewable sources.
If we weren’t so wasteful with our energy we wouldn’t need as much of it and it’d be easier to go fully renewable.
Well this is not good math at all. If you create a project and offset all its power requirements, you haven’t added anything to the grid. The alternative is to not do stuff, which is not going to happen anytime soon*, so it’s a net good thing and needs to be incentivized, not disparaged.
*Well it will happen after the water wars and plagues wipe us out, and the sphere will stop drawing any energy at that point.
Consider ”hate credits”… like imagine the KKK can do whatever it wants so long as they claim to offset it with “hate credits”…
Currently, an agreement is under review to ensure that 70% of the Sphere’s power needs will come from solar sources, with the other 30% from non-renewable energy that will be offset by renewable energy credits.
Nevada has pledged to achieve net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, and the solar project under construction to help offset its energy debt is estimated to complete in 2027.
How stupid is it that somebody can claim “Net Zero” greenhouse gas emissions when 30% of their power is greenhouse gas.
Just gonna throw this out there. Fuck credits, charge a carbon tax.
We’ll also ignore the fact that that solar could have been used to offset actual needs instead of this BS.
Vegas exists because of the BS.
The word net does a lot of heavy lifting and it’s just a scam
You can use 100% coal power and claim net zero by buying a forest
Well you don’t understand what “net” means.
It doesn’t mean literally zero. It means colunm A and column B average out to zero.
To acheive a real net zero, they have to save energy somewhere else that takes that column past 100% (Such as if their solar panels produce more energy than they use during certain times.)
They probably just make some shit up to say their are saving extra somewhere they aren’t (so to that point, yes…credits are bullshit.)
Maybe, I mean just maybe, they can run this thing only as long as the solar generated power lasts, and then turn it off 30% of the time.
Run it at 70% percent brightness.
Oooh, this is a good idea
Fuck credits, charge a carbon tax.
IMO it seems RECs are a better solution than carbon taxes at least in situations like this. With RECs you’re buying renewable energy to offset non-renewables, with a carbon tax the company is just giving the government money for use of non-renewables. Only funds spent on RECs in this case actually go to supporting the renewable energy sector. I’m no expert in this stuff so I could be off, just how I understand it.
They never claimed net zero. They plan to achieve net zero by 2050
Yeah, that’s in the quote. I’m more complaining about the concept of “net zero”.
Exactly. Carbon credits for the win! I love me some Pigouvian taxes. :)
Las Vegas in general is a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat. Does it even exist without the Hoover Dam?
I don’t know about power, but Vegas is actually incredibly water efficient. Due to the way the water rights work with the Colorado river, they’re not allowed very much, but it doesn’t “count” if you put it back in. So nearly every drop they use is treated and put back (probably cleaner, tbh). Boggles the brain, but somehow it’s actually a fairly sustainable city. More than any other other major metro, in any event.
Considering they are in a literal desert, they would have to be fairly sustainable to exist in the first place. Not saying it’s not super impressive, my dad lived out there when they were building up a lot of the expanded infrastructure and he has some cool stories about how he saw the desert on the outskirts disappear as they added in all the water and transportation stuff
It was also, literally, built by the mob
It’s funny, I think Vegas is perfectly fine as the city of sin so things like this really don’t phase me. It was built on the idea of crime and excess.
What does seem weird to me is how in a desert, why isn’t everything solar? The sun is their only natural resource besides sand. Every rooftop and parking lot and flat surface possible seems like it should be a panel.
Vegas is surrounded by empty desert, they don’t need to use rooftops and parking lots
even deserts host life. it’s kind of a ecological misnomer that we could just cover the deserts of the world in solar panels. that would have serious repercussions.
What repercussions could covering a few acres more in the mojave with solar panels have?
Honestly if we could get space elevators figured out, the best place to put solar panels would be in the upper atmosphere. Tethered to the ground by massive columns that feed the energy they collect to massive capacitors on the ground?
Solar only works during the day. During night you need batteries which are not renewable. Mining lithium trashes ecosystems and we probably have enough for like 50 more years at this rate, cobalt is extracted through slave labour. And we’ve seen how well recycling works for other materials which are less complex. So all these renewables aren’t all that green in every aspect. Unless we solve the energy storage problem it isn’t as simple as putting up more panels.
Sodium batteries (which are on the market now) are way more environmentally friendly than Lithium batteries.
The materials are very accessible by comparison to Lithium batteries and they’re way more stable.
Wait, why do they need 150 GPUs for a 1.2 megapixel display?
That’s less than 1080p!
Who engineered this monstrosity?
They say there are 16 screens inside, each with a 16k resolution. Such a screen would have 16x as many pixels as a 4k screen. The GPUs power those as well.
For the number of GPUs it appears to make sense. 150 GPUs for the equivalent of about 256 4k screens means each GPU handles ±2 4k screens. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it could make sense.
The power draw of 28 MW still seems ridiculous to me though. They claim about 45 kW for the GPUs, which leaves 27955 kW for everything else. Even if we assume the screens are stupid and use 1 kw per 4k segment, that only accounts for 256 kW, leaving 27699 kW. Where the fuck does all that energy go?! Am I missing something?
This is a complete shot in the dark but could the huge power draw come from needing some intense industrial cooling/airflow stuff in/on the sphere?
Edit: forgot a word
The big power draw is because of the sheer amount of light it dumps out. You try lighting up 54,000 square meters of LED panel to a few hundred nits like a pc monitor, and see how much power it takes.
More likely it’s the thing that generates all that heat in the first place.
complete shot in the dark
Man, I wanna delay the stupid edgy joke I’m making but I can’t help myself
Oh Jesus, there are 16 16K screens? I didn’t read that right at all. That’s completely superfluous. The Las Vegas Sphere is an affront to God.
In the future there will be myths that we once had standards such as html but after we tried to build this sphere, god cursed us to use only incompatible proprietary protocols
Yeah, 4k phone and 4k plasma tv don’t consume same ammount of energy.
Says 16K, where’s the disconnect? (I don’t know display tech)
Ah, you’re right, that’s 1.2 megapixel for the exterior, and 132 megapixel for the interior.
That’s a substantial increase, but it’s still the equivalent of about 16 4K screens, which absolutely does not need 150 GPUs!
Edit: No, I was wrong, this entire monstrosity is overengineered to over two gigapixels on the inside, and that’s absolutely ridiculous.
Anything most likely driving factor here?
Extreme resolution requirements, massive number of LED elements, real-time rendering and synchronization needs, complex content processing, load distribution and redundancy, future-proofing capabilities, fraudulent kickback scheme
And a waste of electricity?
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.
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.
Add a solar array and battery bank, a you might even have electricity left over. It’s in the desert after all.
Still a waste of energy because that could be used for the general grid
I wouldn’t say entertainment is a waste of energy even if there are nobler uses for the power.
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!
Remember when he got his dick almost bitten off while doing coke with a hooker?
Wasn’t it his lip?
Shit you might be right. It’s been a long time
It may be entertaining, but it’s not entertainment.
deleted by creator
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.
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 saw several concerts there and it was awesome. You want to live a life without anything fun in it?
Have you ever seen a solar array that gives 28 MW?
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 :))
Thank you for doing the math.
So?
Or how about six wind turbines? It’s rather windy in Las Vegas.
I mean, have you seen it with your own eyes?
I’ve flown over a couple big ones. Not sure of the exactly area or output.
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.
Probably have a few cards running the displays and the rest of them mining some sphere-themed memecoin
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
Is the ‘dystopia-sphere’ trying to compete with the torment nexus or something?
Thunderdome was already taken
Might as well just give up on the earth right now I guess
A bomb that could destroy Earth’s core would be an admittedly impressive technical feat!
Nono, the bombs starts the earths core
WAVE PROPIGATION
The Core appreciators… UNITE!
I mean it is cool. But really a testament to why we deserve extinction at this point…
Ok, so it’s “capable of drawing” enough power for 20,000 homes in the area. How much does it actually use day to day? Does it dim at night and brighten in the daytime to keep those ads rolling in the sunshine?
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.
Even if it’s just playing back videos, it still should compensate for the distortion of the spherical display. That’s a “simple” 3d transformation, but with the amount of pixels, coordinating between the GPUs and some redundancy, it doesn’t seem like an excessive amount of computing power. The whole thing is still an impressive excess though…
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.
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.
