Comment Re:50%+ cheaper not to use the cloud (Score 1) 119
If someone is watching an episode of the smurfs where it is raining, you will notice a difference.
Could performance be improved if Amazon were to offload rendering of the raindrops to the client? I'm thinking if the Roku or AppleTV box had to compute the transparency of the raindrop over the skin of the blue smurfs, it might alleviate these performance hits you're seeing on EC2. Either that or replace the raindrops with snowflakes which are more complex due to every single one being unique, but not having transparency issues to manage might speed things up. I suppose the feasibility would depend on the Smurfs episodes' storylines, however.