Lightweight 3D MMO framework with high GPU offloading

3D Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) applications have in present a large number of registered and active users that can reach up to even several millions for the most popular ones. These types of applications that include 3D games, virtual life simulations, educational environments, museums, etc. are already considered by many as the new generation of human computer interface and human computer mediated communication; they continue to grow in size and integrate or even replace traditional ones (web browsers, instant messengers, social portals, etc.). The main problems of current 3D MMO server architectures are related to their scalability because they need to accommodate a large number of concurrent users and the number of operations that need to be executed can get very high in moments of peak usage. These problems of scalability are mainly due to the necessity to achieve real time low latency interaction in the 3D virtual worlds, at the same time ensuring their consistency and persistence. The owners of such virtual worlds need to handle a high operational cost due to the software and hardware complexity of current server architectures. In this paper we present and evaluate the 3D MMO server architectures already used in production and we also expand our previous work, presenting an overview of a solution that uses GPGPU (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units) processing in order to alleviate the scalability and costs of current architectures. Preliminary results and tests with a functional prototype sustain the feasibility of our solution.