Short recap, because this is the second half of a story. In the previous article I described how our on-air graphics at VSporte left vMix. The overlay became a web page fed into the mixer as a single input, which took the graphics out of vMix's memory and made them testable. Then Rive moved the layout work off developers and onto designers. That last step had a consequence nobody planned: a graphic was now a file with a state machine, driven by plain data. It did not need a browser to render. And it had never needed a GPU, we had just always rendered it through tools that came with one attached.
Everything below is VSporte engineering too: real feeds, measured numbers, and a container that does what I say it does.
Can the rendering leave the building?
Once the graphic is a Rive file plus a JSON state, the renderer can be anything that runs the Rive state machine and rasterizes vectors.
Rive is something you normally render on the web, in a browser or an app, and that is where we ran it. I wanted to know whether the same file could be rendered headless, on a server with no GPU in it at all, and what a live broadcast would cost if it could. Which is the obvious question restated: why is there still a GPU workstation in a rented room attached to every parallel broadcast?
