
Peer-to-peer cloud gaming on machines located in your neighborhood - Samin100
https://vectordash.com/edge/
======
sam36
How exactly does this work? As far as I know, most ISP's send all traffic from
their CPE equipment to their main data center where it is then routed. Which
means if you happen to know your neighbor's IP address, and try to ping it,
the packet goes 100+ miles away before being routed back to your neighbors CPE
interface.

And I don't game, but if I set up a gaming machine I can "rent" it out?

~~~
Samin100
There's very little a consumer can do to alter the way their ISP routes
packets, however as long as the network latencies between the two machines are
below ~15 ms and bandwidth up/down is 15+ Mbps, a near-native gaming cloud
gaming is very much possible!

In an ideal world though, ping times would just be a function of distance.

If you're interested in hosting machines, you can check out
[http://vectordash.com/hosting/](http://vectordash.com/hosting/)

~~~
Sabinus
Planning on supporting AMD GPUs anytime soon?

~~~
Samin100
Unfortunately AMD support isn't on the roadmap.

------
ObsoleteNerd
Is there any tech write-up on how this works? I'm genuinely fascinated and
curious.

How does it actually run on my PC? What sort of sandboxing? Does it take over
my GPU completely or can I still be using my PC for non-GPU-intensive stuff?
Does it run like a VM on my PC with GPU access, or does it run the game as
though I'm running it, and just stream the input/output back to the player?

------
joshumax
I remember this from a little while back on HN! IIRC the creator of Vectordash
was a student interested in ML but disenchanted with the prices of other cloud
GPU compute services. The idea was so ingeniously simple I was surprised
nobody really tried it before. Glad to see they're expanding into other stuff,
too.

On a side note, I'd love to see a tech write up on how Vectordash operates.

------
bcheung
How does the client and security work? What protections are there against
using a host's IP for malicious activity?

Would be nice to take advantage of my 1080ti and excess solar generation I
have right now.

------
algorithm_dk
I bet it's using mesh networking a la ZeroTier, I have a similar setup,
working on my home desktop while being at my customer's offices. I get 15-40ms
latency, 1920x1080 at 60fps and no noticeable input lag. Gaming works really
well, but I only really use it to code.

I keep saying I'll write on how to set this up for cheap, but I didn't find
the time yet.

Basic recipe: fiber, zerotier, one raspberry pi and a steam link

Edit: latency above referrs the display latency, the latency between the
machines is between 2 and 10 ms

------
sharms
Back in ~1998 or so, Dwango[1] provided a similar service, and for the time /
capabilities it worked very well. There is still a latency penalty for
distance, and I don't see cloud computing solving that, so having these
locally makes sense (gamers typically buy < 5ms gear etc)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWANGO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWANGO)

------
empath75
Man I would not trust the sandboxing on any modern game engine enough to allow
that.

~~~
Samin100
Interesting, so from a hosting POV you wouldn't be comfortable hosting your
machine for others to game on?

~~~
orliesaurus
I think what they mean is that games have to provide sharding GPU resources or
something? I'm interpreting not sure if that's right tho

------
coolspot
Both p2p GPU renting for AI training and location-based renting for gaming are
very interesting business models.

Also glad they didn't drag blockchain into that.

~~~
iamdave
I almost feel bad breaking this to you but, they (partially) have.

[https://rendertoken.com/](https://rendertoken.com/)

~~~
Stammon
Isn't this a different product?

------
gaspoweredcat
this is a repost from a few days ago although they didnt have the google form
for signup then just a semi broken sign up on the site (to get it to work you
had to sign up for a vectordash core account before it would work)

im hoping that the service can iron out the few issues i have with liquidsky
which is the service i currently use for gaming till i can afford to replace
my laptop which manages to be nearly good enough sadly the few issues i have
are enough that it just isnt worth it, maybe for a single player game where
you can pause or save etc but not for competitive gaming.

i just hope this manages to handle the task, its one thing doing it on a
server that is constantly running with a set amount of resources but theres no
guarantee these machines will stay on, those selling the power may need it
themselves so disconnect just like when mining.

what happens if the GPU doing the lions share of the work drops offline, are
the threads it was processing seamlessly passed to the next nearest card with
no loss, dont get me wrong, i like the idea but ill want to see how well it
works before i commit to it.

also if theyre looking for feature suggestions may i suggest an android client
thats capable of using in app purchases to pay for the sub, currently only one
cloud gaming service ive seen offers this its called vortex but rather than
having a VM of your own where you can install games of your choice that one
has a set list of games which sadly doesnt include the main one i care about,
overwatch, so i havent tried it myself however i know im not the only one with
a rather fat balance of google play credit earned from survey rewards going
unused

------
sinatra
Interesting! Just curious .. what happens if a machine suddenly goes offline?

~~~
Samin100
Thank you! If a host goes offline then gaming session is free! Host uptime is
taken into account while assigning gaming sessions, so if a machine goes
offline before it’s set date then future sessions are less likely to occur on
it.

------
rememberlenny
What happen to your original idea of machine learning GPU rentals?

~~~
MrEldritch
They're still doing that - this is an _expansion_ , not a pivot. Vectordash
Core (the ML service) is totally still a thing.

