

Nvidia launches a game streaming service - bcaulfield
http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/11/13/grid-game-streaming/

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leeber
How well does this work from the user experience standpoint?

Is it a smooth fluid experience, or prone to lag?

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TheLoneWolfling
If you believe that it will be smooth and fluid, I have a bridge to sell you.

There's this pesky little thing known as the speed of light.

I mean, even if they were to do the absurd thing of "render X possible
futures, send you all of them, have client pick the "best" one", that only
reduces general latency, not worse-case latency - and you cannot keep
increasing X as bandwidth is not infinite (and their server power is not
infinite either). Worst-case latency being (RTT + render time), which is going
to be at least RTT. And worse-case latency is what you tend to notice, at
least at these timescales.

Will it potentially be useful for those who live close to a datacenter? Sure.
(I question the economics of it from a consumer perspective. But that is
another matter.) But is it a general technique? No. For example: I have a ping
to Google of ~200ms at home. As such, worse-case latency is >=200ms. (Well,
again, depends on where the data centers are. But I'm assuming that Google has
pretty good datacenters. And almost all of that latency is coming from the
"last mile" in my case, which could change.) Are you going to notice 1/5 of a
second delay in a FPS? Probably enough to not consider it smooth and fluid
anymore. Related: I at one point got annoyed at a projector over Super Hexagon
- kept overcompensating - and measured the delay against my laptop's display
and found a delay of ~5 frames over and above my laptop. Admittedly, SH is a
twitch-based game - but when you're turning / etc in a FPS you want much the
same same frame precision. An extra 200ms isn't exactly going to be
unnoticeable.

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Xixi
I think there is a business case, even for FPS. FPS are typically played
online, so you are already dealing with lag. And a worst case of lag is
already going to get you killed, whether the game is streamed or not.

Besides the light is not so slow. I ping Google in ~12ms (from Osaka). Even
for a FPS that's good enough for most people, especially if the alternative is
forking a non trivial amount of money. I mean most people play FPS with
gamepads, so it's not like the threshold in terms of quality is particularly
high to begin with.

How many gamers within reach of a datacenter in Seoul? in Paris? in Berlin? in
San Francisco? in New-York City? Sure it won't work for you, but that
certainly doesn't mean there is no business case.

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Umn55
Man this is idiotic, anyone who would support this shit is ruining gaming,
it's just DRM by another name.

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elliotec
But you have to buy the weird tablet...

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rckclmbr
Do you? It seems like they just get the service for free -- you can buy it
otherwise

