

Cloud Computing - Streaming Video Games - pkaler
http://www.dperry.com/archives/news/dp_blog/my_feelings_on/

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swombat
The elephant in the room of this whole OnLive games thing is, why the heck are
they bothering with video games?

If they have a technology that's capable of remoting games (which are some of
the most demanding consumer applications imaginable), then the whole "Linux vs
Mac vs Windows" debate is moot. If it can remote 3D, fast action games, it can
remote whole OS's with ease. That's surely a 100x bigger market than games.

That, to me, casts huge doubts on their claims... it's like someone claiming
they've solved cold fusion and are using it to power really strong, long-
lasting flashlights.

~~~
teamonkey
You can already remote OSes with ease, and have been able to for years. VNC,
X11 etc. It's not particularly fashionable, but PC hardware is so cheap you
might as well buy a new one. You can easily spawn an instance on EC2 and
connect to it, but those machines don't have state-of-the art GPUs.

The problem they're trying to solve here is that a new gaming PC can cost a
couple of thousand dollars, and you have to keep it on the bleeding edge of
expensive hardware to play the latest games. It's typical that even the most
avid gamers simply can't keep up with all the consoles and PC hardware.

~~~
swombat
Most OS remoting solutions I've seen are only just usable. I can remote into
my Mac Mini into the living room and even that doesn't feel quite right. A 3D
shooter, with this kind of latency, would be almost unplayable. And that's
just to my living room!

If they can get games to play well on the average DSL connection, they can get
OS's to feel 100% local, not laggy, like the average VNC session. I'm sure
there'd be a big market for that kind of technology, outside of gaming.

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Angostura
I've been thinking about the OnLive business model and the difficulties with
the technology/bandwidth and this is what I reckon they are going to do:

Sell it to DSL/Cable companies.

I sorry I just don't believe that the system will work if it is hosted in some
nebulous cloud somewhere, and I suspect that the ISPs will go bonkers about
the amount of traffic that it generates - if the ISPs aren't getting a
payback.

Obvious answer - the ISPs sell it as a service to their customers and colocate
the equipment at their exchanges.

~~~
bitwize
Better yet, sell it to restaurants, bars, etc. for those completely noddy
trivia and keno games.

That's about the only place I can see it really succeeding. I don't want to
play even an RPG with laggy, video-compression-artifacted graphics.

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greendestiny
As complete an analysis of the difference in latency between OnLive and a
local game as I can be bothered making is:

\- player input to server: ping/2

\- game engine + rendering: same as local

\- video compression: worst possible is 1/framerate

\- first video bit back to player: ping/2

\- whole frame back to player: worst possible 1/framerate

\- decompression + display: worst possible is 1/framerate

So assuming video compression, decompression and transmission are all as slow
as they can be thats a total of ping + 3/framerate. So they can rightly claim
a perfectly smooth 30 frames a second performance, but the latency could be
ping + 100ms worse than a local game. The best case latency approaches the
ping.

I doubt the compression and decompression is much faster than 60 frames a
second, although the transfer time could be quite low in the case of a
connection good enough to do HD sending SD. So a more realistic estimate might
be ping + 2/60 or ping + 33ms, where a good ping is ~20ms(?) to your ISP or
well peered server location. So assuming things work quite well you're looking
at >50ms latency. I think that'd be a fairly unsatisfactory experience.

~~~
corysama
OnLive claims to have compression time down to 1 millisecond. I'm not sure how
long decompression takes, but it would be more accurate to say "the latency
will be ping + 1ms + decompression time worse than a local game".

Anyone have stats on latency for decompressing 720p video?

BTW: Local game latencies for 30fps games are often (30ms/2 average time
between controller input and controller sampling) + (30ms gameplay&physics
processing) + (30ms CPU-side graphics) + (30ms GPU-side graphics) + (30-90ms
TV signal processing) >= 135ms.

I had a chance to play Mirror's Edge through OnLive at GDC. They were claiming
a 50ms ping to the server for that setup. I choose that game because I am very
familiar with it and it is a very demanding. The extra lag was noticable, but
still playable.

