How long do people think it will be until we have dummy terminals?

GGizmo

GGizmo

GGizmo

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I've been in to gaming world since the 1980s and seen gradual improvement in technology over the years.

I was around when the PC broke up the Amiga vs Atari ST fight and booted them to the retro era.

But one big issue with PC's is the many combinations of parts. Choice is a great thing. But not good when it comes to wanting to run cutting edge games on them. It takes games companies a lot of time to run a game on all the main potential builds, and even then major bugs can appear in a game, even the AAA games.

As our broadband connections improve new technology, speed increases and low pings are gradually becoming more common how will this chance how we play our games?

I think when the change happens I suspect that the integrated motherboard graphics might come back in to play for the desktop, and then we sign in to servers that have the most powerful graphics cards around.

I've noticed many of the consoles have some sort of cloud gaming feature. But if it comes to the PC, how do the think it will change PC hardware?
 
Don't really see it happening, it's already been available for a number of years (e.g. Stadia) but has never really taken off mainstream.

Not to mention that compute costs in the cloud are pretty expensive. Costs don't typically shrink over time, the compute just gets more powerful.
 
I don't see it happening soon, but I do think it will eventually happen. There's already some hybrid games, and we'll start seeing some more like it.

Infrastructure will need to be a lot better before fully possible though
 
I can see companies pushing for it :( then they can make you rent the hardware, increase prices at will, sunset older hardware when they feel you should be giving them more money, etc.
 
From an environmental standpoint it's a good idea. No wasted resources in manufacturing hardware and the packaging and shipping of the millions of units to users across the globe. It'll become like Netflix, Prime or Disney, all competing for your eyeballs and trigger finger.

However I still think it's at least more than a decade away due to the lacking infrastructure.
 
Rroff said:
I can see companies pushing for it :( then they can make you rent the hardware, increase prices at will, sunset older hardware when they feel you should be giving them more money, etc.
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Couple that with the people who can't afford 1-2k in one go on a PC but can afford to 'rent' one at £40 or whatever a month for years. Similar to renting vs buying a house. I think that's a huge portion of the market, much larger than the still relatively niche custom builders that many of us are on here.

On the companies side they can also offer those 'compute units' out to multiple people across timezones for nearly 24hr utilisation (within reason). Charging each for usage as if they're the sole user or there abouts of course.

Seems like a sad inevitability unfortunately.
 
It's just the latency that's the sticking point.

Ok fair enough like some single player turn based games it'll be fine.

But you try and play some even half competitive FPS and no way.

Online FPS games so have pretty clever software behind them all that's smooths everything out, I'd actually be interested to play something like PUBG with everything set to "real time" so you can see what's actually going on, but the problem with some kind of cloud gaming in input lag, and you can't resolve that unless you get the latency (and that's a return trip) down to basically nil.
 
I played FH5 exclusively on Xbox cloud just to test it, and it was fine. you could tell it was being streamed, but it was as playable as any online game in that you kind of just got used to the very slight delay.
 
We already have them, but seems people aren't interested.

There's a horrible ad for chrome books that screams about how great they are for cloud gaming. And Sony has announced their handheld game streaming thing that lets you play your ps5 over network or Internet. And as far as I can see that literally does nothing else. And the logitech g cloud thing.

The issue is that so long as these produce a subpar experience they're never going to really take off. And tbh I think that for the moment they keep coming out and getting largely ignored its going to be a long time before people actually give them a proper go. So even if tomorrow the perfect streaming platform comes out people will write it off. Maybe in 10 years they can try again
 
BUDFORCE said:
It's just the latency that's the sticking point.

Ok fair enough like some single player turn based games it'll be fine.

But you try and play some even half competitive FPS and no way.

Online FPS games so have pretty clever software behind them all that's smooths everything out, I'd actually be interested to play something like PUBG with everything set to "real time" so you can see what's actually going on, but the problem with some kind of cloud gaming in input lag, and you can't resolve that unless you get the latency (and that's a return trip) down to basically nil.
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I think there's been experiments into doing things like rendering the player character (both 1st and 3rd), and the HUD locally, which is fairly lightweight, and do the more expensive stuff like the world and AI remotely. Was a while ago on some tech talk.

Ultimately I don't think the economics really work at the moment. Running a console standard GPU in the cloud is expensive, especially when that same GPU could be running AI workloads for companies with loads of money to spend..... Versus playing games in an extremely latency sensitive environment for some gamers that can't afford an Xbox...... Just doesn't really add up.
 
If it was available where i am and my internet connection was good enough i'd have no problem streaming games for a fee, it'd save spending 1000s on pc components every x years. but the network infrastructure is not good enough here right now.
 
mid_gen said:
I think there's been experiments into doing things like rendering the player character (both 1st and 3rd), and the HUD locally, which is fairly lightweight, and do the more expensive stuff like the world and AI remotely. Was a while ago on some tech talk.

Ultimately I don't think the economics really work at the moment. Running a console standard GPU in the cloud is expensive, especially when that same GPU could be running AI workloads for companies with loads of money to spend..... Versus playing games in an extremely latency sensitive environment for some gamers that can't afford an Xbox...... Just doesn't really add up.
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Yeah, it doesn't add up at all.

It ends up being a more expensive, more complicated, less effective solution to the problem.

I've worked on some of this stuff from a concept perspective and had a close friend who worked on Nvidia's first offering a while back.

For some games it works "ok" non-twitch shooters or games which are a little slower, but having the graphics cards centralised in a data-centre is always going to mean that the experience will be all over the place, for some people it will be ok, for others it sucks - and that's never good.
 
I know I mentioned it earlier, not tried it myself but Geforce Now ultimate over FTTP seems do-able.


The subscription cost versus buying a top end GPU gets you the top end GPU for 6 years.

However you get to utilise the next 5080 on release.
 
iron_monkey said:
Has anyone actually tried streaming a game, i imagine atm it's not great, with low Res and high lag, but I've not tried it so I'm just guessing
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Nvidia's GeForce NOW Ultimate tier is actually surprisingly good and I only have a 70-80 Mbps connection at the moment (I plan to upgrade over the next few months).
 
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iron_monkey said:
Has anyone actually tried streaming a game, i imagine atm it's not great, with low Res and high lag, but I've not tried it so I'm just guessing
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If you have a reasonable internet connection a fluid 60FPS 1080p is very achievable but there is no hiding the latency including encoder and your connection. For single player it isn't terrible but I wouldn't choose to do it, for multi-player you have to be a sucker for punishment or have really bought into the whole thing to ignore the negatives.
 
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