Is this the future - Subscription Games and Computers ??

thing is you can use your local GPU for more than just games. i.e. A.I. (variety) / encoding / transcoding / rendering / even CAD and 3d Modelling, not including other weird applications.

so if your only gaming when at home
some basic maths say:
12hrs Saturday for 4 Saturdays = 48hrs
leaving 52hrs remaining
if you game on a Sunday for 12hrs (12x4= 48hrs)
that leaves 4hrs during the week (over 20days).
based on a 4 week per month simplification

or 12hrs on weekends for 48hrs over 4 weekends (6hrs a day).
with 52hrs spread over 4 weeks at 5 days around 2.5hrs a day.

not totally unreasonable for gaming purposes.

but not what i'm asking for or want either. i do game offline often for various reasons.

one benefit for the gaming industry, it would likely reduce piracy.

i don't have a Netflix subscription or amazon and i don't plan to either.


a different take for people. how much money can you make renting out your GPU to Corporations?
 
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TNA said:
All I know is it would really put me off gaming. Never say never, but i am just not interested in going down that route.

Between hardware i have and steam deck and board games I am more than happy.

Can't see it happening any time soon. Only way this accelerates is pc hardware keeps getting more and more expensive if ai bubble never pops.

Got my fingers crossed that ai plateaus the bubble pops in the next year or two. As much as I like ai, it is moving too fast and seemingly irresponsibly. We need it to be more safe and a slowdown would help with that and hardware prices :D
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If/when AI "bubble" bursts, it won't be anything like the .com bubble, the companies shares will just go back to what they were before ai took of but even then probably still be sky high. I think even if the "bubble" for ai were to burst, the push to cloud gaming will still be there. With all the profits shown by nvidia, intel and amd, it is evident now that us consumers are small fry, there is far more money to be made with massive deals/data centres with companies, which is exactly why micron and others are now pulling out for the consumer market, the only way prices return to normal is if/when these millions/billions deals between these companies stop. Perhaps when trump is out, we may get some policing on the shenanigans going on but suspect this will be the way now as long as the government get their cut....

PrincessFrosty said:
It'll all work itself out in the end, the market will just take time to re-adjust.

There's always paradigm shifts and quite frankly with Moore's Law basically coming to an end now, we're facing a massive one anyway. We're also facing rasterization reaching severe diminishing returns and Ray Tracing not being do-able unless we use a lot of hacks to get the frame rate up (like DLSS, Frame gen, etc). It will be a turbulent time but there's no reason to think it's the end of personal compute.

Typically what happens is there's a period of adjustment, the free market rushes in because there's a massive demand for innovation and supply, eventually the market corrects, usually over corrects, and we enter some new paradigm. Things change. Usually we look back at the old way of doing things and laugh.
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PT/RT is doable on a lot of hardware now, not to mention, the majority of games have it on by default with no way to disable it i.e. UE 5 with its lumen approach and eventually they have said hardware RT will become the default. Frame gen is only really required if you are wanting to push beyond 70/80+ fps. This is were I would far sooner use geforce now over owning a console, higher fps, higher visual settings with pt/rt and lower latency but I have a good 1GB line, obviously be different for people with lesser internet.
 
LostCorpse said:
thing is you can use your local GPU for more than just games. i.e. A.I. (variety) / encoding / transcoding / rendering / even CAD and 3d Modelling, not including other weird applications.

so if your only gaming when at home
some basic maths say:
12hrs Saturday for 4 Saturdays = 48hrs
leaving 52hrs remaining
if you game on a Sunday for 12hrs (12x4= 48hrs)
that leaves 4hrs during the week (over 20days).
based on a 4 week per month simplification

or 12hrs on weekends for 48hrs over 4 weekends (6hrs a day).
with 52hrs spread over 4 weeks at 5 days around 2.5hrs a day.

not totally unreasonable for gaming purposes.

but not what i'm asking for or want either. i do game offline often for various reasons.

one benefit for the gaming industry, it would likely reduce piracy.

i don't have a Netflix subscription or amazon and i don't plan to either.


a different take for people. how much money can you make renting out your GPU to Corporations?
Click to expand...

I wish I had that time to game! It's more like 12 hours a week on a good week, but can be as little as 4hrs a week depending on life stuff!
 
Emlyn_Dewar said:
I will never pay for a subscription gaming service.
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Same. Refused to pay for playstation online so gave up online play there. Refused the vast majority of subscription services I only pay for Amazon. I just won't be a part of it. If no other option exists I still won't be part of it I'll just find other stuff to spend my time and money on.
 
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It's the red line for me. I would happily just make do with the games I could play on various own hardware with no sub, there's more than I could ever play in a lifetime any way so wouldn't bother me at all.
 
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Nexus18 said:
PT/RT is doable on a lot of hardware now, not to mention, the majority of games have it on by default with no way to disable it i.e. UE 5 with its lumen approach and eventually they have said hardware RT will become the default. Frame gen is only really required if you are wanting to push beyond 70/80+ fps. This is were I would far sooner use geforce now over owning a console, higher fps, higher visual settings with pt/rt and lower latency but I have a good 1GB line, obviously be different for people with lesser internet.
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It wasn't doable just on modern hardware alone, Nvidia had to invest in specialized cores for RT acceleration and DLSS to deal with the fact that even then it was only doable below about 720p and we'd need a generational leap in upscaling to get modern resolutions, and then do all kinds of denoising etc. Most RT features these days are only partial RT and not used for the entire scene so we miss out on a lot of the subtle RT effects.

I think my point was more that we're at the intersection of other paradigm shifts completely unrelated to memory shortages and that things are changing now anyway, in order to make that leap to DLSS and make RT possible we needed ML in huge data centers to train the upscaling/reconstruction, so there's a big open question of where improvements in rendering will come from in future. We know hardware WILL top out at some point, that's an absolute certainty, we're already feeling it now and it will only get worse. Nvidia are openly predicting frame gen will only get more sophisticated and maybe only one in 10 or one in 20 frames will be real and the rest some kind of reconstruction.

I agree with the overall point that local compute going away is bad, but paradigm shift happen and usually end up better for us in the long run, but they're painful to go through.
 
xaldub said:
This assumes Steam remains viable if the bottom drops out of the PC sector.
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When you say viable, do you mean to be able to run the servers for us to download the games?

Surely if they ever went to the point of dying they would provide us with the exe files like gog?
 
TNA said:
When you say viable, do you mean to be able to run the servers for us to download the games?

Surely if they ever went to the point of dying they would provide us with the exe files like gog?
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That's the problem ... we don't know what would happen. At this point in time, GOG is the safest platform if the worst happened and we enter a future where everthing digital is accessed via cloud / data centres.
 
TNA said:
Surely if they ever went to the point of dying they would provide us with the exe files like gog?
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they've said in the past they would convert the service to a file based server. but that was a long time ago.
but things change obviously.

there is all the legal issues around it, re-configuring of the games to remove the steam requirements/exe's/DLLs ect
 
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It's inevitable, let's not kid ourselves. It's already happening. One day people will laugh at our generations building our own computers at home. It'll be exactly like Netflix or other streaming channels and we'll all be forced to join in if we want to continue gaming.
 
Nexus18 said:
I won't be anytime soon since no need for it but when I used the geforce now sub back with the 4080 for a while (got it for a very good price), it was utterly fantastic, the IQ was incredible, latency was a non issue (which is all confirmed in the testing that has been done so if people find latency on consoles fine then you won't have any issues with geforce now since it has considerably lower latency than them). I imagine with the 5080 and all the improvements since I last used it, it will be even better now. The extra benefits that I didn't think of at the time were also nice to haves, little to no electricity use and no noise/excess heat from the PC. The only downsides for me was the lack of modding and not having access to every game.

100 hour limit a month won't be a factor for most people (well people who work, have families etc.)

Ultimately as shown with netflix, amazon, disney and a lot of other things, gaming going this direction is.... inevitable, especially with the way prices are now for hardware. Pc gaming scene/community is going to become like the home media system crowd (££££[££] worth of hardware with a huge collection of film discs), very niche.
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Absolutely, it's very impressive for the money (at the current price). The 5080 rigs also have a stronger CPU (Zen 5 Epyc vs the Zen 3 Threadripper in the 4080 rigs) which really helps in certain games. You get full system upgrades every few years without an increase in the subscription price (at least for now) which Gamers Nexus' value for money table didn't take into account.

I noticed a big boost in Cybperunk on the '5080' with all the pathtracing on, bigger than I expected. It may be because it's not actually a 5080, it's a server part that approximates a 5080 and has 48GB of VRAM.

Where GFN struggles is in terms of image quality in games with lots of vegetation and effects like fog/volumetrics. However, there are plenty of games where image quality is almost indistinguishable from local. Image quality is best if you limit the stream to 60FPS, but a 120FPS stream is perfectly acceptable in most cases. When you go up to a 240FPS stream or 360FPS then the image quality suffers noticeably (because the bitrate is limited to a maximum of 100 Mbps currently), but these modes are marked as being for competitive gaming where responsiveness is the primary focus. I'm sure with time this sort of technical limitation will be overcome.

The other issue is that Nvidia is taking a long time to fix problems with little to no communication e.g. Cloud GSync problems which haven't been fixed for months now despite them having been made aware. Patching games can also take a long time, particularly if you are playing one that is very niche (although this is pretty rare).

Then the service went down for 5 hours or so when BF6 launched and there were similar problems when Borderlands 4 launched. Nvidia need to do better, but I suppose they are a victim of their own success as the service becomes more popular.

The lack of more big games is due to greedy publishers/developers who want to be paid twice or companies like Sony who want you to use their own cloud gaming service.

So there are issues, but I don't think they are beyond a massive company like Nvidia, particularly if GFN becomes their main focus on the gaming front.
 
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I'm already building an offline gaming PC with spare parts, and games of dubious origin plus GOG games.It's obviously not going to keep up with the demands of future games but it will play all my old high rep0layability strategy games and old games. My Blu Ray collection is going all the time and I have 2 new BR players and a backup still boxed, I think they'll outlive me tbh. Same thing with books. I'm also stuffing HD's with movies etc.

I'm not paying forever for stuff I already own or paying to rent future AI infused slop on sub services.

So yes while it is coming, I am prepping to be as self sufficient as possible with regard to entertainment.
 
Steam is a good point, but I feel the only way that will fail in future is if games themselves do. Cloud services may offer deals for exclusives like the consoles do, to attract people initially to buy into the system, but that's extraordinarily expensive. And it only works because consoles are still a 1 off payment they can use to lock you into 1 platform for a whole console generation and thus recoup the costs.

As for access to games, steam only made it because of convenience and not being massive ****s by cramming in advertising. If that ever fell then people would just go back to piracy, I know that fell off a lot in the public eye more recently but it just went back underground where it started. I can tell you private trackers are massive, they follow strict rules, invite only, make sure people seed as well as leech or they ban accounts. It means bandwidth we all pay for anyway (from our ISP) becomes a giant network of all media for all time. There's incentives to get people to seed old/uncommon stuff, and requests to allow people to ask for forgotten media.

They can try and protect games by keeping the source material entirely private and in the cloud later on, but it'll get leaked. Movies always have been from awards ceremonies and things like that. Only takes 1 person somewhere in the world with access to the binaries and boom it's out.

There is only one thing that concerns me, and that's with replacing my current hardware if it breaks. If I never bought another PC upgrade again due to change paradigm on the PC, I'd (surprisingly) be OK with that. I was around when there weren't even 3D accelerators, the improvement since then is bonkers, we're at a point of severe diminishing returns. Games only benefit so much from graphics, and as I said before, it's 100% going to hit a wall anyway. If that happens here and now, and not say 10 years from now, to me isn't a big deal. I've made peace with all this improvement coming to an end. We've known the likely path for transistors shrinking in the real world for a good decade or so now.
 
I started a thread like this in the console forum a few weeks ago

Will the future be streaming only and no gaming consoles available

Lately i been wondering how long it will be before there going be no gaming consoles available and we just stream games on a TV/Tablet/Mobile phone etc Thinking about how this happened with movies and how no one buys DVD or Blu-ray players any more and everyone just stream movies.. And then i...
forums.overclockers.co.uk forums.overclockers.co.uk

Both Microsoft & Sony are pushing that you can play games by just streaming them now.
Think Microsoft with xbox streaming has been doing this for some years now.

Due to the latest update You are now meant to be able stream playstation games on a playstation portal handheld without having a PS5 Turned on (and maybe without even owning a PS5)

2.50 minutes in says should be able to stream playstation games even without a PS5
 
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Streaming gaming is an obvious niche to fill, but - one little issue aside! - it is likely to coexist with hardware gaming, just like Blue Ray releases coexist with Netflix et al.

The "little issue aside" is that gaming may change beyond recognition due to AI, with textured polygons being replaced by AI generated worlds. Still controlled in real time of course. This would likely HAVE to be streamed as home hardware is not going to be up to the task. E.g., 5090 has 1/20th (?) of VRAM needed for a state of the art open source AI text generator.
 
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I’m in the minority here but I sold my Alienware laptop (£850) and gaming pc(£500).

Replaced it with a Mac mini m4

GeForce now works perfectly with it. No issues with it what so ever. The only thing I will say is that it doesn’t have every game.

It costs £200 per year for it. My mac was ~£500 but the thing is sleek, silent and I have a nice clean set up now as well.

Way I’m looking at it is I’ve got a few years paid for with GFN and I won’t have to upgrade anything. I suspect (and hope) the M4 last at least 10 years.
 
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