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OnLive - threat to all gaming hardware

intellix

intellix

intellix

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Anyone heard of OnLive? gaming on demand where the server does all the rendering and calculation stuff, then sends it back to a client... which will allow games such as Crysis to run at maximum settings on something like a Mac Air...

It also looks like its going to crush Console gaming too

Anyone got any comments? Really can't wait for it to become available...
 
There has been a few threads on this around the forum... fair enough I think they were mostly in general rather than GPU section...

Input latency is gonna be the killer... they are banking against people being clued up enough to notice it... I wouldn't bet on it personally.
 
Also, what about when a new game gets released - the severs will get hammered. Companies have enough trouble providing servers that will keep up with demand to download these games, let alone do all the processing etc. on the server as well as all the video the user will constantly be downloading. It just seems like a bad idea.
 
apparently you only need a 5mb connection to play something at 720p aaaand that's available pretty much everywhere... the input latency part of it does seem a little... how is that even possible? but looking at the videos it doesn't look to be an issue... but even still... this opens up gaming on devices you would never have thought it was possible to...

Personally I'm a little pessimistic about it, but hoping to be surprised
 
Rather than type out my own reasons why I think this is a load of **** I will post a link to this rather concise article on why it is a big bag of smoke, mirrors and fail.

http://www.digitalfoundry.org/blog/?p=614

Oh and that article does not even mention they will need to break the laws of physics to stop latency from destroying the experiance.
 
So how does it exactly work ? If they are graphics intensive games requiring not just the use of processing power but of graphics card power as well, does that mean one graphics card is required for each user ?
 
DeathTyrant said:
Personally I like being in control of my gaming system. I like to be able to play offline, with mods, all that jazz.
Click to expand...

Exactly it won't target the gaming market who play offline, so the idea is flawed but very plausible assuming the figures of latency adds up.

It says that onlive micro console can compress 720p in less then 1ms.

On the bandwidth front, the issue is video compression. You can't send a raw HD signal over the net without compression otherwise the bandwidth usage would be too high for most households. Video compression helps reduce this data, however traditional solutions have been rather slow – 500ms or more latency to compress HD video. This appears to be the area where OnLive has made a considerable technical achievement. They have custom built a network card that can compress HD video in less than 1ms. This almost wipes out the impact that compression has on the latency and has significant implications for other video processing applications to boot.

Finally, there will be some additional latency to consider at the client end involved with decoding the compressed video, but this could be expected to be less than 5ms on most machines.
Click to expand...

If you played 60 hours in a month on a 5Mbs connection, you would use about 100GB bandwidth.
Click to expand...
source: http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=13939&sid=e8206da43d7752e0206a6c1598069
thats 100GB x say 10million uses = 1,000,000 Terabytes of bandwidth a month? I don't think any data centre is capable of that.
And furthermore if you want 1080p you need a 10MB connection, again thats 200GB a month minimum, heck i bet it'll probley be around 300-400GB on average considering a lot of people play more then 2hours a day.
So thats 4million TB+ bandwidth which is just obsurd.
 
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Linx said:
thats 100GB x say 10million uses = 1,000,000 Terabytes of bandwidth a month? I don't think any data centre is capable of that.
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With all the money they will make they can make a data center such as that. it also wont be one data centre they will be spread over the world
 
Problematic scenario 1: New hyped game is launched.
Problems: Servers are hammered, people can't play the new game. And if it's implemented poorly enough: Servers are hammered, people can't play their other games.

Problematic scenario 2: Some ass DDoS's their servers. Problems: Nobody can play their games.

Problematic scenario 3: OnLive goes under. Problems: Can't play my games, and won't be able to retrieve them.

Problematic scenario 4: A family member is torrenting too many linux ISO's. Problem: Game plays like ****.

This is a reliability nightmare, to be honest. It's just asking to **** people off.
 
lame news imo.

it will officially stamp on my main hobby.

hope it fails badly or costs 8 thousand pound a month for the connection needed
 
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EdGey said:
lame news imo.

it will officially stamp on my main hobby.

hope it fails badly or costs 8 thousand pound a month for the connection needed
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How can you hope that? that's also kinda like saying someone was disappointed cause they had a hobby for making CRT televisions... new hobbies will arise!

Yeah, the figures look a little bit insane. I don't think the micro console compresses anything.. think it just receives input and outputs the video and audio received from the internet connection. Tbh... think of online gaming as it stands at the moment, does that not all need to be sent to the server to be verified?

I don't really know much but isn't there a process in which the graphics card only renders parts of the map that are currently being viewed... then in this case maybe they have a separate processor to process certain things like... one to render the map in real-time, one to do players and so on... but ya know, what do I know?

I think it's a little crazy for people to shoot it down cause it is going to ruin their hobby or because they WANT to play offline. I think it goes the same for people who prefer to use old technology... let them sit in a room lit by only candles.
 
The basic idea is sound, but it wont be workable in this country for a long time yet. Our internet suppliers just arent set up for this kind of service.

In parts of america it could and probably will work, to an extent. Places like south korea with fibre to your appartment will be best to take advantage of a system like this.

As technology progresses this kind of system will evolve and will eventually become the standard i reckon. But thats a good while away yet.
 
AtreuS said:
The basic idea is sound, but it wont be workable in this country for a long time yet. Our internet suppliers just arent set up for this kind of service.

In parts of america it could and probably will work, to an extent. Places like south korea with fibre to your appartment will be best to take advantage of a system like this.

As technology progresses this kind of system will evolve and will eventually become the standard i reckon. But thats a good while away yet.
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fibre is like 100mbps... OnLive is talking about wanting 5mbps for 720p which is pretty much available to most homes in the UK...
BT are trying to roll out 24mbps across the UK and Virgin are making 10-25-50-100mbps available to UK homes at quite an alarming rate
 
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