OnLive - threat to all gaming hardware

Wizardskills · 30 Mar 2009 at 15:55

Yeah MMO's are all we/they have to look at to do a comparison. EvE Online, the MMO that i play, is one big server farm with all the connected users in the same universe. EvE regularly gets 40,000+ people on at the same time. In the busy systems the server just cant cope. It is quite a regular thing to hear of people requesting to CCP (the developers) to put certain system on priority servers if a huge battle is being planned. And even then the server has been known to crash with fleet battles of around 1500 people. Let us not forget that this server is only running the core game number crunching engine, graphics rendering is done by the client. I have no idea how the people behind onlive think that they are going to run everything on a set of servers.

Rroff · 30 Mar 2009 at 16:01

eve is prolly one game that would run on it ok... 100ms lag between clicks is probably liveable and with a lot of dark colors and big patches of the same/similiar color compression would be easier to obtain the encoder latency and bitrate they are claiming.

Something like starcraft would prolly be playable too.

But any fps or racing game... not a chance.

JRS · 30 Mar 2009 at 16:09

intellix said:
OnLive is talking about wanting 5mbps for 720p which is pretty much available to most homes in the UK...

No, it isn't. I'd hazard a guess that maybe....between a third and half of homes in Staffordshire could get a connection that approaches or exceeds 5mbps. I know ours will only sync at ~1mbps if the weather is even slightly unfavourable, and only reaches 1.5mbps when it isn't. There are many, many, many, many....

....some time later....

....many, many homes in the UK without an internet connection that gets even close to 5mbps.

arc@css · 30 Mar 2009 at 16:11

They will need one hellova server to process all that.

Muzy · 30 Mar 2009 at 16:31

My line is 8mbit Full.

Download speed 842kbyte Max at anytime
Upload rate = 51Kbyte Max at anytime

Ping www.bbc.co.uk = min 8ms max = 11ms

Location: London - North West

less than 200 Meters from my Local BT - Exchange

Wizardskills · 30 Mar 2009 at 16:32

Muzy said:
My line is 8mbit Full.

Download speed 842kbyte Max at anytime
Upload rate = 51Kbyte Max at anytime

Location: London - North West

less than 200 Meters from my Local BT - Exchange

Congratz

Happy · 30 Mar 2009 at 16:39

ignore

nikebee · 30 Mar 2009 at 16:45

Muzy said:
My line is 8mbit Full.

Download speed 842kbyte Max at anytime
Upload rate = 51Kbyte Max at anytime

Ping www.bbc.co.uk = min 8ms max = 11ms

Location: London - North West

less than 200 Meters from my Local BT - Exchange

Wonderful! And your point is?

The other problem with OnLive, is also the fact that the server farm you'd need to have... whilst also being incredibly powerful - would need to sit on an incredibly quick internet connection itself surely?

Wizardskills · 30 Mar 2009 at 16:50

Yes, very quick. Say 10,000 people playing on it = 10,000 people downloading at 500kbs from one server. They would need a stupidly fast connection

Rroff · 30 Mar 2009 at 17:14

Most of the links on LINX are only 10GBit/s tho some facilities have 2-3 of these... would only need a couple of thousand or so players online and you'd flood out most of the main London backbone.

Corasik · 30 Mar 2009 at 17:32

People whine about UK broadband and internet, but honestly its not all that bad if you live close enough to an exchange to get the highest speeds.. sucks if you live at a distance, or on an overcrouded exchange).

But for a system like this work work, 165ms latency, that would be horrible, and anyway who wants to play a PC game at 720p, 1920x1200 much nicer.

But the UK's net isnt the whole story, most likely the servers would be hosted somewhere cheaper like amsterdam, and now your at the mercy of BGP4, and many peering contracts.

Lets give an example, at my office, I can connect to World of warcraft with an average ping of around 45ms, the route goes to telia in london, then to amsterdam, and finally to the datacenter blizzard use to host the server.

However at home, the route is telia london -> telia paris -> telia frankfurt. Between paris and frankfurt the ping jumps to 200ms+ and actual ping in game is over 300ms. Geographically its probably a shorter/better route than the amsterdam route at the office (and infact at 4am in the morning it is actually faster). But at peak times its a dog.

And thats part of the issue, it doesnt matter if you live in Sweden, with 100Mbps delivered on fiber to your high rise city appartment, when your trying to connect to a datacenter in another country over conjected transit links.

Telia is the ISP that Blizzard use for World of Warcraft european servers. BGP4 announces the "best" route, yet the route from paris -> frankfurt is conjested and suffers high latency.

Latency on the internet is not guarenteed, its more of a best endevour with semi automatic systems guestimating the best routes, and often its programed with "prefered" routes which often are not the best performing.

I really cant even begin to imagine how poor gaming would be with 100+ms latency on the graphics. Might as well be playing at 10FPS, for all the accuracy it would have. It doesnt matter how fast the real time media encoding is, getting datapackets across the net is slow, and worse unpredictable, 1 packet might be 30ms, and the next 200ms (or even dropped completely).

Deaco · 30 Mar 2009 at 18:12

Erm.. Quake Live and Fallen: Empire Legions seem to be alright. To be honest some very hostile posts towards tech that could revolutionise gaming. I like most will probably keep a hefty desktop for offline stuff, but to wish a company to go bust or fail for no reason, just strikes me as immature and foolish.

Imagine back to '92 and if everyone said the same thing about 3D cards, crazy idea.. atleast let everyone try the actual product before spouting that it won't work. Sure on paper it looks iffy at best. However you never know it might work and it might work well, very well. So really less of the witch hunting and heretic burning.

Personally I like the sound of being able to play PC games on my TV, and only needing a little box for all of that, certainly beats trying to take a PC/console round to a mates... wait.. that wouldn't work doh

Lightnix · 30 Mar 2009 at 18:25

It will revolutionise it by introducing lag, monthly fees, reliability problems and compression artefacts. Forgive me if I think 'revolution' is too strong a term, unless you're talking of the 180 degree variety.

Final8y · 30 Mar 2009 at 18:33

Deaco said:
Erm.. Quake Live and Fallen: Empire Legions seem to be alright. To be honest some very hostile posts towards tech that could revolutionise gaming. I like most will probably keep a hefty desktop for offline stuff, but to wish a company to go bust or fail for no reason, just strikes me as immature and foolish.

Imagine back to '92 and if everyone said the same thing about 3D cards, crazy idea.. atleast let everyone try the actual product before spouting that it won't work. Sure on paper it looks iffy at best. However you never know it might work and it might work well, very well. So really less of the witch hunting and heretic burning.

Personally I like the sound of being able to play PC games on my TV, and only needing a little box for all of that, certainly beats trying to take a PC/console round to a mates... wait.. that wouldn't work doh

QuakeLive still runs the client & the gfx on the PC like any other game.
The browser is the front end.

Rroff · 30 Mar 2009 at 18:57

The reason people are so down on it is because short of a miracle the technology fails, its like someone saying they've come up with a way to produce perpetual motion... it will result in the same level of skepticism...

What most casual gamers don't appreciate is the degree that client side prediction is compensating for input latency and internet conditions in general - client side prediction is completely impossible with the model they are proposing... even with sub 30ms ping times in current multiplayer games turning off client prediction results in a very nasty feel to the game.

Then theres the encoder lag problem... currently no compression technique exists to compress data fast enough to produce the combination of bitrate, quality and framerate they are proposing without dedicating some serious computing power to just that one client... it would be cheaper for the company just to buy every client a powerful home PC instead.

Lightnix · 30 Mar 2009 at 19:00

There's also the issue of cost of hardware, in the broader view of things: At some point or another, all this hardware has to be paid for. No, they're not going to magically make all current games run on maximum settings, even at 1280x720, using anything less than very high end equipment, which has to be upgraded over time. At the end of the day, the consumer will have to pay for that. On top of that, the consumer may even need to buy one of these little 'microconsoles', of course, there's extra money to be shelled out, right there.

This company also has to worry about the logistics of cooling and maintaining literally thousands of high performance, high heat output graphics cards and CPUs, which of course we as consumers don't have to deal with as we only really need one or two cards per system - they're looking at possibly hundreds in a server room, it will get hot.

Then there's the networking which has to be done, of course the consumer only needs to have a simple ADSL connection, this will need a very complex network which will be expensive and risky to maintain. They also need to pay people to maintain this fairly vast system, whereas the consumer will not have to deal with problems on the level of complexity that they will. More money down the drain at OnLive.

This system just introduces unnecessary hardware and manpower in order to degrade the overall experience of the consumer. The only real good point about this system is that it will help to prevent piracy, for a short period - they claim it's 'inherently unpiratable', but at the end of the day, there will be some clever so-and-so who cracks the system and manages to use their system to play their games for free.

Rroff · 30 Mar 2009 at 19:18

Lightnix said:
This system just introduces unnecessary hardware and manpower in order to degrade the overall experience of the consumer.

Thats an interesting perspective on it.

Lightnix said:
The only real good point about this system is that it will help to prevent piracy, for a short period - they claim it's 'inherently unpiratable', but at the end of the day, there will be some clever so-and-so who cracks the system and manages to use their system to play their games for free.

That and in multiplayer games it will be much harder to cheat.

Spyhop · 30 Mar 2009 at 20:21

Imagine playing an FPS where simply rotating your view has noticeable input lag. Ugh...

Lightnix said:
The only real good point about this system is that it will help to prevent piracy, for a short period - they claim it's 'inherently unpiratable', but at the end of the day, there will be some clever so-and-so who cracks the system and manages to use their system to play their games for free.

Why do you say that? If it was subscription based and well designed, I think the chances of that would be small.

thegoonden · 30 Mar 2009 at 20:40

720p at 24fps barely works over ethernet.
Can't really see 60fps of 2046xwhatever working over under-street copper that's turned green.
Also, driving games (my passion) do tend to be useless with any input lag at all.

neologan · 30 Mar 2009 at 21:07

I'm thinking the game will be bought as per the usual methods (retail, steam), and this company will licence with the publishers. You'll pay a fee for server resource use, not for the game itself. That's my theory. This is a hardware solution only, i think.

In this respect, I'd rather buy my own hardware, i'm in no way interested in stuff like this. Subscription fee's, no thanks, doesn't float my boat.