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Comment by ajmarsh | Hacker News Reader

I assume the GTX 1080 lives in the cloud. We shall see I guess.

Latency is also critical for VR and AR

Latency is critical-path for VR not just in existing solutions, but fundamentally. Speed-of-light delays are sufficient to cripple remote-processing approaches to VR, so we won't see cloud solutions unless we're wrong about the fundamentals of relativity.

I wouldn't rule it out completely, though. There is some opportunity to mitigate latency, such as performing the heavy lifting remotely with local transformations on a simplified description of the scene to account for head movement and the like.

It would certainly be a much more complex solution that would still have inferior results compared to computing everything locally (just like cloud streaming now). Just that it's not "change the laws of physics" impossible to get to a workable implementation.

See also John Carmack's comments from 2013 on latency mitigation: https://web.archive.org/web/20140719053303/http://www.altdev...

critical but not impossible to fix. I can't find it but Microsoft published a video some time ago to realize cheap VR/AR headsets which do rendering in the cloud

A previous article (possibly from over a year ago) said that the computing power and battery come from a cell-phone-sized device that you keep in a pocket and attach to the glasses via fiber.

Can't. The bandwidth wouldn't be enough.

Bandwidth is not the problem, latency is. Bandwidth can be fixed by throwing more bandwidth at the problem.

Cloud gaming has not done all that well; it's right at the edge of feasibility due to latency. VR moves it back off the edge to "unquestionably infeasible". If VR gaming were to take off and become a dominant paradigm it would make cloud gaming even harder to justify.

Gaming and banking/trading are definitely the informative projects here.

Pseudo-real-time gaming is possible, but only for regional servers. Live global gaming is off the table permanently unless known physics changes; speed of light delays are larger than human reaction times. Right now, the best we can do is predictive techniques and continental servers, which have barely enabled MMO shooters.

VR gaming worsens the problem - 80ms delays in VR are nauseating and game-ruining. Global latency isn't a solvable problem via money or devotion.

> Bandwidth is not the problem, latency is. Bandwidth can be fixed by throwing more bandwidth at the problem.

There is a limited useful spectrum that's shared between everyone in the area. You can't just throw more bandwidth at the problem.

You sound like you think wireless is the only option...? All my consoles are wired. Anything that was doing cloud gaming would take an ethernet port unless the manufacturer is just an idiot. It might work with wireless but it would recommend wired.

I had to look it up, but it appears OnLive was shut down in 2015 and patents sold off to Sony.

I was completely skeptical at their claims with respect to latency. I never believed they could get the service to work, and for enough people to make it profitable. It appears quite a few people were able to enjoy the service at decent enough framerates. Which is surprising.

I used onlive for a year or so and really enjoyed it. There were some issues, but even the multiplayer FPSs were playable. Most of the time I was playing single player games that were less twitchy, and if you had done a blind test I probably wouldn't have been able to tell you if it was running locally or not.

I recently tried the PS4's remote play functionality. My friend in another city was able to play my bloodborne, which is a very timing-sensitive game, perfectly fine.

A few weeks ago my cousin ran games at 1080p on an EC2 GPU instance and used Steam's In-Home Streaming to play remotely and it worked perfectly fine.

I think the latency is now there, if you have a fast connection and live relatively close to the datacenter.

Uncompressed 8K over the public internet!

Why uncompressed? Recent mobile devices have hardware video decoding.

There are plenty of devices without HEVC hardware decode, though, which is basically a prerequisite to 4K. And software decoding is god-awful for anything besides South Park.

(It's not actually required, but the efficiency loss between H.264 and HEVC for 4K is pretty massive.)

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