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Comment by goodroot | Hacker News Reader

I recently received an invite for the GeForceNOW beta. For the unaware, GeforceNOW is game streaming; they leverage cloud GPUs to render games, then stream the results back to you. My take away is in-line with critical consensus. If you have a sublime Internet connection, it's an awesome service. It's prone to the odd dip in quality, but all-in-all it's a major paradigm shift.

I have been a proponent of gaming on Linux most of my adult life, but I can't help but think that Valve might be missing the boat by sinking resources into gaming on Linux local hardware. Times are a-changin'.

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  > I have been a proponent of gaming on Linux most of my adult life, but I can't help but think that Valve might be missing the boat by sinking resources into gaming on Linux local hardware. Times are a-changin'.

No they aren't. There is just now a large amount of hammer-wielding cloud idiots on the scene who think everything local is a nail. There is an entire industry built around computer building, and a very large proportion of the PC gaming crowd see the two as inexorably intertwined. Part of the joy of PC gaming is the satisfaction of building a powerful system and watching it play 3D games really well.

>might be missing the boat

Valve's goal was to hedge against a "Windows Store" model for games at a time when it seemed that it was inevitable.

Also, and I don't mean to sound dismissive, but that streaming model simply will not work. When it comes to anything more than visual novels or turn based RPGs, the only way you'll be able to solve the problem of latency, which players of these games are very sensitive to, is by using tachyons. I think there are better uses of hypothetical faster-than-light particles, personally.

> If you have a sublime Internet connection, it's an awesome service. It's prone to the odd dip in quality, but all-in-all it's a major paradigm shift.

I thought this when OnLive launched, but even with a relatively good internet connection for the time, OnLive was still pretty horrible to play consistently. You can have a great experience for an hour or even an hour or two, but by the 8th hour you're bound to be hit by the inherent problems of delivery of a network. Maybe that's a random latency spike or loss of video quality. Maybe that's something more. Even a great connection can have problems with consistency over long durations. That's what you need for streaming games to work well for everyone.

I could see this working for something like Civ or casual RPG play. I can't see this working well for anything competitive. Even in a best case scenario with a huge pipe and a server right nearby you'll probably be looking at one or two frames of delay at 60 fps which is already pretty frustrating for games where timing is important, and I doubt that's going to be the case in general. Physics is just going to get in the way, and we're not even considering 144Hz or higher resolutions, the bandwidth/latency requirements quickly get way out of hand.

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