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Comment by fathyb | Hacker News Reader

> The next console generation (not the mid Gen refresh) might actually be a cloud only box

It would be a mistake to not research and ship a cheaper cloud-only option given the rent-seeking potential.

But unless we see a massive deployment of low-latency high-speed internet in most populated areas, I don't see it replacing offline compute boxes.

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I think outside of the US/North America fast fiber internet penetration is a lot higher. And Nvidia smartly is partnering with ISP's so that servers are local and haver lower latency instead of servers on the other side of the world. I don't game enough to have a yearly subscription but I subscribe once in while when I really feel like gaming as its cheaper than paying for $800-900 card that I would barely use otherwise.

Fiber might be but good luck having good pings to Nvidia data centers. Unless this would scale similarly to Netflix with boxes in ISP's own data centers I see small chance of this succeeding.

Which is what they are doing

The next generation of consoles will be in 5-6 years.

Fiber rollout is increasing and Starlink can offer 20ms under good conditions right now and it or competing networks can get lower still.

A hybrid console is also possible it will have enough horse power to run “casual” games but if you want the top tier you’ll have to stream.

Console makers usually don’t make money on hardware so if they can move everyone off it and just stream that’s a no brainer for them.

15 years ago or even just 6 I would have been outraged at that idea. But reality has caught up with me (or the other way around I suppose). Despite my desire to own things and control them, the ammou t of time I have to game is usually a few games a year and only when one really piques my interest. I will play regularly for a month and then be occupied with other pursuits for a couple months or longer before picking up another game. Intense but casual is my gaming style.

So if I could treat gaming like Netflix, subscribe when there's a show I want to watch, binge and then cancel, that would be great. The only reason I don't do that is because I got a switch to game with my kids and just can't justify two gaming consile for the amount of time me and my family spend on them.

> Starlink can offer 20ms

Note that for remote gaming you need a roundtrip for every interaction, meaning the minimal felt latency will be 40ms, that's almost 3 frames, not counting all the software bookkeeping and video encoding dance.

This is okay for casual games, but these can run on the hardware needed to stream games in realtime as you said, not much of a point streaming them.

> A hybrid console is also possible it will have enough horse power to run “casual” games but if you want the top tier you’ll have to stream.

Good point, I guess we're seeing a preview of that today with the Nintendo Switch and cloud games.

You can hide the latency in very interesting ways. For example, oculus link encoded a fraction of the screen and starts sending that while the remainder is still encoding. That hides a non trivial part of the encoding latency. If you could reach further into the rendering pipeline (ie rendering the top 1/4 of the screen before the others) you could imagine reducing the effective latency even further by overlapping rendering with network transmission. It’s obviously tricky due to several reasons, but it’s not impossible (eg mobile games are rendered this way and mobile GPUs are particularly geared towards tile-based rendering). There are obviously limits to what you can do with reactivity to input but a lot of that can be mitigated with local prediction rendering.

20ms is an unacceptable amount of lag for many popular genres of gaming. Network lag (esp wireless) is often variable, which would make controls feel inconsistent. I think a significant high margin portion of the market will agree with me here. Take a look at gaming lcd monitors as an example. The response time has gone down from ~8ms to ~1ms, and these improvements are generally seen as significant.

Like what? Unless you’re a professional gamer playing a very active really time game like Counter-Strike, there is a 0 chance you notice any sort of measurable different between 10 and 20ms.

I hate cloud gaming more than most people, but you should check the keypress-to-screen latency on recent AAA games. There's a hilarious amount of bloat there that you can invisibly cut into with clever techniques to make most games playable

Twitch shooters and fighting games played at high skill levels are impossible, but a lot of stuff is entirely doable

20ms on Starlink is the best case right now for a round trip latency.

Today on R6S with a GSYNC monitor using a 4080 240fps tier stream on GN you get an end to end latency of 23ms this is comparable to what you’ll get on a 240hz PC build with reflex on. Yes 360hz with reflex will be better on a dedicated PC and can lower the end to end latency to 14-15ms but GN for esports is actually usable today at least in the UK.

> Fiber rollout is increasing and Starlink can offer 20ms

in terms of input latency it's like throwing away your nice 144hz monitor and going back to a 50hz one

there are going to be zero takers amongst nvidia's best gaming customers

It’s really not, Reflex and all the other tech were getting now on PC is due to direct work NVIDIA has put into GeforceNow.

On the 4080 tier in 240hz mode you are getting an end to end latency of 25ms or lower with a GSYNC monitor on e-sports titles like R6S with that Windows app that is comparable to the end of end latency of a e-sports optimized PCs today.

Latency is additive, GFN and other cloud bullshit isn't a magic ticket to getting rid of all other latency sources.

I know but an end to end latency of sub 25ms is achievable in esports titles such as R6S and Apex on the 4080 240fps tier as measured with LDAT when combined with a GSYNC display and the windows GFN app.

That’s as good as about any PC at high frame rate unless you go up to 360hz you’ll probably wont see much lower latency with a gaming PC.

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