Video Game Streaming Is Here: The End of the Console? | Hacker News Reader

Video Game Streaming Is Here: The End of the Console?

mashable.com

6 pointsmalvosenior5 comments

Misleading title. Videogame streaming is not here (at least not in the form of the OnLive service), and a great number of people still have some pretty fundamental questions about the technology. There was a tech demo at a videogame tradeshow, but as people here surely know, a controlled tech demo is a whole different beast from a real live service.

The other funny thing about this write-up is the idea that OnLive is challenging the videogame industry. Rest assured, most big companies in this space would love to have this technology be a reality: it offers greater control than consoles, and makes piracy next to impossible. If OnLive can make this work for a wide market (and not just hotels and the like), we'll see lots of offers to buy them and lots of copy-cat technology.

And OnLive is a great example of marketing gone wild--the technical information their marketing has put out cannot physically all be true at the same time. Some information I've heard, for example:

1. Their system is powered by a JPEG encoder.

2. Their encoder handles one frame per millisecond (1000fps).

3. They plan to do something on the order of 2.5 megabit 720p video.

4. They intend to have extremely low end-to-end latency.

It should be obvious why not all these can be true at the same time. Furthermore, you'll notice other conflicts even if you start ignoring some of the claims: even if 1) is false, 4) basically makes 3) impossible (ultra-low latency has a catastrophic effect on interframe compression).

So at this point I'd pretty much put OnLive in the "extremely dubious" category due to the fact that their marketing can't seen to decide what their technology actually does.

Absolutely not.

There are still MAJOR questions about these high-end "games on demand" services that have so far gone completely unanswered, aside from PR type non-answers.

Latency - how will they perform when round-trips take 30-100ms+?

Bandwidth - Even assuming a mediocre resolution of 800x600 at 30fps, games are going to guzzle bandwidth.

Hardware - While a decent spec server can happily serve up dynamic webpages to thousands of users, that's just not possible for games. Modern games require a modern spec machine per user - and don't forget the heat/power issues either!

And wow - we haven't even talked about all those publishers who are going to demand top dollar for their latest titles!

So we'll see. I do look forward to seeing the what the service is like, but my feeling is that unless they can sign deals with ISPs to colocate then they're doomed. That said, such a service could be very attractive to cable operators as an additional extra to offer their customers.

According to CrunchGear OnLive is a "cloud gaming service": http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/03/24/can-onlives-cloud-gamin...

One user per core would probably work fine, if you leave one core for the operating system. Of course you will need a lot of memory and probably a video card per user as well.

Edit: Just checked out the Wikipedia entry and it looks like they're doing something like that and with virtualization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive#Architecture

AnandTech had a great article recently about latency in games and where it comes from. A good PC could have as little as ~30 ms latency, while a poorly optimized PC is closer to 100 ms. Assuming their system is heroically latency-optimized, this means that OnLive is not necessarily that much worse than local gaming.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3601

Reply on news.ycombinator.com