OnLive

[watercooled]

Has anyone else heard of the on-demand gaming service called OnLive?
A quick intro: It is a gaming service based on cloud computing that allows users to play any game (including Crysis) on a low-end PC or even a netbook. They should also be a console so you can play on your TV. For more info, here's a few pages I've found: 1 2 3

What do you think about this? Please consider the enormity of the challenge - they are promising to provide thousands/millions of gamers with the computing power to run Crysis maxed out - this would need an enormous server farm and a tera-scale internet connection. They say to receive HD video, users need a 4-5Mb/s internet connection - this means that most users would hit monthly download limits fairly quickly or hit speed caps. I doubt ISPs would be happy with the massive strain on their networks (they can hardly cope now) and would probably block access to the service. I've seen rumours that the box should cost around £150-200 and I think the PC-based service would be free to sign up to. How are they planning to pay for everything?

Take a minute to think about this and post with any comments.

[XA04]

I was so close to clicking report then I noticed you have 600 odd posts? Fair enough if you wanna talk about it but it's in the wrong section for a start..

Edit: Sorry I sound like a troll now

[moogle]

I don't see it happening

[Blastuk]

only available in the U.S
and yeah.. the bandwidth needed is a bit much.. though less than i expected when i saw it

[JK Ferret]

Some people have said it could be a future to gaming. I don't see it happening tbh, people are resilient to change for a start, and then there's aforementioned obstacles like bandwidth...

It's an nice idea, but it'll never work like they want it too, imo.

[G4Z]

Can you imagine how much computing power it would take to run a million instances of crysis?

I suspect it could work for some games, but surely this is never gonna scale for new games like empire total war.

[watercooled]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I've been thinking. Just think - you need something like a HD 4870 to run Crysis comfortably (probably more) and that costs around £200. Assuming subscribes only have to pay for games, everyone would need to buy at least 10 games to pay for it. Maybe they would be able to get the processing power cheaper for a server farm but still, imagine how much it would cost to set up/run. This reminds me of mainframe systems and as an enthusiast I'd rather have my own hardware anyway.

I was so close to clicking report then I noticed you have 600 odd posts? Fair enough if you wanna talk about it but it's in the wrong section for a start..

Edit: Sorry I sound like a troll now

Why do people insist in moaning about my posts lately?? And what's to report - I didn't break any rules and I thought it was an interesting topic to post.

[moogle]

Why do people insist in moaning about my posts lately?? And what's to report - I didn't break any rules and I thought it was an interesting topic to post.

Get an avatar

[JK Ferret]

From the first few lines it does sound like that start of an ad thread. Maybe if there was a news link..? And an avatar does show you as a regular member too, as moogle suggested

[Knoxville]

Interesting thread

This does look like a discussion better suited to the gaming forum though so I'm going to see if I can have it moved there for you

[Oobie-]

Some people have said it could be a future to gaming. I don't see it happening tbh, people are resilient to change for a start, and then there's aforementioned obstacles like bandwidth...

It's an nice idea, but it'll never work like they want it too, imo.

Exactly my sentiments.

Just think - you need something like a HD 4870 to run Crysis comfortably (probably more) and that costs around £200

£143!

[PeterStoba]

I just can't see this working anytime soon, in the future maybe, but not in the next 3 years.

[Zhou Yu]

Other massive problem I can see is input lag. As a player you need to send control commands through the internet to where they are hosting the games, those commands need to be dealt with, the resultant gameplay needs to be recorded and encoded on the fly and then it all needs to come back to you over the internet.

This means unlike the immediate cause -> effect we are used to playing any game on our computers currently, Onlive risks having several seconds of latency in between you doing something and seeing its effect.

[watercooled]

Exactly my sentiments.



£143!

Wow, that's cheaper than I thought - I stand corrected.

Interesting thread

This does look like a discussion better suited to the gaming forum though so I'm going to see if I can have it moved there for you

Thanks

Other massive problem I can see is input lag. As a player you need to send control commands through the internet to where they are hosting the games, those commands need to be dealt with, the resultant gameplay needs to be recorded and encoded on the fly and then it all needs to come back to you over the internet.

This means unlike the immediate cause -> effect we are used to playing any game on our computers currently, Onlive risks having several seconds of latency in between you doing something and seeing its effect.

The funny thing is, they are promising <1ms latency. Yeah right.

[Main]

If it sounds too good to be true...

I can't get my head around how they think this is going to work with all the totally crap routers that are out there (not forgetting the crap internet services and traffic shaping...). I've never seen a piece of adsl kit that had zero instances of randomly falling over in the middle of heavy use.

The highest resolution they're offering is 720p, that's 1280x720. To cut bandwidth there's going to be an FPS cap, say about 30 (which is higher than the PAL (25) and NTS (27) tv standards). Since they're probably going to have to produce optimisations and/or modifications to run on the server farms they'll probably get a slight edge over what the comparable hardware a single user can get from local rendering.

This is the target to beat if you want to spec up a PC that will beat their service. Given that the 'hot new games' they've listed are almost all available on consoles it can't require a great deal of power to get this.

[sp3n]

sounds like a great idea, but whether it will work... who knows.
the eurogamer article is great and gives a bit of an insight as to what onlive are claiming to have achieved.