Nvidia grid: cloud gaming

[Spaceghost]

I wanted to get opinions or experience with this new to me concept Nvidia launched. The idea of just having a basic desk top machine with a huge monitor to game is quite interesting to me. Read: an awesome sounding inexpensive solution to getting a gaming rig.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html

Thanks for the help!

[MrFancyPants]

I knew this was right around the corner when Steam enabled in-home streaming. If you haven't used that before, it looks like the same concept, except delivered through your ISP as opposed to your internal network. I've used Steam streaming from my gaming desktop to my old laptop to play modern games the laptop could never handle on its own and it worked perfectly, no lag or anything. As fast as internet speeds are these days, it makes sense gaming would go this route. It's less resource intensive to stream video and audio than for a PC to generate the 3D content. It'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

Depending on the monthly cost for the service, and how access to games is packaged, it might still be cheaper in the long run to build your own gaming PC, but that remains to be seen.

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[Spaceghost]

$7.99 a month seems tough to beat, with some free games included in the service.

[ExtremeX]

I am not much of a gamer anymore, but I think it's a cool concept.

It's basically taking all of the GPU / graphics processing and doing it all in the data center instead of locally at the desktop.

Its going to make for very affordable computers being able to play very complex games.

The cost of the PC savings of a traditional gaming rig will easily offset the cost of the subscription.

[jdfthetech]

What about latency?
Seems to me most internet infrastructure really wouldn't be able to handle something like this.

[ExtremeX]

What about latency?
Seems to me most internet infrastructure really wouldn't be able to handle something like this.

Latency is probably improved in some areas since all the processing is in a datacenter, but you still have to deliver that content to the user.

You you ever tried to play a game or watch a video over remote desktop you would know its a total fail. Latency was terrible.

I think lots of improvements have been made for things like that... I was playing with a thing Microsoft came up with years ago... RemoteFX Media Streaming and it was pretty impressive.

I dont know how they are doing it now, but RemoteFX was able to deliver a really nice experience with everything processed on servers. Even for people who use AutoCAD or other rendering tasks. Crappy thin client computers were using servers backed with very powerful video cards to do all the processing offsite.





Its probably some very aggressive compression for video transport, probably similar to encoding in a device like what Netflix would do... Its adaptive based on the actual bandwidth available.

I'm just speculating on how its done, but not surprised they are able to deliver games like this.

[jdfthetech]

Perhaps it would work with something noncompetitive or single player, but seems like it would be pretty crappy if your roommates watching hulu and your game starts stuttering.

I've used quite a few streaming systems over the years, and have never found one that worked well outside local LAN. Even my remote server has input lag sometimes (yes I installed a gui for testing things on it don't judge me!)

[Spaceghost]

Another feature that seems intetesting is playing on a smart tv with a console controller (Not sure if nvidia released their own)

[MrFancyPants]

Of course one of the major downsides is you'd be limited to the library of games the service provider has to offer. I like to be in complete control of my environment.

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[Spaceghost]

Above user name checks out.

[meaty-btz]

This isn't new. We had full hardware acceleration to our data centers. It was a VMware solution running in our blade server. It allowed us to offer managed thin clients for students who needed acceleration for their work, mostly 3d art and video editing. But it worked for games. This was 8 years ago. Latency was not an issue with games. The data center was accessed across a MAN at the local sites. Internet might be different as far as latency.

[sholling]

I'm sure there are still minimum hardware requirements. For example, the only cloud based game that I play regularly is World of Warships and a 4th gen i5 with a GTX960 is plenty for 1980x1080 at maxed out settings. What matters more is ping times and refresh rate. Over FIOS I'm getting 30MS ping times to the server and 59-60hz refresh rates.