I am going to wait until the results from the open beta has come in to find out if the service works. the response time on the demo given at the press con did not look bad at all and they were 50 miles away from the server, they have even tested it in Oz (it was playable but the lag was defiantly visible. With 3 main server locations in the US covering the east,middle and west the us is covered and I don't see there being to many problems for them. I do how ever see problems with the service if it came to the UK, I believe that one maybe two sever locations would be needed to handle the load because a lot of us have expensive high bandwidth connections but my gripe is that the infrastructure and lack of funding the connection is mostly delivered by ageing copper at home I have a theoretical speed of up to 8mbps but only get 2-4 on average the service would be in constant lag. There is hope with testing for fibre in Kent but it will be years before most of the country will see it. I would love this service so much but the issues with the UK's copper jungle is a crippling factor.
This is true, I was waiting for someone to bring that up However on a traditional setup, the two are rather tightly coupled. There is actual response time lag in regular pc games. A frame that takes 30ms to be rendered/drawn, by very definition must contain a picture from at least 30ms ago.So you must wait that long before you can see the result on screen of your input/actions/keypresses. As framerate drops, frame time increases, and so does input lag/response time. So one can use as a quick approximation, the input lag at different framerates to get a feeling for how this would impact, say a twitch shooter. Personally, when framerate dips it's not so much the "slideshow" that I have a problem with, but rather the accompanying increase in input lag. At around 20fps and lower (50ms response time) is where it starts to get rather annoying personally. If they could miraculously achieve a soid 30ms, then that would give you the input lag that typically accompanies ~30fps, which could be more then acceptable.
Hm, the technology is interesting, but it's not for me though. I actually enjoy building high-end systems, tweaking them and swapping components about as often as most people swap socks. Another thing, though I don't know how copyright laws affect logos and the like, but OnLive's logo is remarkably similar to that of www.nextgentel.no which I find weird (insert made up conspiracy theory here).
One question i haven't seen posted here though is... At the moment you have to layout big cash to play the latest shiny new games. A monster rig to push those pixels in Far Cry 2 or Crysis. Are they going to charge a straight fee per game per user, or are you going to have to fork out extra cash if you use more system resources on the "Power Cloud". Patent Pending on Power Cloud, by the by...
I'd just assumed it would be a flat monthly subscription fee for all users, plus the cost to buy each game
you can choose to either rent or buy games, i've seen it suggested that pc gamers may ending up using the rental service as "try before you buy" seems to me that if a monthly fee is needed torrents will still fill the try before you buy void
if i pay the monthly fee for it, then i demand the equivalent computing power available to me all the time (just like my PC) ... therefore, if i can't do Fold@Home on it just like my PC while it's idle, then why should i pay for the monthly fee? so without F@H, i'd probably spectate Crysis or the next most demanding game 24/7, or im not getting my money's worth of computing hours.
There is a good article on Eurogamer about how this service cannot possibly work but what made me lose interest is when I finally watched the side by side comparison of video quality, why on earth would anyone want their games to look that crap? http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article
If you invented a codec that can compress live HD video in real time and stream it across the internet with a 1ms overhead then why on earth would you aim it at gamers? I wish them good luck but the article posted above sums up (and adds to) my initial scepticism.
Da_Rude_Baboon's cracked it! If this DID actually work, we would have seen it in other mediums (pornography) before gaming.
Tim reckons that article is full of ****, because a lot of the hardware stuff is just not properly researched. Me, I'm sure that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will just swat this thing with a marketting push anyway - so it doesn't matter if it works or not. Too many people have too much to lose by letting it succeed, including Intel and AMD and Nvidia.
Lookin at another angle, if the 720p stream requires a 4Mbps connection, thats around 1.75GB of data per hour. Anyone on capped connection will feel the hurt of that pretty quick. My lovely Canadian ISP would allow me just over 30hrs of gaming per month, not counting using the internet for anything else. Only gaming 1hr a day?
Sounds like a fantastic idea. I really hope it works. Lag is a serious issue for online FPSs games. One benefit of having everything hosted on the same servers is that lag between player will be minimal (i.e. no need for compensation) so the only lag that needs to be worried about is getting the content displayed locally. Lets face it, cloud computing really is the way that mainstream computing is going to go. There is no need for most users to have uber powerful machines as even the cheapest computer is enough for 99% of tasks (net, office, video decoding). I can't see this being the thing that really bucks the trend in terms of users running programs remotely, but it's a step in the right direction. lol, not sure that 1ms decoding is really a requirement when broadcasting video! I'm not too concerned that the live feed coming from some student house that happens to be filled purely with 18 year old blondes that are 'up for anything' has a fews seconds delay
Half of that article is BS. You've been able to get h.264 encoding hardware that works with extremely low latency for ages now. There are companies that make IP CCTV cameras that encode 1080i video to h.264 in real time, and the chips they use to do it don't even need heatsinks. Even some mobile phones encode h.264 in realtime. I'm not saying that onlive is definitely real, I'm just saying that h.264 in real time is pretty easy now.
Coincidentally there seems to be a similar product recently announced, aimed at Game Developers allowing them Remote access to their (expensive) Game Development kits. Press Release: http://www.animationmagazine.net/pr...e-access-to-game-console-dev-kits-from-a.html They cite a 70ms "end to end" latency best case. Using a fancy new "zero latency" h.264 realtime encoding codec. I'm not exactly sure what "zero latency" (or 1ms latency that the Onlive guy quotes) actually means. Realtime encoding certainly exists, and at 60fps each frame has to be encoded at least as fast as ~16ms or so. But 1ms as frame encode time seems a little strange, as that means it could theoretically handle a 1000fps stream, which seems a tad fantastical. That being said the "MAKO-HD™ H.264 ultra-low-latency codec" quotes the figure in it's literature, so it must mean *something*, although I'm not exactly sure what else it could be? Edit: A little more digging, from the HaiVision (creators fo the MAKO codec) site: "Zero latency" can be considered within systems that operate assuring hand eye coordination (below 90ms) or operating within a blink of an eye (100 ms). That answers that question. It is also very likely what the OnLive people will be using and would explain the slight misquote. Still, while 70ms is considered enough for hand-eye coordination, I'd imagine it's still something very perceptible when playing a twitch based video-game. 70ms input lag ("mouse lag"?) is around what you see at a framerate of 15fps. I certainly find that unplayable in terms of response lag. For less then twitchy games though, this certainly seems feasable.
Interesting, aggies. Thanks for that. So it'll look smooth but feel like 15 FPS? Not nice. About encoding HD stuff in real-time: Badaboom, anyone?
