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OnLive Latency Tested
The Digital Foundry blog has done an analysis of recently launched cloud gaming service OnLive, measuring latency across several different games. Quoting:
"In a best-case scenario, we counted 10 frames delay between button and response on-screen, giving a 150ms latency once the display's contribution to the measurement was removed. Unreal Tournament III worked pretty well in sustaining that response during gameplay. However, other tests were not so consistent, with DiRT 2 weighing in at 167ms-200ms while Assassin's Creed II operated at a wide range of between 150ms-216ms. ... OnLive says that the system works within 1000 miles of its datacenters on any broadband connection and recommends 5mbps or better. We gave OnLive the best possible ISP service we could find: Verizon FiOS, offering a direct fiber optic connection to the home. Latency was also reduced still further simply due to the masses of bandwidth FiOS offers compared to bog standard ADSL: in our case, 25mbps."
And with the bandwidth this service uses, you'll hit your ISPs "unlimited" cap in what, 6 hours? A day?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Maybe you want to look for a better ADSL provider. 25mbps is not much faster than a good ADSL2+ line.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Is this bad or livable? From what I recall of first person shooters a 150-200ms lag isn't bad, but your review just gives the raw numbers and never says if the games were still playable or not.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Getting that sort of latency within "1000 miles of its datacenters" is quite impressive.
As an early adopter (read: 1-year free trial ;) the service works fine (6Mb cable conneciton). For twich games you will notice a little sluggishness, but overall, its not difficult to adjust. Essentially, all the games play like a good latency online game. The only thing i'm not sure I like at the moment is the some of the minor artifacting you'll see due to the video compression. Again, this only really comes into play if you stop and look for it, during action you'll not notice it too much as you'll be busy paying attention to other things ;). Though right now, I cant say for sure how this service will perform in the future, as you apply for entrance into the service currently. Once anyone can join whenever they want, its hard to say how quickly OnLive will adjust to increased congestion.
I love to slaughter the english language.
Bandwidth and latency are not the same thing. Increasing the bandwidth to 25Mbps will not help latency at all.
Latency was also reduced still further simply due to the masses of bandwidth FiOS offers compared to bog standard ADSL: in our case, 25mbps.
Damn it, kids, Latency and bandwidth are not the same thing and anybody who makes that mistake should be forced to use a "1Gb/s" connection via fedex.
Yes, in the case of something like OnLive, which is basically streaming mouse/keyboard events one way and video the other, things will look substantially worse if frame N hasn't finished downloading by the time frame N+1 is ready for transfer(and then either has to be dropped, or delays frame N+1 even more than your connection's latency would); but having a fat pipe does not "reduce your latency". It is correct to say that 25mb/s FIOS is probably about the most generous test that is also remotely realistic for more than a tiny number of their potential customers; but the bandwidth thereof does not "reduce latency"...
I've played WOW with that kind of latency at times, and while it's not ideal, it's definitely playable without becoming frustrated. It may not work well for some games, especially for people who are serious about PVP, but it seems like a reasonable service. Considering the technology they're using, I'd say they're doing pretty well. As a mac user, I'd give it serious consideration.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
You had a good business model. A lot of people would be happy to play games that can be played with lag without noticing (I spent hours on Puzzler World, Max and the Magic Marker, Crayon Physics, World of Goo, Age of Booty, all sorts of games that aren't that affected by lag). You could easily have had a Wii-like console in every home that delivered as powerful a game as necessary, against as many players as necessary while needing no fancy installation, discs, etc. and most importantly NEVER needing an upgrade. Specifically, I would compare the system to those arcade machines that let you play, say, 20 minutes of Super Mario World or some other Nintendo games. You pay a flat fee and can swap between games as much as you like during that time without having to install demos, or buy them all. Brilliant idea.
Instead you didn't listen to the only criticism of the idea (enormous lag is inevitable - yeh cannae break the lawsa fisics...), wouldn't heed it, denied there was any problem, etc. and thus in the first, purportedly "ideal" real-world test, your founder's press statements were found to be orders-of-magnitudes out. As such, you've killed the interest from people who *knew* that all along and who would be asked their opinions on it by other people. If you'd just said "the affect won't ruin the majority of games", or "the latency isn't something we can do anything about but we don't expect it to affect the titles we offer, and the kind of customers we're aiming at", then nobody would have cared and if their granny bought the system they would have played on it too. But the stupid claims did not hold up and, thus, we're waiting to discover what the next lie is... *do* you have an accord with BT to get onto the UK broadband backbone? Do you have top-name titles properly licensed and ready-to-go? Do you have the capability to scale the service with the number of users? Do you have the hardware ready? Do you have something that you can sell if the system was to go live as quickly as possible?
You spoiled your image with bullshit. On an ideal test, a quite basic but fast-paced game that plays well locally gets up to 250ms of lag. Optimised or not, ideal conditions or not, that's just never going to sit well with people, even if they have a 60ms lag on their TFT monitors and don't realise it (http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/images/input_lag_graph.jpg). All I see is the "250ms" and think - damn - when I play CS online I think of anything over 80ms as "laggy". And that's just a one-way property, my lag to the server. God knows how a server performs when ALL players have a few hundred milliseconds of lag. I think 90% of your CPU time in that case must be input smoothing and path prediction.
It's just a pity that your failure to be honest will tar the rest of your business' life and that of any similar systems that might arise in the future.
No, it wasn't (at least not significantly). The difference in latency between a 1 mbps link (ADSL upstream) and a 25 mbps link (which is due to serialization delay) is about 12 ms for large (1500 byte) packets. Since the vast majority of packets sent in this sort of application would be small ones (having only to convey simple info like "button 1 pressed"), it would actually be well under a millisecond. Compared to the measured results, this is insignificant.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
How many people on this thread are going to confuse network latency with input latency... hint: you have no experience that prepares you to understand these numbers.. just play the god damn game and quit the service if you don't enjoy it.
That's why they're handing out 12 month trials.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I too got in on the 1 year free trial to check it out. My connection is pretty average, 7meg verizon DSL, but being in the middle of nowhere I ping 150~200 in every game I've ever played, so I had pretty low expectations.
I was very pleasantly surprised when I gave it a shot. There is definitely noticeable latency, but I only really feel it when moving the mouse cursor around. Button based actions seem fine. I probably wouldn't play a twitchy FPS on it, but just about any other game doesn't feel strange at all. Playing Arkham Asylum with a gamepad feels great.
I have no intention of buying any games for it though - my only machine is a nice desktop so I have no need to. That being said, I am loving OnLive for the ability to launch it up and instantly play a demo of any game in there. No downloading, no installing, no waiting AT ALL. Not only that but the demos aren't specially packaged portions of the game - they are simply 30 minutes of access to the full retail game. This has already led me to make several purchases that I was on the fence about.
So in the end, having seen it for myself, I think OnLive is pretty cool and does have its uses. It's certainly not going to replace PC gaming as we know it, but I think this cloud based tomfoolery has a place in our future.
Cheap, dead-simple "Game rental", buffet-style. Pay per hour, not per game.
You can play any of hundreds games, now. No purchase, no download, no install, no cracking, no registering, easier than torrents. You just start a game and play it. And if you don't like it, switch it off and play another, you lost maybe half a dollar trying it out, not fifty bucks at a store, not thirty bucks and three hours downloading and installing from Steam, not three hours downloading and installing from piratebay. You just have it as if it was already installed on your PC, all included in rental fee.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Wen you see "I am connected to a server, and I have 200 ping with this server", that is not input latency. You can have 10ms input latency with a server that give you 200 ping. Things are computed clientside. So this will be much less playable than your average 200ms server.
-Woof woof woof!
Lag with any "mouse" cursor is horrible, so all strategy or table games that need a cursor will be painfull to play with this.
-Woof woof woof!
What I don't really understand(though what might be part of why they don't seem to offer anything all that compelling to the customer) is how the economics of their operation stack up.
With something like storage, or web hosting, there are fairly large and obvious gains to centralization and specialization. In the case of storage, the economics of not having a local copy are stupid, when a 1TB drive is $99; but unless your data are super extra secret, especially enormous, or you are atypically skilled, getting backup by buying 1 1 millionth of some professional data warehouse's capacity and sending incrementals over the internet is clearly sensible. Web hosting even more so. A tiny slice of some gigantic datacenter with multiple redundant enormous pipes is way cheaper than replicating that at home.
Video games, though, don't seem to offer the same arguments. Unlike, say, making good backups, which is a comparatively rare skill, console gaming is pretty seriously accessible. Worst case, you bribe some local 16 year old with a six pack to make it work. So there is no argument from skill specialization. Consoles have already carved out a "gaming appliance" market, and(particularly for casual games, flash games, and the like) using the PC that already needs to be working for internet access and word processing for a bit of gaming on the side isn't much harder.
There is also no efficiency of scale argument: In something like storage, a fancy data-deduplicating, zippy-special-compression, etc. storage setup, as available to the pros, can handle rather more customers than a simple comparison of its total capacity to the sum of all the customer's data would suggest. Most home-user data are either in the form of unique; but fairly tiny and compressible, stuff like text documents, or fairly large; but far from unique, things like downloaded movies and songs. With games, though, that effect is much smaller, if present at all. Console games are generally designed to be at the limits of their hardware, since those limits are fixed. You might, if buying in gigantic bulk, convince the console maker to provide you with their console in "processor card" format, allowing you to aggregate things like PSUs and mass storage; but, even in that ideal world, you are still buying as much silicon as joe gamer.
Games are also relatively "bursty" which is bad. Because of latency/speed of light issues, you cannot aggregate demand across the globe, or even across more than a handful of time zones. So, everyone your datacenter serves will be on almost the same schedule. During peak hours, like shortly after kids get out of school, you'll need to be able to support almost as many instances as you have customers. During off-hours, you'll just have a few inverted odd-shift workers and the like. Unlike batch number crunching, an hour starting at 4am is nearly worthless to most of your customers.
Then, of course, you come to the fact that "cloud gaming" inevitably incurs certain additional costs: bandwidth and video compression hardware. You'll see some bandwidth savings, since none of your customers will be downloading game or demo binaries from you, and because you will be able to keep multiplayer games, in some cases, occuring between multiple users within your datacenter; but the fact that you are sending 720p video constantly, to each one of them, will erode that pretty quickly. You also have to pay for, and power, whatever silicon is pumping out that video.
This, I'm assuming, is why OnLive is charging a subscription fee just for the right to show up and buy stuff, and why the games they are selling access to are not, generally, forecast to be much of a discount over their retail counterparts.
This number of 150 ms latency may be true but it very likely does not mean at all what you think it means - it is not to be compared to the network latency that multiplayer games often report. The latency you normally see in a game is just the network latency - the amount of time it takes for a small packet to go from your computer to the server. The 150 ms latency includes the time it takes for a packet to go to the server, for the game to process that packet, and then send a frame of video back to you. So the server has registered your action long before the 150 ms are up. Also, normal lag does not include the time it takes for the game to process your command, which can be even more lengthy than your network latency, but that time is included in the 150 ms. Unless you are aware of these things, then the 150 ms number is completely meaningless to you and if you compare it to the latency number from some game you've played before then you are doing it wrong.
What they should have done to get a meaningful comparison is to do the exact camera setup thing they did, but also do it for a game running locally and then over the net. Only then can you meaningfully compare the numbers and know that you got it right.
I was able to get a beta testing account setup about 3 weeks ago. Most of the games play surprisingly well. But for the ones that require fast response times - Dirt, Unreal Tournament - there was just too much lag. Unreal Tournament was practically unplayable since it felt like you were running at 10fps. But for games like Lego Harry Potter, it works great. :)
200ms input lag is huge. Really huge. The sort of amount that makes you feel like your computer is about to die. Bear in mind this isn't network lag, this is the amount of time it takes to react to your mouse moving, to change your direction with mouselook, etc.
Supposedly it might get better the bigger connection you have. However, if you have a 5-10M connection as they recommend, it's simpler and probably quicker to download the whole game off Steam, or a torrent or whatever.
The only way I can see this working is for people with very high quality net connections, and no decent rigs to run the games on (just enough to stream the audio/video). I'm not an expert but that seems a very specific and counterintuitive demographic.
No fast action game will work with that latency - the graphics might be smooth but the input response is like playing at five frames per second.
There'll be some games which work in this format but they won't be first person shooters or driving games - think flash games but multiplayer and in 3D.
Is it worth subscribing and being nickle-and-dimed for every minute you're on there instead of playing all the free flash games on the web? That's what they're betting the company on.
No sig today...
ADSL maximum is 8mbit over copper and 12mbit over ISDN.
ADSL2+ is 24mbit maximum
So, 25mbps is not standard ADSL, *it does not even exist.* Moreover, reaching ADSL2+ maximum theoretical speed (24mbit) is extremely unlikely. Most of us have a speed between 1mbit and 20mbit in most cases (depending on line quality, modulation type, line distance to central, etc).
Disclaimer: that's sync speed (IP bandwidth is therefore LOWER)
Like I said, 25mbps is not much faster than a good ADSL+ line.
25mbps is not much faster than 20mbps. It's only around twice as fast as 12mbps.
(What do you mean by ADSL over ISDN?)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
OnLive seems to be a DRM pusher's wet dream:
1) You can't play without constant internet connection.
2) Can't trasnfer saved data to an offline version of the game.
3) You are renting the game and thus you own no physical copy of the game which you can resell or lend to others to use.
Remember the days of playing Counter Strike on a 56k dial up connection? p.s. Reload sux!
Yes, latency and bandwidth are different concepts. But depending on the message sent, bandwidth can effect latency.
Latency is the time it takes for the message to start coming through. But you don't get the end of the message until a time later which is determined by message size divided by bandwidth. And you can't act upon the tail end of the message until you've received it.
So in the case of OnLive you're talking about a frame of video. They can't draw an entire frame until they've receive the entire frame. And that point it time is determined (among other things) by the latency of your network connection plus the bandwidth of your network connection.
You can think of latency as the minimum time it can take a piece of information you asked for to get to you. But if you asked for more than the smallest transmittable unit, then the total time it takes to get the information is determined by latency and bandwidth.
So stop banging your head, unless you are doing so to open it up to let new information in.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
ISDN is some digital phone line, its very wide spread in some countries such as Germany. (Integrated Services Digital Network)
The ITU G.992.1 Annex B ADSL standard specify the ADSL modulation that works over ISDN. It's quite "recent", from 2005.
By poster I meant story poster ;) I realized later its also from TFA anyway. I just meant to bring more precision/information to what you wrote basically.
Look at all the ways Onlive fails us gamers:
* Lower resolution that our monitors.
* Extra fees to play the game - what is this, an MMO? And for multiplayer games with PC servers, how does that work?
* The game will Not Always Be There - they "guarantee" 3 years, from what I saw.
* Added latency
* Always-on internet connection required: that's why I didn't buy AC2. F them and their DRM.
For non-hardcore gamers (I won't say "casual", since that implies Peggle and the like), this is probably a good deal. Pay $180 over 3 years, which wouldn't buy a new machine (heck, my last graphics card cost more). Buy a game, play it once, then get rid of it - why replay when there's something new coming? $5 a month extra? Sure, worth it for the ease. DRM? What's that?
It sounded clever as hell when I first heard about it. Now that I've seen it: meh.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
I've tried OnLive, and yes, it is simple, but their game rentals are in days, not hours. I wish they had a pay per hour service, but unfortunately right now the game publishers are killing the service before it even started. Every game has a different rental price. For example, Borderlands costs $8.99 for 5 days or $5.99 for a 3 day rental, while Batman: Arkham Asylum is only $6.99 for 5 days or $4.99 for a 3 day rental. The publishers even have arbitrary restrictions like "this game may be played on PC clients but not Mac;" even though the OnLive client runs fine on Mac.
I will give them credit: most games have a free 30 minute demo mode which lets you play 30 minutes for free. This is a great way to try out new games and find out if they suck or not before potentially buying them in a store. I would not buy a game here though - If OnLive goes out of business, and I can't see how they're going to make much profit, to be honest, all my games I've ever purchased are GONE permanently.
When the "1st year free" offer runs out, I'm not going to resubscribe. $50 a year just to be able to pay full retail price to buy games stored in a digital locker that I can't even download to my own PC, and can only play at 720p with compression artifacts? No thanks.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
The excerpt from TFA three times confuses bandwidth with latency. I'm guessing, with that lack of rigor, that the test results are meaningless.
From the very moment this idiotic service was announced, we geeks simply "did the math" and predicted this outcome rather precisely. Even if they had instantaneous video compression, they still can't exceed the base latency of the network. If it's already difficult to just receive conventional multiplayer packets quickly enough, then streaming a 100-fold larger video sure as shit won't make things any faster.
It's not like a semi-decent gaming rig costs much anymore. You don't need quad GPUs and SSD raid to play Unreal Tournament, you just need a plain $450 PC with a $150 mid-range GPU. Sure, my $7000 workstation eats four instances of Crysis for breakfast, but frankly the same games ran just fine on my previous PC which was already 4 years old (except for Crysis).
I know this for fact, because there's a very inexpensive AMD X3 system sitting at my feet, of which I've built and sold several to cash-strapped gamers, most often with a Radeon 5770 card. They might not crank everything up to "Ultra details" I'll bet it still looks sharper and more fluid than anything OnLive could deliver, because they are unfavorably bottlenecked - that's the nature of online video streaming, you have to choose a compromise between bandwidth and display quality, can't have both.
"OnLive: for suckers, by suckers. The first ten callers will receive a special deal on this bridge we're selling, CALL NOW!"
-Billco, Fnarg.com
That's totaly bizzare.
In my experience ISDN is run over copper pairs - often usimg DSL as the modulation (2mbps SDSL for a primary rate line). How the hell do you run ADSL over a slow digital line?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I am posting from such a line :)
It's common in Germany, most lines are digital only. It's actually slightly faster (12mbit) than the original ADSL (8mbit)
ISDN actually runs over copper lines, but they dont have the equipment for analog lines, it's less expensive to run the ADSL over ISDN.
You have a splitter so that you can still use a ISDN channel (for voice usually, although you could use it for data) and the rest is used by the ADSL.
This document explains it better and in more details if you're interested:
http://www.giif.com/CGI-BIN/projects/current/ISDN%20_DSLPostPaperv2.htm
It works also with ADSL2 (and probably 2+) but I don't know the standard variant name. I'm actually on ADSL2 over ISDN to be precise.
Ok, now I understand.
Annexe B specifies how to run ADSL on copper that is also running ISDN (base rate) - it runs "ADSL over ISDN" in the same sense that annexe A runs "ADSL over voice". the difference between annexe A and B is which frequencies are avoided by the ADSL connection.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I kept using my trust old Iiyama 19" CRT for years after most people had switched over to those shiny looking LCDs. The main reason was because it could do decent resolutions at 110hz whereas LCD were plagued with 50/60hz cycle times and dodgey screen refreshes. It also had better colours and depth to my eye, the only bad thing being it was huge and had a mildly curved screen.
I've finally switched over to an LCD that oddly still only syncs at 60hz (what is up with that!) but which doesn't greatly impede my gameplay. It runs at 1920x1200x60hz, looks great, and draws less power.
I don't agree with their figure of 160ms for input lag, assuming this means the time between when I smack my key and see / hear some feedback. I'd think it's much close to 50ms at a guess - 150ms lag can mean you're dead in a FPS, whether that's from your network or your screen.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.