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Why Project Flare Might Just End the Console War
An anonymous reader writes "Project Flare, the new server side gaming technology from Square Enix, turned heads when it was announced last week. The first tech demos do little more than show the vast number of calculations it can handle with hundreds of boxes tumbling down in Deus Ex, but the potential is there to do much more than just picture-in-picture feeds in MMOs. As a new article points out, what's most interesting is the potential to use the technology for games that use more than one system — OnLive may have used this tech before, but only to play games you can buy on discs in the shops anyway, but the future is in games that need the equivalent of dozens of PS4s or Xbox Ones to power them. Ubisoft has already partnered with Square on the project."
Why to spend power in datacenters when people can use it at home? Other than vendor-lock, is non-sense. Another thing is how scalabe the thing is, etc.
One example is to provide functionality which cannot be provided by the console machines themselves. For example, games for the Xbox 180 are going to have the option to use Azure to run game servers. One of the major frustrations of console gaming today is that one of the game consoles has to play server.
From the summary, though, the idea is to provide games more powerful than what your console can actually run. With a large enough playerbase it might actually be feasible. It costs a lot of CPU to perform a lot of physics calculations, but if you only have to perform them once for a whole bunch of players' updates because they're all looking at the same thing, then you're going to save some cycles there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Works great till you realize the USA is currently worse than a third-world country in terms of broadband penetration and up/down speeds...
Full disclosure: I work for NVIDIA on cloud gaming.
I was as skeptical as you about the latency. In this interview. Phil Eisler talks about 200ms of XBox + TV latency that people live with every day. (See page 2) If that's our target, then that's pretty doable, since with strategically located data centers you can get the network latency down to 20-30 ms.
In the work we're doing, we're actually focusing more on hitching in the game than latency, since the latency isn't as big a deal if you're say in the Bay Area where one of our test clouds is. Heck, I played Trine2 from the east coast and it was very playable. I wouldn't play BF4 across the country, of course. :)
There are plenty of other risks with the idea, but I wouldn't put latency at the top of the list.