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Nvidia's GeForce Now Windows App Transforms Your Cheap Laptop Into a Gaming PC (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the budget-friendly dept.

The GeForce Now game streaming service that Nvidia announced for the Mac last year is finally coming to Windows PCs. According to their website, the service lets you stream high-resolution games from your PC to your Mac or Windows PC that may or may not have the power to run the games natively. Starting this week, beta users of the GeForce Now Mac client will be able to install and run the Windows app. Tom Warren reports via The Verge: I got a chance to play with an early beta of the GeForce Now service on a $400 Windows PC at CES today. My biggest concerns about game streaming services are latency and internet connections, but Nvidia had the service setup using a 50mbps connection on the Wynn hotel's Wi-Fi. I didn't notice a single issue, and it honestly felt like I was playing Player Unknown's Battlegrounds directly on the cheap laptop in front of me. If I actually tried to play the game locally, it would be impossible as the game was barely rendering at all or at 2fps. Nvidia is streaming these games from seven datacenters across the US, and some located in Europe. I was playing in a Las Vegas casino from a server located in Los Angeles, and Nvidia tells me it's aiming to keep latency under 30ms for most customers. There's obviously going to be some big exceptions here, especially if you don't live near a datacenter or your internet connectivity isn't reliable. The game streaming works by dedicating a GPU to each customer, so performance and frame rates should be pretty solid. Nvidia is also importing Steam game collections into the GeForce Now service for Windows, making it even more intriguing for PC gamers who are interested in playing their collection on the go on a laptop that wouldn't normally handle such games.

65 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Explains why by captbollocks · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nvidia is banning GPUs in the cloud unless you have a special license, which I bet stops you from offering a service like this. https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

    1. Re:Explains why by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      1. Find a country where such a license limitation is not legal.
      2. Move your datacenter there.
      3. Profit.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Explains why by Boutzev · · Score: 2

      They can always deny you from buying new GPUs at a discount price. You can still buy all those GPUs at market price though.

      They can also deny you support and hardware replacements if you don't respect the agreement.

    3. Re:Explains why by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 1

      #1 is easily fixed by hitting the local Gamestop with a fake moustache. #2 is going to be illegal wherever that clause is illegal.

      --
      My first program:

      Hell Segmentation fault

    4. Re:Explains why by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      4. Massive latency
      5. ???
      6. Bankruptcy.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    5. Re:Explains why by cowwoc2001 · · Score: 1

      You can't. By the very nature of this service, latency matters.

      Whatever country doesn't respect said license will suffer high-latency sending data back to North America.

    6. Re:Explains why by Geekbot · · Score: 1

      haha, right, if their whole plan revolves around data centers not using GPUs for the competition then I think they are in trouble. If AMD can crush them by just undercutting them and selling to anyone for data centers then AMD get the larger cut without the risk and at the same time castrates nVidia. I don't see the game plan there.

  2. Re:Nice. When can I do this from Android tablet? by Opportunist · · Score: 1

    When the input devices for tablets improve past the ability to play tap-like-crazy-to-win games.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. Re:"There ARE obviously going to be some" by EETech1 · · Score: 1

    I believe the word you're looking for is "Thare's"

  4. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by ledow · · Score: 1

    VNC wouldn't stand a chance.

    But this is basically what Steam Link / In-Home Streaming is.

    OnLive literally went bust trying to make this kind of thing work.

    It's not new, or surprising, but it's not really what people want. I really *don't* want to stream games from a computer that someone else has total control over. Everything from monthly subscriptions, to losing all your games if you cut it, to massive peak-period performance hits, to poorer quality gaming (30ms is "nice", but most people will never be able to manage that and won't know why, and will then just blame the service).

    Honestly, we've been able to do this for years in a variety of ways. But nobody is going to pay money to do that.

    "The game streaming works by dedicating a GPU to each customer, so performance and frame rates should be pretty solid."

    Then it's going to cost AT LEAST as much as a GPU, a computer, the cost of the game, the connectivity, and the associated hardware (at your end) overall. Or they either would be making a massive loss, or it would be shit.

  5. Input latency by RogueyWon · · Score: 2

    I'm still not seeing anything about this that addresses the biggest problem that's hit previous gaming services such as OnLive and the like. That is to say; input latency.

    30ms latency is indeed a generally acceptable figure for normal online gaming. But don't forget that what you're talking about under normal circumstances is the latency between the server and the client. So that latency is only relevant to the server-side game interactions. What we're talking about here is having an additional 30ms latency before you even get to that point. What that translates into is a far more distracting gap between the player's control inputs and a visible reaction on-screen (added on-top of the standard display-related latency, which even on a really good gaming monitor is likely to be at least 10ms).

    This is really, really distracting, particularly in games which use mouse controls, where it is highly noticeable that there is a delay between mouse movements and in-game response. 30ms is roughly equivalent to what you'd get from a particularly horrid vsync implementation (e.g. what you see in the PC versions of Skyrim and Fallout 4), which can be distracting in regular gameplay and a real killer in any kind of competitive online action game.

    1. Re:Input latency by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      It's not at all clear what that 30ms latency refers to. Is it 30ms latency on top of network latency, like you suggest? Or do they mean they want to locate their data centers in such a way as to offer 30ms network latency to customers, with the streaming tech adding only a small amount on top of that?

      Around 8 years ago I got to test similar graphics streaming technology (from HP I believe). We wanted to be able to stream business-related 3D simulations and games to the typical shitty business laptops around our offices, since those laptops weren't able to run 3D games. We tested this by playing some rounds of Unreal Tournament in various setups: with streaming servers in 1 data center and players from around the world, and with servers in 3 local data centers. With a network latency of under 30ms to the streaming server, you wouldn't really notice that you were streaming the game. At 50ms we did notice a slight input lag but the game was still very much playable, though perhaps not to the exacting standards of a competitive gamer. Over 60ms latency would affect your combat performance in UT, and anything over 150ms made things unplayable.
      If they can keep latency at around 30ms, performance will probably be good enough for most gamers. But the challenge is to keep that performance consistent. That was one issue with OnLive (which I tried at around the same time): some days it would run fine, but sometimes even non-action games were unplayable.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    2. Re:Input latency by ledow · · Score: 1

      To be honest... their latency is going to be the least of your worries.

      People are going to expect to play this on a device that isn't pushing input to the game directly, over their home wifi (still on 2.4GHz with loads of neighbours around), shared with the whole household, across their standard broadband, through the ISP and to the game servers.

      From there, sure, the inter-gamer latency will basically be 0ms. But the latency from all that path will be horrible, variable, out of control of anybody by the user themselves (who won't care about that, they'll just know "it doesn't work well").

      Hell, I rarely see a home router even capable of QoS, let alone one that's even got it turned on. Big sister loading up her YouTube makeup tutorial is going to make the game unplayable not just from a latency point of view, but sheer pressure on bandwidth, and the effect won't be "fast local display but laggy other players" but "complete breakdown of the video stream".

      OnLive died for more than one reason. It's cheaper to just buy a gaming computer and game (or even just rent a computer directly) than they can offer. The latency sucks. It's highly dependent on good wifi, good local network, good connectivity to the cloud via your ISP.

      Hell, for a silly multiplayer Java game I play, you can double just the game latency by browsing a website with lots of images on the shared 30Mbps connection. Until I put on QoS specifically for that game's ports, the girlfriend browsing Facebook could make my ping spike.

      I'd hate to think what happens when you're streaming a video that basically can't be buffered at all on most random home's wifi full of devices all interfering and downloading at the same time.

    3. Re:Input latency by cmseagle · · Score: 1

      30ms is roughly equivalent to what you'd get from a particularly horrid vsync implementation (e.g. what you see in the PC versions of Skyrim and Fallout 4)

      I've played both Skyrim and Fallout 4 on my PC and never noticed any kind of input lag. If that's what 30 ms input latency feels like (and nVidia can actually deliver it), I'd call it a success.

    4. Re:Input latency by Hands+of+Blue · · Score: 1

      It's not as good as having the hardware, no. But it's better than suffering through abysmal performance at bottomed-out settings on something that was never meant for gaming.

      Lag from streaming gameplay is much better than the midpoint of "can't run it at all on my hardware" and "running it maxed out at 144fps", by virtue of being playable and running at higher settings, so they can sell it to those who already have capable rigs as "Cheaper than the equivalent gaming laptop! (for the first however-many months)", and they can potentially ALSO sell it to the netbook/prebuilt-home-office-computer crowd as "Cheaper than buying a prebuilt and easier than building your own!"

      They can compare the cost of 13 months ("Over a YEAR!") of service with the cost of a PC build (and they're free to make that build as exorbitant as they want). You could argue that, by comparing the service favorably to buying your own PC, they might be competing with their own hardware sales. However, I'd imagine the profit margin will be better for them on this service than it is on prebuilts with Nvidia cards, and I find it likely that anyone who's in the market for buying a GPU on its own either 1.) isn't going to care about this service at all, because they're happy with their rig, or 2.) will react favourably to the "cheaper than a gaming laptop" bullet point. If Nvidia see that potential competition as an issue, they may still be able to compare favourably to the cost of a "pro" console and a year of XBL/PSN.

      All they have to do is shoot for a "budget option" angle, and people will find ways to justify latency/occasional downtime because it's cheaper for them (for now).

      That said, after seeing how they handled the Shield line, I'll be surprised to see ANY adverts for this.

    5. Re:Input latency by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      If they can keep latency at around 30ms, performance will probably be good enough for most gamers.

      They can't. You failed to read and/or understand the parent post. The 30ms is additional lag, and it's a ridiculously low estimate as well. If you only have 30ms of internet lag, you are my own personal hero sir. In the best case, they are approximately doubling your input lag, which is unacceptable for anything but a strategy game.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:Input latency by fazig · · Score: 2

      I tried to stream Fallout 4, Skyrim and Prey (2017) through Steam to my notebook. I did it over Wifi within the same room and made sure that no other one was using the network. I can tell you that you probably would not like the additional latency that's added on top of all other latencies through streaming.

      I'm not too optimistic with this technology. But of course it's the wet dream of copy right fanatics - the perfect form of DRM for software - so they're going to continue to push it.

    7. Re:Input latency by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      Well, With the recent rolling out of Gigabit internet in places around the country, this might be what we need to kick it into everywhere.. my brother has gigabit internet at his house, fiber into the garage.. he wont let me run fiber to the switch i gave him yet, guess i get to wait for the next round of drywall cutting.. Back to the point, When i play games at his house, even on eastcoast servers i get about a 10ms ping at most, so IF the customers have good internet, fiber obviously being the best scenario. I could see the concept of the game streaming working. And it might be an incentive to get the ISP's to roll out fiber faster than what they are doing. Hopes and Dreams my friend, But we used to dream of internet wide 1mbit+ internet..

    8. Re:Input latency by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 1

      It's not as good as having the hardware, no. But it's better than suffering through abysmal performance at bottomed-out settings on something that was never meant for gaming.

      Lag from streaming gameplay is much better than the midpoint of "can't run it at all on my hardware" and "running it maxed out at 144fps", by virtue of being playable and running at higher settings, so they can sell it to those who already have capable rigs as "Cheaper than the equivalent gaming laptop! (for the first however-many months)", and they can potentially ALSO sell it to the netbook/prebuilt-home-office-computer crowd as "Cheaper than buying a prebuilt and easier than building your own!"

      They can compare the cost of 13 months ("Over a YEAR!") of service with the cost of a PC build (and they're free to make that build as exorbitant as they want). You could argue that, by comparing the service favorably to buying your own PC, they might be competing with their own hardware sales. However, I'd imagine the profit margin will be better for them on this service than it is on prebuilts with Nvidia cards, and I find it likely that anyone who's in the market for buying a GPU on its own either 1.) isn't going to care about this service at all, because they're happy with their rig, or 2.) will react favourably to the "cheaper than a gaming laptop" bullet point. If Nvidia see that potential competition as an issue, they may still be able to compare favourably to the cost of a "pro" console and a year of XBL/PSN.

      All they have to do is shoot for a "budget option" angle, and people will find ways to justify latency/occasional downtime because it's cheaper for them (for now).

      That said, after seeing how they handled the Shield line, I'll be surprised to see ANY adverts for this.

      My last gaming PC cost about $600 about 6 years ago; I still don't feel the absolute need to upgrade it, although it certainly is beginning to be a little stretched for some games. I see more than capable gaming laptops on sale for $800 frequently. I'd still need a cheapo computer to run their service.

      So in order for it to be cost effective it would have to be under $80 a year... and even then that would be less than optimal because you don't own the hardware, can't use it if internet gets spotty... etc. So to deal with the inconvenience of it requiring internet, say $50 a year.

      If they can make a service that is $5 a month... it will be worthwhile. I somehow suspect they won't manage that.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    9. Re:Input latency by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      The (grand)parent post claims the 30ms lag is additional lag, but that wasn't clear from the original statement in the summary. The quote in the summary implies that the 30ms refers to either total latency or network latency, since the quote mentions the exceptions being people living fram from the data center. In our own testing, the streaming pipeline didn't add anywhere near 30ms latency.

      As for network lag, my latency in BF4 is generally between 15-30ms.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    10. Re: Input latency by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      In gaming, lag or latency generally means the delay between your input and what happens on the server or the other way around. The delay between your actions and the visual feedback you get is rarely mentioned as because that delay is generally not an issue: a very low and fixed value (unless the game sends your commands straight to the server and only shows you what happens there).

      The delay between your input and visual feedback is indeed increased notably with a streaming solution. However in our empirical tests have shown up to 50ms latency (one way) to be still acceptable for 1st person shooters. I had the same experience on OnLive.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    11. Re:Input latency by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Well, With the recent rolling out of Gigabit internet in places around the country, this might be what we need to kick it into everywhere

      Trump's Swamp Things are doing all they can to keep us from having faster internet. So no. It won't be. Enjoy paying more for less.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    12. Re: Input latency by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      However in our empirical tests have shown up to 50ms latency (one way) to be still acceptable for 1st person shooters.

      If I wanted "acceptable", I'd be using a console and a gamepad.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    13. Re:Input latency by sl3xd · · Score: 1

      A few years back, John Carmack tweeted that he could ping transatlantic faster than putting a pixel on screen. He then explained more fully at superuser.

      Since I run smokeping from my home server, I can definitely say that most online services are reachable from my home internet connection in ~20 ms round-trip - or 10 ms one-way.

      For contrast, one frame at 30 FPS is 33 ms. (Kind of slow by modern standards, but I'm old enough for 30 FPS to be the threshold of being acceptable).

      While it certainly matters to the experience, 2-3 frames of latency between my input and rendered pixels doesn't detract from the experience -- especially for games played with a gamepad (instead of a mouse).

      It might not be suitable if you're playing an FPS game professionally, but it's fine for RPG and strategy games.

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    14. Re:Input latency by tohoward · · Score: 1

      Oddly enough I am currently streaming Fallout 4 from my desktop PC in the basement (on a wired Gigabit connection on my LAN) through a dedicated dual-band (2.5/5.0) wifi access point. I would quantify the result as "very playable" right up until someone hits the wifi node with a massive load (i.e. someone starts a streaming service, big download, etc.), at which point there is a noticeable lag that quickly recovers.

      For "twitch" gaming with an FPS, that just wouldn't cut it. For playing Fallout 4, it seems to work fine. I may try streaming it to my chromebook running GalliumOS (linux) to see what it's like, but haven't got around to it.

    15. Re:Input latency by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      Oh right, I forgot you cant look past the line your side is on without snark. Should have done like I was going to and not replied to you. Showing your true colors. Seems like a lot of you here must be related. Have a good life.

    16. Re:Input latency by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Oh right, I forgot you cant look past the line your side is on without snark.

      I'm entirely serious. Part of the Republican agenda is control of media. Like Trump, all Republicans depend on low-information voters for much of their support. Also like Trump, the bulk of the remainder is made up of people with money who feel that the Republicans will help them keep it. Most of the ne'er-do-wells in the KKK and the like don't bother to vote, like everyone else. That's why they had to have a voting drive for Trump; it wasn't a given. Republicans consistently break more promises than Democrats, not that I'm in love with either party. Democrats depend on getting the word out, Republicans depend on shutting the word down. If my answer offends you, then go ahead and be offended. It's not going to take any skin off of any part of my body.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    17. Re:Input latency by chihowa · · Score: 1

      I regularly stream games using Steam (including twitch FPS) and I rarely have any issues. I've even used it over a VPN from shitty hotel wifi and the latency isn't that bad. My Windows box is headless and only exists to host games.

      Since you mentioned it, I played the entirety of Prey over a VPN from another continent. The ~160 ms latency may have slightly biased my play style, but it made playing it on my laptop possible.

      --
      If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
    18. Re:Input latency by Hands+of+Blue · · Score: 1

      I'm not expecting it to actually be cost-effective for consumers, I'm saying that their best advertising angle is CLAIMING that it is.

      In order for it to look good next to buying a $1k+ Alienware monstrosity, it just needs to cost less than $500 per year, and they can say "Over 2 years of our service is cheaper than this PC! Plus, you'll never have to mess with hardware!"

    19. Re:Input latency by fazig · · Score: 1

      It probably depends on the person to what degree the additional delays are noticeable. I suppose you can get used to it, like we were used to play things like Counter Strike with 200ms+ pings over dial up, but if you see the differences more directly the reduced responsiveness does lessen the enjoyment of fast paced games in my eyes.

    20. Re:Input latency by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      Democrats depend on getting the word out, Republicans depend on shutting the word down.

      Think you may have drank a little too much, you're mixing your words up..

  6. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by itsme1234 · · Score: 2

    Then it's going to cost AT LEAST as much as a GPU, a computer, the cost of the game, the connectivity, and the associated hardware (at your end) overall. Or they either would be making a massive loss, or it would be shit.

    Obviously "dedicated" means for the time you play not that it sits there idly waiting for you. So multiple (possibly many, many) customers could be using the same board at different times.

  7. Re: Suboptimal if you own a GPU at home by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

    How do you install a desktop GPU in a laptop or any Apple computer?

  8. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by ledow · · Score: 1

    Yep.

    And if they have to have a dedicated card for each concurrent user, capable of playing the latest games, then you could easily buy a GPU for a home computer for the price that they'll need to pay + profit to do so.

    Plus... what do you think is going to be required on, say, Christmas Day when everyone wants to play their new games and you've promise they all have a dedicated card? The capacity planning alone means you're basically into just-as-much as just buying a card per user anyway.

    This is precisely the reason OnLive went bankrupt. You're paying to have a gaming-capable computer, in a datacentre, for each simultaneous user, ready to go, on-demand, 24 hours a day, and there's almost no way to scale that up without having a card-per-concurrent-user (in theory, there's no reason one GPU couldn't offer up half its cores to one user and half to another, but that's not what they are saying, and you'd need some SERIOUSLY expensive GPUs to be able to do that and still work for modern games).

    It would be cheaper to just rent out to every user a full gaming machine and deliver it to their home, for the life of their subscription.

  9. This almost means I only need one capable PC by jools33 · · Score: 1

    For me this means I will only need one or 2 high specced PCs (one for me and one for my son), then we can play from wherever we are. Now all I need is a good reliable and safe way to remotely switch on and off my pc. This must have been solved surely, any ideas?

    1. Re:This almost means I only need one capable PC by jools33 · · Score: 1

      Sounds like a simple and cheap solution, I have a spare PI or 2 - so will give it a go, thanks for the suggestion.

  10. Re:Nice. When can I do this from Android tablet? by Solandri · · Score: 2

    This is basically what Steam In-Home Streaming does. The PC playing the game converts it into a h.264 video stream in real-time (using dedicated encoding hardware present on all modern GPUs). The device displaying the game just thinks it's playing back a streamed h.264 movie (using its hardware h.264 decoder which is also present on all modern GPUs, even on phones). The only bits that are missing are getting input from the display device and feeding it back to the game PC. That's probably the only reason the client hasn't come to tablets (and phones) yet - they generally don't come with keyboard+mouse or gamepad support.

  11. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by vivian · · Score: 2

    The difference is, most gamers don't play more than 8 hours a day - probably 4 or so would be more like the average. The hardware in the datacenter could get much higher utilisation than that - up to 24 hours per day, so the amortised cost of hardware per user is much less for gamers playing on time shared hardware compared to owning their own.
    In addition, when there isn't sufficient demand for gaming, it could be used for render farm work, protein folding, AI training or whatever.
    So all in all, it should be possible for them to offer a quality gaming experience at a lower cost than people buying their own high end rigs.
    I think I'm starting to see why they possibly want to slap down a ban on game hardware in datacenters, so they don't get competitors in this new business.
    I do wonder though at what the end result will be on the bottom line, given that it will potentially erode that home gamer market, and reduce hardware sales.

  12. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by ET3D · · Score: 1

    Just because you don't want to stream, doesn't mean that others don't. I didn't want to stream movies and TV. Why would I have to pay a sub even when I don't watch that much or suffer downtimes, when I have a decent DVD/Blu-Ray library? But I tried Netflix recently, and it has quite a bit of content, that content is immediately available, things work well most of the time, and I carry on watching on different devices without having to load any content to the device or think about syncing. It's convenient. It's not perfect, but it's more convenient than what I had before.

    Technical hurdles aside (and of course they matter, but not as a matter of concept), why wouldn't I want the same experience with games? If I could play a game without having to download and store dozens of GB, on any machine, without any special hardware requirements, and stop playing on one device and continue on another without any hassle, why wouldn't I want that?

    Money-wise, it could be even be more worth it than Netflix. If I could play on a $100 PC-stick or $200 laptop what I now need a $500 PC or $1000 laptop for, then if the subscription price is right, I could even save money in the long run.

  13. with an VM one card per use = pci/e passthrough by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    with an VM one card per use = pci/e passthrough.

    Now with AMD EYPC maybe get 5-7 gpu per node with the rest of the PCI-e for network / disk / ipmi / etc.

  14. Re:Nice. When can I do this from Android tablet? by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 1

    nVidia's brand of Android tablet with game pad (been out for a few years now): https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/s...

    I've been using the nVidia Shield Android TV to do in-house game and media streaming from my home office PC to my bedroom TV for a couple years now. I hear the new version even streams games in 4k now.

  15. Re: Suboptimal if you own a GPU at home by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

    That costs a lot of money and means carrying around a bulky extra item. What happens if your laptop doesn't support TB?

  16. Re:Nice. When can I do this from Android tablet? by Ranbot · · Score: 1

    Bluetooth keyboards, mice, and headsets have been available for tablets for years.

  17. Re:Suboptimal if you own a GPU at home by EvilSS · · Score: 1

    According to their website, the service lets you stream high-resolution games from your PC to your Mac or Windows PC that may or may not have the power to run the games natively.

    --
    I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
  18. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by ET3D · · Score: 1

    OnLive isn't NVIDIA. NVIDIA doesn't have to buy GPU's. It gets its chips at cost, and it doesn't need to have them installed in a good looking package produced by some OEM. It can put them in a rack with special cooling and special power supplies. I don't even fully trust NVIDIA that the GTX 1080 is what one would expect from a desktop PC (the Max-Q version is called that too, and has lower clocks and lower power), but regardless, NVIDIA's costs are much lower.

    And although the Verge article claims that one GPU is dedicated per user, that doesn't mean that the CPU is dedicated, and certainly the storage isn't dedicated. So with no need for full size fully functional motherboards, cases, consumer PSU's and consumer level cooling, very little per-PC storage, CPU's bought more cheaply at bulk rates and perhaps shared between players, and GPU's at cost, the total price would be much lower than an actual gaming PC, even when factoring in the costs of a server farm (storage, cooling, electricity, network).

    (Not to mention all the crypto they could mine when the GPU's are free. :)

  19. Steam In-Home Streaming by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

    If this is anything like Steam's In-Home Streaming, I hope they actually allow me to source source/destination IPs into the clients. I've got a powerful machine in a remote location that I can only get to via a dial-up SSH VPN session. Because of the difference in subnet, Steam In-Home Streaming wont auto discover the machine at the other end.

    I'm all for making this "auto-magic" for the end-user, but having advanced options would be extremely helpful for when the magic doesn't work.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  20. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by GameboyRMH · · Score: 1

    I have actually tried running a Windows game via VNC, for controlling an observer player while actually playing the game myself, and it doesn't work. You can't send DirectX 3D rendered output over VNC. After some searching it seemed to be a practically universal problem with remote desktop systems.

    --
    "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
  21. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by Ranbot · · Score: 1

    Money-wise... If I could play on a $100 PC-stick or $200 laptop what I now need a $500 PC or $1000 laptop for, then if the subscription price is right, I could even save money in the long run.

    Many people get laptops from their work (free) and use it as their personal/home computer too. If they can install this Nvidia client, they could stream games at only the cost of the Nvidia service without installing games on work laptop, which would probably be frowned upon by the employer.

  22. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by itsme1234 · · Score: 1

    what do you think is going to be required on, say, Christmas Day when everyone wants to play their new games

    So you're saying this won't work because EVERYONE is getting new games on Christmas Day and has nothing better to do than to play right then? This (assumption) is clearly false. Now how much they can save because not EVERYONE is online at the same time even at peaks plus doing it "in bulk" versus what overhead they're having (and what profit margin they want) is another discussion. And there's another discussion too if this would ever work properly from the technical side.

  23. Re: Mining by Type44Q · · Score: 1

    latency

    How the fuck would latency affect mining crypto?! Do you have the foggiest idea how computers even work??

  24. Of course! by jenningsthecat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is just another chapter in the lately-skanky 'evolution' of computing. You know, the one that says you no longer control, (or really, even own), the device you paid for. It's all moving to 'the Cloud'; this means both that privacy is defunct, and that the proper functioning of the hardware you buy is subject to the whims of whoever is providing your 'Software As A Service'. And since so much gaming is already MMO, most gamers won't give it a second's thought beyond "Oooh! Shiny! Now I can play on cheap, small hardware!". Yet another erosion of self-determination and autonomy - hooray!

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
    1. Re:Of course! by erapert · · Score: 1

      You, of course, wrote that post on a computer running Linux?
      Because if you're using MacOS or Windows then that would sort of undermine your point, wouldn't it?

    2. Re:Of course! by erapert · · Score: 1

      I actually do run Linux. But you would be right if I wasn't.

  25. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by ledow · · Score: 1

    With a movie you can buffer. You will be buffering for the first 10 seconds of so of content at least, and then any latency is swallowed by the buffer.

    With a game... you can't buffer. It's like watching live TV.

    I don't know if you've ever tried it, but Live TV is even buffered (e.g. BBC iPlayer is often a second or so out of sync with the TV broadcast). Things like TVPlayer.com... they can be 5-10 seconds out of whack. And they cut out A LOT.

    A 10-second delay on your movie is invisible. A 100ms delay on your interactive game is VERY visible, especially if it comes and goes as your connection fades and improves. And you can't really buffer input / interactive content as that just makes things worse. Sometimes you even just "throw away" old data and pretend it didn't exist.

    I stream all sorts. But streaming a game? No. There's a reason that even Steam Link says "use Ethernet, not Wifi". Unreliable delivery even across a local Wifi network (no Internet involved) is enough to throw out the user experience. Doing that over people's shared crappy broadband/routers/connections?

    It's not even the same class of problem.

  26. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  27. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by JackieBrown · · Score: 1

    I'm not an online gamer but I'd be willing to bet a nickle that most gamers playing co-opt or competitive online games play at the same time periods.

  28. Re: Nice. When can I do this from Android tablet? by pecosdave · · Score: 1

    I played South Park the Fractured But Whole on it all day Saturday and it was great. I've played some platform games on it as well.

    I'm not sure how it works for FPS games or Racing games, I'm guessing those are sort of shit (The Next Penelope was fine). On RPGs, slower platform games, Adventure games it works great. I've played Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams on it, it looked beautiful and performed well.

    I'm not sure WHY but using a Steam Link works better than my Linux desktop. I've got Steam on my Linux desktop that's on the same switch as my "Wintendo" Steam server. My Steam Link has to go through that switch, the router/switch under the TV, then the switch in the bedroom to get between the systems. It's all Gigabit, but that's quite a few cascades for home equipment. The Linux desktop is pretty much double the power of the Wintendo, and when I'm playing a Steam game locally it works great, no technical problems to speak of. When I'm streaming from the Wintendo to the Linux system it has video glitches, occasionally goes to really low bit-rate video and on rare occasion just freezes. I've got a pair of olded nVida cards in SLI mode in the Wintendo and the Linux system has a Geforce 750 TI, so I they've definitely put some thought into the Steam Link side of things even the PC/Linux version is lacking. 8 cores at 3 Ghz and 16 GB of RAM should beat the Steam Link, but whatever.

    --
    The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
  29. Steam inhome streaming by rbpOne · · Score: 1

    You can do the same with Steam (any game, not just games bought on Steam). Unlike this Nvidia thing, it works on Linux too. I have a win7 box burried in a closet somewhere for that purpose.

  30. Game Streaming by krisbrowne42 · · Score: 1

    Playstation Now already does this, and it works pretty darn good... But I'm not interested in paying a subscription to play games I already own(ed) for PS3 just because they never solved backwards compatibility... If Geforce Now lets me tie in the games I own from other platforms and just pay for their power/bandwidth, at a reasonable rate, I'm in for times I don't have my massive slab of a gaming laptop handy... Bonus points if I end up being able to do so from my iPad down the line.

  31. Re:How is this different from other services? by Voyager529 · · Score: 1

    Didn't OnLive and Sony both try streamed games, to no real success? What happened?

    I think someone else on the thread called it - this is different because neither OnLive nor Sony could overcome the cost/hardware investment. Both companies tried to sell gaming, and only gaming. It's possible to do this with AWS because other components more readily subdivide. As a simple example, an 8TB drive can be sold to 8 people in 1TB slices, all of whom can use it at the same time and be generally-okay with performance. GPUs don't subdivide nearly as well, meaning there basically needs to be a 1:1 ratio between cards and subscribers. It's difficult to oversubscribe into profitability, just as much as it's difficult to make a decent profit off hardware that's sitting idle for 16 hours a day.

    But that's probably not what nVidia is doing.

    nVidia is, in all probability, making some sort of GPU specific variant of AWS or GCC. Gamers want to game for 90 minutes that day? Great, let them use the card for 90 minutes and then use the other 22.5 hours of the card to rent out as GPU time to Bitcoin miners or weather forecasters or machine learning algorithms, or whatever other task people are willing to pay to rent time to process. This way, heavy gaming days = lower general use, and lighter gaming days = heavier general use.

    And that is how they will be successful.

  32. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by farble1670 · · Score: 1

    Why don't you try it. I think you'll answer your own question.

  33. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by farble1670 · · Score: 1

    The difference is, most gamers don't play more than 8 hours a day - probably 4 or so would be more like the average.

    Most gamers will be pretty upset when they sit down on a holiday and can't play because the systems are only setup to scale to 57% concurrent users. How do you sell a service with the caveat like that?

    The other thing is this needs a shit ton of bandwidth. I subscribed to Nvidia's Geoforce NOW service. It pulled ~57MBit for a 1080p, 60fps game. That's not for everyone, and it makes gaming on even the best networks susceptible to intermittent problems. Pretty cool seeing your 7 inch tablet driving a 1080/60 game on your 65" screen though. Nvidia did a good job with it's gaming tablets, but that's a dead product now. Selling chips to Nintendo is a more lucrative business.

  34. External GPUs are scary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Seems like eGPUs really scare a lot of vendors.

    "From reading things such as this, I conclude that the tech/drivers to get full speed Thunderbolt eGPUs are largely ready, but Intel and/or other vendors are refusing to licence it and make it available. The one company that defied them and sold it anyway appears to have been shut down by Intel and product recall notices issues to everyone that purchased it. Read the thread, check the sources and make your own conclusions."

    That's Intel, but same difference. Like gaming laptops cost a fortune, so eGPUs being so cheap are a threat to gaming laptops when many eGPUs are fairly portable.

  35. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by ET3D · · Score: 1

    So you agree that it's desirable if it works? If you're just arguing implementation, let the implementation speak for itself. All I'm saying is that if it works decently well, then I think there's a market for it.

  36. Re:You can do this yourself with vnc by ledow · · Score: 1

    And it CANNOT WORK DECENTLY WELL on what you know as a home broadband connection because you CANNOT buffer interactivity.

    And of course there's a market. That's why Steam Link was sold for about 10GBP over Christmas - they were dumping stock of something that basically does exactly the same.