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