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Nvidia launches a game streaming service (nvidia.com)
43 points by bcaulfield on Nov 15, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments


How well does this work from the user experience standpoint?

Is it a smooth fluid experience, or prone to lag?


If you believe that it will be smooth and fluid, I have a bridge to sell you.

There's this pesky little thing known as the speed of light.

I mean, even if they were to do the absurd thing of "render X possible futures, send you all of them, have client pick the "best" one", that only reduces general latency, not worse-case latency - and you cannot keep increasing X as bandwidth is not infinite (and their server power is not infinite either). Worst-case latency being (RTT + render time), which is going to be at least RTT. And worse-case latency is what you tend to notice, at least at these timescales.

Will it potentially be useful for those who live close to a datacenter? Sure. (I question the economics of it from a consumer perspective. But that is another matter.) But is it a general technique? No. For example: I have a ping to Google of ~200ms at home. As such, worse-case latency is >=200ms. (Well, again, depends on where the data centers are. But I'm assuming that Google has pretty good datacenters. And almost all of that latency is coming from the "last mile" in my case, which could change.) Are you going to notice 1/5 of a second delay in a FPS? Probably enough to not consider it smooth and fluid anymore. Related: I at one point got annoyed at a projector over Super Hexagon - kept overcompensating - and measured the delay against my laptop's display and found a delay of ~5 frames over and above my laptop. Admittedly, SH is a twitch-based game - but when you're turning / etc in a FPS you want much the same same frame precision. An extra 200ms isn't exactly going to be unnoticeable.


I think there is a business case, even for FPS. FPS are typically played online, so you are already dealing with lag. And a worst case of lag is already going to get you killed, whether the game is streamed or not.

Besides the light is not so slow. I ping Google in ~12ms (from Osaka). Even for a FPS that's good enough for most people, especially if the alternative is forking a non trivial amount of money. I mean most people play FPS with gamepads, so it's not like the threshold in terms of quality is particularly high to begin with.

How many gamers within reach of a datacenter in Seoul? in Paris? in Berlin? in San Francisco? in New-York City? Sure it won't work for you, but that certainly doesn't mean there is no business case.


Can't really appeal to the speed of light -- light travels 1000 miles in 5.3ms.

And for comparison, ping to google is 3ms in my apartment.

If ping to google is 200ms, can you play traditional online games (Counter Strike, TF2, etc) without issue?


OnLive does this and seems to do okay, and they do have first person shooters and other twitch games https://games.onlive.com/


ping 200ms to google is horrible and more like a dial up modem, with a good connection a <20ms ping is reasonable and if you take into account that 30fps equals about 33ms per frame, game streaming is entirely possible and has been proven to work. Just the economics are questionable at this point.


Man this is idiotic, anyone who would support this shit is ruining gaming, it's just DRM by another name.


But you have to buy the weird tablet...


Is it really that weird?

Most reviews say really good things about it. Not just performance wise but overall device is been praised by most reviewers.

Apart from getting hot and okay-ish battery everything else of that tablet is said to be great.


Do you? It seems like they just get the service for free -- you can buy it otherwise




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