The future of gaming

TonyM.

Is this the end of high end hardware? online gaming no more upgrades needed.

http://www.onlive.com/

Captain Chaos

Only if everyone is lucky enough to have a 24meg, contention free, zero usage limit connection then yeah otherwise for the other 99% of the population, no.

PCPhoto

certainly looks impressive

thorbarry

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Only if everyone is lucky enough to have a 24meg, contention free, zero usage limit connection then yeah otherwise for the other 99% of the population, no.

So pretty much Ireland cant use it. Our connection here is way below the European average. Should be usable in France tho

kiffer

Most likely Vaporware trying to pull in venture capital...

Do you really want your single player games to suffer from lag or be totally unplayable if your connection goes down?

TonyM.

http://www.mova.com/

They claim a 5 mb connection within 1000 miles of a server will do
check out the video she looks real to me.

TonyM.

http://kotaku.com/5181300/onlive-makes-pc-upgrades-extinct-lets-you-play-crysis-on-your-tv

Captain Chaos

TonyM. wrote: »

http://www.mova.com/

They claim a 5 mb connection within 1000 miles of a server will do
check out the video she looks real to me.

I have a 10meg connection at less than 3km from the local exchange, 1:1 contention and I can only get 3meg at the best of times and I'm lucky if I can play online games with the latency on the line.

Great idea and looks like a good service for anyone with a decent connection.

TonyM.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article

The bad news it may not work.

generalmiaow

TonyM. wrote: »

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article

The bad news it may not work.

The psychophysics research that the article you link to blithely dismisses is the same sort of research that led to the consumer digital music and video age, you can't underestimate the role of the brain in what looks good and feels smooth.

Having said that, there's a fairly obvious barrier to the success of this thing: The multi-billion dollar game industry has a lot of hooks in the hardware industry, which has been upset enough over thin clients for mere office work. Lending support to server side rendering would not be in the interests of console and GPU manufacturers, even if it is considered "green computing".

The article is spot on though in pointing out the fact that video decompression uses heavy client side resources.

Overheal

As far as Im concerned its purely theoretical atm.

Look at computing in the last 50 years. Thinking has always favored decentralisation. Mainframes and Terminals went the way of the typewriter to later be replaced with workstations and much more conservative servers. The race for stupidly fast, stupidly hot processor cores gave away to multithreading and multicore processing. 1 wheel drive gave way to 4 wheel drive. even your gaming controller runs on its own independent power source now. I could go on and find similarities like this for a while.

Unless you can create a hardware farm that is powerful enough in that it can supply more users at a lower economy than that same number of users can by supplying their own hardware, this is going to bust. And what happens when a mainframe goes down? Everybody gets ****ed. At least when an MMO crashes you can still go play solitaire or something. With onlive you wouldnt be so lucky.

Lots of barriers for this technology to overcome. I doubt we will see it become mainstream anytime soon.

rgdaxter

looks fairly good alright

Is this not just a way of preventing piracy presented as a plus for gamers?