51–60 of 268 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There might be cases where Stadia will be too high-latency for some games/gamers, but I would wager it will make huge inroads in the untapped market of people who want to play games but can't or won't invest in gaming hardware.
yes, instead they buy phones for 1k.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There might be cases where Stadia will be too high-latency for some games/gamers, but I would wager it will make huge inroads in the untapped market of people who want to play games but can't or won't invest in gaming hardware.
yes, instead they buy phones for 1k.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a lot bigger deal than you think, including for those very engine developers who work on Unity and etc. Having to deal with all extra lock-in APIs doesn't come for free. It takes time, resources and slows down releasing features to their users.
Vulkan _is_ a lock-in API, locking you into Google platforms; the one commercially viable platform using it is [recent versions of] Google's Android with another one on the horizon - Google Stadia. It's not necessary on Windows, not available on two of the three consoles, and not available without a wrapper on iOS and OSX. (Technically, it is also available on Nintendo Switch, but there's also an arguably better alte…
If MS and Sony wanted, they could have Vulkan driver for Xbox and PlayStation tomorrow, since they are all using AMD GPUs. And no one stopped Apple from supporting Vulkan on their systems either. They don't, since they are also lock-in jerks, which is exactly the point I was making above.
Google finally advances Linux+Vulkan gaming using a side door that bypasses the market share blocker altogether. MS and Sony don't like it and plan to mirror Google. Instead, they should stop being lock-in jerks, and should support Vulkan as well.
AMD is the big winner here, being behind the MS and Sony consoles for the last (and likely future) console generations and the Google Stadia service. And with their GPU's going into datacenters and a move away from CUDA lock-in to OpenCL (example: https://www.openwall.com/lists/announce/2019/05/14/1 ), they're in a great position to increase market share of GPU accelerated tasks like AI and deep learning.
There's the obvious DRM win. Accessibility will be higher with way lower or non-existent hardware costs. These probably look very enticing on a cooperate slide deck. Not to mention the subscription model.
On a more technical side game streaming is only really desirable for games that don't run well on commodity hardware (see AAA 3D action titles). Latency is very important for these titles and the general rule of thumb is that 50ms of input latency is readily noticeable to humans. Average home connections have ~20-30ms round trip latencies. These speeds are not a reality everywhere or consistent. Combined with hardware input, world simulation, and rendering latencies it can be difficult to get latencies low enough to be comfortable.
Modern games just have the client run its own world simulation and rectify with the server later to hide the network latency. This strategy won't be possible with streaming. Is there some alternate optimization that can be made for streaming? The architecture will definitely be simpler with the main-frame paradigm. Maybe if there's only one client it could be feasible to send some batteries included chunk of frames that can be easily constructed based on the next set of inputs. Is there any hint that progress can be made in this direction?
If the latency problem can't be solved, I'm definitely bearish or game streaming. Latency insensitive games for the most part are not difficult to run on commodity hardware.
>While details have yet to be hammered out, the partnership will center on artificial intelligence and the cloud. The latter category includes plans for joint development of cloud gaming technology. So this agreement mostly focuses on Sony using Azure infrastructure for Cloud Gaming. I wonder how will Xbox will compete in this scenario, it's kind of weird hosting your competitor.
It's not like the tech industry is exactly new to using competing companies products. Microsoft using Mac (not even discretely). Apple using AWS, Google Cloud, Azure Amazon Selling competing products etc, etc This may be a bit of a specialized case, but if you run a cloud hosting provider that is not your primary (or original) business you will need to accept that likely be involved in running a competing service. (I…
>While details have yet to be hammered out, the partnership will center on artificial intelligence and the cloud. The latter category includes plans for joint development of cloud gaming technology. So this agreement mostly focuses on Sony using Azure infrastructure for Cloud Gaming. I wonder how will Xbox will compete in this scenario, it's kind of weird hosting your competitor.
It's not like the tech industry is exactly new to using competing companies products. Microsoft using Mac (not even discretely). Apple using AWS, Google Cloud, Azure Amazon Selling competing products etc, etc This may be a bit of a specialized case, but if you run a cloud hosting provider that is not your primary (or original) business you will need to accept that likely be involved in running a competing service. (I…
I assume this is in response to Stadia?
Google finally advances Linux+Vulkan gaming using a side door that bypasses the market share blocker altogether. MS and Sony don't like it and plan to mirror Google. Instead, they should stop being lock-in jerks, and should support Vulkan as well.
Microsoft has been working on this ~2008. Google only started a few years ago.