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Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#81

Post by coffekaesque »

shmerl wrote: post #18

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.

Very interesting talk about Stadia, latency, Linux, Vulkan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdz4b5psrhE

> The inside story of how DOOM came to life on Stadia. id Software delivers a bird’s eye view of real-world Stadia development from conception to execution. Learn how high-performance games are made on Google’s new streaming platform. Recorded at GDC 2019.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#82

Post by skohan »

unsigner wrote: post #48
shmerl wrote: post #34

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…

That's just plain incorrect. There are already mainstream AAA titles targeting Vulkan published for Windows and macOS (via MoltenVK). Doom Eternal will only target Vulkan on PC : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_7

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#83

Post by skohan »

cududa wrote: post #44
shmerl wrote: post #18

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.

Yeah but Google has serious bonafides as far as delivering high-res video at scale. Stadia is just Youtube with input handling and a game renderer instead of video files producing the frames.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#84

Post by skohan »

Jyaif wrote: post #73
skohan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine cloud gaming will be viable for VR anytime soon. It's far too sensitive to latency.

It's possible. The trick is to render the pictures using the latest position of the headset. Include depth maps to make the rendering more accurate. Use ML to in-paint the gaps.

But the rendering happens at the server. You'd still need a local GPU to do reprojection for the headset.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#85

Post by earenndil »

cwyers wrote: post #80
shmerl wrote: post #18

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.

How does Stadia advance Linux+Vulkan? The games run in a data center (and they're not running a standard Linux port, the presentations I saw made it sound like they were running basically another console port).

Still, the games will have a vulkan renderer and run on some form of linux, making an official port to the actual OS more likely.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#86

Post by skohan »

bredren wrote: post #62
skohan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine cloud gaming will be viable for VR anytime soon. It's far too sensitive to latency.

An alliance like this is a decades-long proposition.

Recently I saw a talk where John Carmack said he is working with camera manufacturers to find ways to reduce firmware overhead on the image coming out of the sensor for VR/AR applications to reduce latency. A lot can happen in a few decades, but this is a very hard problem to solve.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#88

Post by cwyers »

earenndil wrote: post #85
cwyers wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Stadia advance Linux+Vulkan? The games run in a data center (and they're not running a standard Linux port, the presentations I saw made it sound like they were running basically another console port).

Still, the games will have a vulkan renderer and run on some form of linux, making an official port to the actual OS more likely.

The Xbox One has an NT kernel and DirectX as the graphics API. Stadia's use of Linux and Vulkan are probably about as helpful for a port to desktop Linux as an Xbox One game is for a Windows port.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#89

Post by skohan »

tzakrajs wrote: post #53
gsich wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, instead they buy phones for 1k.

Exactly and to address the other child comment, those $1k phones have hardware to render AAA games now. Google doesn’t realize they don’t actually have a sustainable audience. It’s sad.

I predict the audience will be huge. The audience for watching Let's Play's on Twitch and Youtube is enormous. I would be surprised if a significant portion of that audience doesn't convert when the barrier to entry is clicking a "play" button on Youtube.

It's not just the people with $1k phones: it's all the students who's parents got them a MacBook Air for college, and all the kids and teenagers who's parents won't buy them a console for Christmas. Not to mention markets where gaming hardware is several times more expensive than in the US or Europe.

edit: if the experience is decent

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#90

Post by Xixi »

davemp wrote: post #56

It seems like all the major players are taking game streaming seriously. I'm still not very sure about the viability. 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…

I have no idea how reliable it is, but quoting wikipedia [1]:

"Testing has found that overall "input lag" (from controller input to display response) times of approximately 200 ms are distracting to the user. It also appears that (excluding the monitor/television display lag) 133 ms is an average response time and the most sensitive games (fighting games, first person shooters and rhythm games) achieve response times of 67 ms (excluding display lag)."

These numbers are from the PS3/XBox 360 area, which certainly sold massively well. Since display lag is not included in these 67ms, this is what these streaming services would have to aim for. It doesn't sound completely insane given the 30ms round trip latencies of home connections.

On a more subjective note, I think it's going to be really hard hunting down high end gamer PCs. On the other hand lots of games don't run particularly smoothly on consoles (especially "normal" PS4 and XBox One, rather than PS4 Pro or XBox One S) that these services are directly aiming at. I can perfectly imagine a stadia version of The Witcher 3 running circles around the PS4 version that lags so much... But I don't think it would hold against the PC version.

But I don't game much at all anymore, so my knowledge is mostly outdated. The last games I played were 80 days and A Dark Room on my iPhone (both pretty good games). So I guess I'm now more in the target demographics of Apple Arcade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag

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