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Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

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

#121

Post by TheOperator »

manfredo wrote: post #75
politician wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running managed clients in a "compute at the edge" architecture that streams video to the end-user might be a good compromise. CDNs are deploying compute/lambda at the edge capabilities, so "gaming at the edge" could be seen as a reasonable expansion of that.

This seems a lot more feasible. In fact, that's what the Nvidia Shield essentially is (although the edge computation is done with the customer's desktop computer).

I see this as being a more plausible implementation for say multiplayer twitcg shooters. Market needs to scale up a lot for this to be viable though...

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

#122

Post by BonsaiDen »

alwaysdoit wrote: post #108
manfredo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of games were played? Whether or not latency is an issue is hugely dependent on the title. A game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice where the bulk of the game play revolves around precision timing is going to be killed by any significant amount of latency. Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end (e.g. make a block succeed even if it was late, if it suspects th…

For a networked multiplayer game, the total amount of network lag is effectively the same, except that the network lag is moved from between client and server to client and "display". Now that the server and client are now just one instance, there is zero lag there.

Considering that pretty much all multiplayer games in existence perform some sort of local prediction / state interpolation to hide the lag on the local machine, cloud only multiplayer will be considerably worse. After all you can no longer hide the lag locally, since you're not computing anything on the local machine, so the minimum precieved lag will go from 0 (for movement of your own player character) to the RT between the datacenter and your PC :/

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

#123

Post by jeremyjh »

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’ve played Bloodborne on PS Now and it works great. This game is really dependent on fast reactions and smooth camera panning. I think if you try it out you might learn something.

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

#124

Post by manfredo »

shaftway wrote: post #92
manfredo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of games were played? Whether or not latency is an issue is hugely dependent on the title. A game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice where the bulk of the game play revolves around precision timing is going to be killed by any significant amount of latency. Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end (e.g. make a block succeed even if it was late, if it suspects th…

> Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end This is actually already done in many AAA titles. The idea is to basically always be showing a prediction of what will have happened in ~70 ms, and update your state model accordingly. Given a datacenter to run the games on and all of the announcements about being able to take a snapshot of the state, this doesn't sound super…

But stadia can't use these techniques. The game engine and rendering isn't done on the client side. Normally a network game the client displays the user's actions immediately, and the lag is only seen from other player's perspectives.

On a streamed game, all interactions need a round trip before the user sees any response.

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

#125

Post by cmsj »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #109
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…

Honestly I just don't get why every single time there is discussion about game streaming, the topic of lag as a potential show stopper comes up, and every time it's a hypothetical discussion, which doesn’t make sense at all - the solutions are out there! Don’t assume - just verify it. And when you do, you will find out that there isn’t any actual issue. I’ve played games like The Witcher 3 via streaming over three ye…

Yep, I played a couple of the Arkham games on streaming services, the first one way back on OnLive before Sony bought them. It was fine.

I now play games with some friends and while I'm using a local PC, they use Shadow PCs (ie a VM with a GPU in a datacentre vaguely near them) and it's fine.

Maybe it'd be worse on an LTE/5G connection, but my phone is getting 25ms to the nearest Speedtest.net instance right now, which doesn't seem substantially terrible.

I would be much more concerned about the pricing of all of these things, than the technical issues. How many gaming subscription services am I going to need to add to my video subscription services?

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

#126

Post by shpx »

Waterluvian wrote: post #7
lawrenceyan wrote: post #5

I assume this is in response to Stadia?

And Nvidia GeForce Now. I'm wildly impressed by Nvidia's streaming solution.

By the way, Nvidia GeForce Now is free right now. Go sign up for their free beta and a couple months later you'll get an invitation

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/wa...

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

#127

Post by jeremyjh »

manfredo wrote: post #74
iandanforth wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Stadia trial convinced me that streaming is a near-term viable option. Latencies were not an issue. Bandwidth was, but when I got to play on a 50Mbps+ connection any issues I had encountered disappeared. Moreover I was able to play a AAA title on my 2011 Macbook Air and that was fantastic.

What kind of games were played? Whether or not latency is an issue is hugely dependent on the title. A game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice where the bulk of the game play revolves around precision timing is going to be killed by any significant amount of latency. Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end (e.g. make a block succeed even if it was late, if it suspects th…

I’ve played a lot of Sekiro on XBox One. I’ve played Bloodborne on PS Now and it works great. They have a free trial you should check it out.

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

#128

Post by ClassyJacket »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #109
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…

Honestly I just don't get why every single time there is discussion about game streaming, the topic of lag as a potential show stopper comes up, and every time it's a hypothetical discussion, which doesn’t make sense at all - the solutions are out there! Don’t assume - just verify it. And when you do, you will find out that there isn’t any actual issue. I’ve played games like The Witcher 3 via streaming over three ye…

You've specifically chosen a game that isn't sensitive to lag.

It's like saying "Switching from a car to a bike just isn't an issue - I once rode all the way to my neighbour's house!"

Try playing a multiplayer first person shooter on the same service, you'll find latency is an issue.

By all accounts, the Doom demo that Google gave was plagued with lag.

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

#129

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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…

> 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).

I think it's actually more or less the opposite?

Twitch platformers like Celeste and Cuphead can't afford input lag, as they require very quick and precise movements from players. It so happens that these types of games almost always have low system requirements. Rhythm games and fighting games tend to be similarly lightweight. Street Fighter 5 won't run on a potato, but the hardware required is far from state-of-the-art.

By contrast, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2 already contain large amounts of input lag when played locally according to Digital Foundry, and consumers don't seem to care much. This isn't to say that adding more latency is a good idea—and I have no idea if the existing latency could be whittled down to compensate for streaming—but it clearly doesn't bother people much.

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