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Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features

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Re: Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features

#81
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What assumptions make it less than profitable at $20? If the hw costs are $1000 and if you'd need a hw setup per every 5 subscribers, you'd get $2400 in 2 years for $1000 in hw investment. Power, bandwidth and other costs are something but doesn't sound obviously unprofitable to me.

First, you take USD4-5 off that in tax. Then more for support, finance and and marketing. Then electricity, bandwidth and insurance. Then games licences. Then hw...

Corporate tax is a flat 21%, and that's on profit, not revenue. I don't believe Nvidia pays anything for "licenses" either. There's no way that overhead should make them unprofitable even at retail prices.

Re: Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features

#83

One of the benefits of GeForce now is im pretty sure they are subsidizing it. I get unlimited gaming on a 4080 for USD$20. I have a 4080 at home and I can't get the same latency/frame rate with Parsec even though I have a gigabit connection. Cool project, actual experience unsure.

Does the higher price tier work better than the low tier? I Usally get wierd stutter and resolution/packet loss during peak times or network congestion at the nvidia end. It’s typically related to new game or game season releases so I think it’s in nvidias end.

Re: Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features

#84
post #65
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GeForce Now works great. I subscribed for a while to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a remote 4080 and it felt like playing on a local computer. But with much higher settings and framerate than I get on my local GeForce 1080. > Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day. Don't make the assumption that everyone live their lives exactly like you do.

A 1080 is 8 years old and wasn't a flagship, an equivalent card costs ~$100 currently... Also: that's 4 generations, not 2. It'd be a complete disaster if gfn couldn't beat that performance. I've attempted to use GFN several times too and can only conclude that you've never played at a decent setup if that felt like a local machine. The input latency is so high that anything with pvp is entirely unplayable (it adds a…

It’s great for turn based like BG3 or cities skyline. My biggest issue with it is how long it takes to start up a session

Re: Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features

#85
post #50

One of the benefits of GeForce now is im pretty sure they are subsidizing it. I get unlimited gaming on a 4080 for USD$20. I have a 4080 at home and I can't get the same latency/frame rate with Parsec even though I have a gigabit connection. Cool project, actual experience unsure.

What assumptions make it less than profitable at $20? If the hw costs are $1000 and if you'd need a hw setup per every 5 subscribers, you'd get $2400 in 2 years for $1000 in hw investment. Power, bandwidth and other costs are something but doesn't sound obviously unprofitable to me.

The hardware could be used for other things I think 1 4080 card tiers also 2 1080 cards equivalent. I wound bet they rent out capacity for other stuff during the day too.

I would also be surprised if they were only 5-1 on users still it’s probably not their most profitable venture.

Re: Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features

#86
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get better latency and frame rate than GeForce Now on a 2660 using moonlight. Using h.265 or AV1 is necessary. I'm not familiar with Presec, but I'll bet it's defaulting to h.264.

I’m getting a stable 5ms latency over ethernet with Sunshine + Moonlight (forced HW en & decoding). WIFI adds a few ms and you need a good router & mostly idle access point for perfectly smooth 4K. For FPS like L4D2 I do get better results (aim) running locally, but I ascribe that to the mouse acceleration weirdness which I never managed to configure _just right_.

This is my experience, 4-6ms. Even over the internet on a different continent I can game from my home PC with negligible latency with Moonlight.

Re: Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features

#87
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you sell globally, then you can get max utilization from different sides of the globe as people sleep, so that you can over-subscribe per unit of the GPU. I would expect that people dont play 24/7, but if you charge like they do, then you get to make a profit.

That doesn't work due to the latency. If you want 30ms roundtrip, you need to be within ~3000km/1800 miles of the subscriber.

What if the gaming PCs were in orbit? You could have the orbit of the satellites track the sleeping times of populations, so that you don't have PCs above areas where nobody would use them.

Starlink promises latency around 20-40ms, so I do wonder if this is possible. You would have far more distance between the client/server, but I would expect that routing would be greatly simplified.

Re: Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features

#88
post #5

Being exclusive to Nvidia GPUs doesn't sound like a good idea. What makes it rely on CUDA anyway? It's cool that it's using Wine though. From these cloud services like Amazon's Luna or Geforce Now, none are running Linux, so this is interesting. No idea why Stadia couldn't do the same and tried to reinvent the wheel with Windows ABI translation at some point before it shut down.

I guess the google team wanted to create an experience that is identical to the console gaming experience, in the sense that the users don’t have to adjust any settings before playing. Because of this requirement they couldn't use windows vms, because they sometimes have some issues like the game not being displayed in full screen. I also guess that Google probably saw some cost saving potential by using Linux instead of Windows.

Re: Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features

#89
post #76
post #74

I was trying to find their actual streaming implementation in their codebase before giving up and checking their Discord. Apparently parts of their game streaming stack are being developed in private repos, and their subscription service is the only working version of this project. In its current state I wouldn’t call this project open-source.

If you’re interested in stuff like this, take a look at the looking-glass project. It uses shared memory to display frames from a VM running under a Linux host. I’m sure there’s a way to transmit those frames over a network if one was clever enough

That's a really cool idea.
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