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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

#221

Post by p1necone »

dead_mall wrote: post #184

Even trying to stream via LAN is unplayable. It's especially much worse streaming from a server that's thousands of miles away from your home. I got 200mbs download and half the upload speed, I played plenty of PS Now titles, and the only problem I have with it is the input lag. There's no escape to it. You cannot play fast-paced games with such delay, especially multiplayer-FPS games, it's just terrible. It's better…

If you find game streaming on your LAN unplayable you probably have a setup problem. If you have a solid router and you're only going through ethernet, no wifi then stuff like steam in home streaming should be basically flawless as far as framerate and input lag goes(I get ~3ms added from the streaming iirc). You will notice video compression artifacts though of course.

I do always use it with an xbox controller rather than mouse+keyboard though, so it's less latency sensitive.

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

#222

Post by thrower123 »

dead_mall wrote: post #184

Even trying to stream via LAN is unplayable. It's especially much worse streaming from a server that's thousands of miles away from your home. I got 200mbs download and half the upload speed, I played plenty of PS Now titles, and the only problem I have with it is the input lag. There's no escape to it. You cannot play fast-paced games with such delay, especially multiplayer-FPS games, it's just terrible. It's better…

I've tried to like my Steam Link, but it just isn't worth the hassle - wired with cat6 from one room to the other I've always had lags and glitches and disconnects.

Throwing in ping times of 50-100 ms to some datacenter, not to mention whatever traffic shaping shenanigans Comcast will inevitably apply, and I don't have a fuzzy feeling about the viability of this rash of streaming services.

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

#223

Post by la_barba »

savethefuture wrote: post #201
la_barba wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine how much better performance you could expect from games if they could spend their time optimizing for one API, and not making compromises to target a half dozen. That is not really an accurate statement. Graphics performance is heavily dependent on the actual hardware design of the underlying platform. You can't wave a magic API-wand and have your executable or shader be magically fast on every hardware pla…

Why couldn't it, you dont think software updates can improve performance across the board? But his point was developers could focus on a single api rather than having to deal with quirks in directx, opengl, vulkan, webgl, etc.

>But his point was developers could focus on a single api rather than having to deal with quirks in directx, opengl, vulkan, webgl, etc.

That is really an imagined scenario. An extremely tiny minority of games are targeted for such a wide variety of platforms. Real-time high-performance code is always tightly coupled with the hardware - if you want to squeeze performance out of hardware, you want to minimize abstractions to such a level as they don't hurt your productivity. If you're targeting consoles, you can maybe target the PC platform. But there is no way you're targeting the nintendo DS or a smartphone with the same codebase without major modifications to the graphics code.

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

#224

Post by shmerl »

la_barba wrote: post #223
savethefuture wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't it, you dont think software updates can improve performance across the board? But his point was developers could focus on a single api rather than having to deal with quirks in directx, opengl, vulkan, webgl, etc.

>But his point was developers could focus on a single api rather than having to deal with quirks in directx, opengl, vulkan, webgl, etc. That is really an imagined scenario. An extremely tiny minority of games are targeted for such a wide variety of platforms. Real-time high-performance code is always tightly coupled with the hardware - if you want to squeeze performance out of hardware, you want to minimize abstract…

> An extremely tiny minority of games are targeted for such a wide variety of platforms.

On the contrary, most games are targeted for most platforms, to increase reach and sales as result of it. Only some exclusives of console makers are not doing that, and those are clearly outliers.

> Real-time high-performance code is always tightly coupled with the hardware

That's not common at all. Unless you want to beat modern compilers with assembly code, you only will produce something worse. Sure, there are are rare cases when using hardware specific features yields extra performance. Codec developers do that for example. But for games? Not usually needed. Shaders are provided in cross platform fashion (such as SPIR-V) and that's compiled into GPU machine code by the driver. And actual game code is commonly using some high level systems language (C++, etc.) + a scripting one.

Good performance is achieved by parallelizing the engine properly, since modern hardware is increasingly multicore.

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

#225

Post by delfinom »

ezoe wrote: post #216
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…

We care about the 50ms latency because the current games are designed for the platforms with > Latency insensitive games for the most part are not difficult to run on commodity hardware. Majority of people don't have a PC with a dedicated GPU. Or PC at all. Thanks to the Smartphone. That said, I don't like the current trend and I hope they failed on streaming video game.

>Majority of people don't have a PC with a dedicated GPU. Or PC at all. Thanks to the Smartphone.

Problem is, smartphones still are shit for input (lol touchscreen) in any precise manners so what point is there in trying to run intensive games on it via streaming.

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

#226

Post by kraig911 »

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 recall we all said the same crap about streaming HD movies with a monthly fee too. I think the only true problem with streaming gaming is that the quality of games will diminish even more.

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

#227

Post by chimpburger »

sterlind wrote: post #143
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…

Rather than purely streaming frames, you could push a frontend client in e.g. webgl + wasm on demand, cache artifacts locally, and send view-independent texture/mesh streams down. Doing so is technically more complex than having a rigid client/server split, but if they start with full streaming they can progressively make the client more intelligent, without being burdened with any specific hardware/client infra choi…

Streaming anything but frames defeats the purpose of a frame streaming service.

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

#228

Post by vardump »

thrower123 wrote: post #222
dead_mall wrote: post #184

Even trying to stream via LAN is unplayable. It's especially much worse streaming from a server that's thousands of miles away from your home. I got 200mbs download and half the upload speed, I played plenty of PS Now titles, and the only problem I have with it is the input lag. There's no escape to it. You cannot play fast-paced games with such delay, especially multiplayer-FPS games, it's just terrible. It's better…

I've tried to like my Steam Link, but it just isn't worth the hassle - wired with cat6 from one room to the other I've always had lags and glitches and disconnects. Throwing in ping times of 50-100 ms to some datacenter, not to mention whatever traffic shaping shenanigans Comcast will inevitably apply, and I don't have a fuzzy feeling about the viability of this rash of streaming services.

Does your HDMI cable also have "lags and disconnects"? I mean, when you have hardware compression (presumably?), it's not all that different to send it over HDMI than ethernet.

Compression latency should be in low milliseconds (1 ms should be plenty.) The latency over ethernet is going to be measured in hundreds of microseconds. Sending a compressed 100 kB frame over it takes 800 microseconds, which can partially overlap with compression. Noticing 2-3 milliseconds extra latency is going to be pretty hard.

Something is badly wrong with your setup or with Steam Link.

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

#229

Post by ahje »

mattlondon wrote: post #94
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…

20-30ms seems high? At least in the UK a typical home broadband latency is 6 to 9ms in my experience.

There's a lot of people who can't get fiber when you get outside the cities. I'd be thrilled if I could get under 35ms.

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

#230

Post by skohan »

Jyaif wrote: post #167
skohan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, but you need a GPU to decode 4k video anyways.

Reprojection for VR is typically done on the currently rendered frame, so the difference that the additional camera movement the reprojection is trying to account for is between 1/60th and 1/120th of a second. Here you would be trying to compensate for 30+ms, so the result is going to be a lot lower in quality.

Also for a moving scene, you'd need to send a depth or position buffer and a velocity buffer for each frame, meaning you'd need something like twice the bandwidth for your video. Probably more, since I can't imagine how you would compress that information: any artifacts are going to give weird results in the reprojected image.

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