Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by _nedR » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

romwell wrote: post #156

Xixi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I have no idea how reliable it is This is not reliable at all. You can really feel 100ms latency. That's why in the world of pro music, barely anything above 10ms keypress-to-sound latency is deemed acceptable. Quake III will make all these streamed games feel slow .

Console gamers have long been conditioned to accept high input lag with laggy televisions, controllers and low-dexterity games and game mechanics.

Quake III makes all modern games feel slow. But that hasn't had the slightest effect on the typical gamers mindset. If only certain type of games work with cloud gaming then AAA publishers will only make those type of games. Exactly like the case with EA and microtransactions.

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

#232

Post by ManuelKiessling » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:50 AM UTC

mrmuagi wrote: post #139

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mind sharing what the solution you referenced? From a hard theory network perspective, having higher bandwidth, lower latency, lower error rate on transmission path combined with closer geographical proximity to servers seem to help mitigate increases in latency. However, if you argue the problem is solved by your empirical evidence gained by playing Witcher 3 of all games, I disagree with your point. Play a real tim…

I had rolled my own setup with a GPU-powered AWS EC2 instance, streaming the video signal via NVENC etc.

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

#233

Post by _nedR » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:52 AM UTC

This marks the beginning of the end of golden age of gaming.

Two historic foes setting aside their differences to target their common enemy - The gamer.

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

#234

Post by hacker_9 » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:57 AM UTC

I for one hope it works out, I like the idea of instantly loading any game I feel like playing for an hour. So what if I don't own it, it's a game. I don't any of the movies I watch on TV either.

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

#235

Post by LaserToy » Fri, May 17, 2019, 7:45 AM UTC

Pricing is a key. As far as I know, Game streaming currently doesn't have viable business model.

PlayStation Now (former Gaikai) was a startup that wanted to sell game ads (try before buy), and after expanding into actual game streaming struggled to make money and attract users. It is just too expensive.

To me, the biggest difference bt movie streaming and game streaming is that gamess are much more resource hungry. Video can be watched on cheap 30 bucks usb stick, for gaming you need 400$ console.

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

#236

Post by meheleventyone » Fri, May 17, 2019, 7:56 AM UTC

_x5tx wrote: post #217

manfredo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn’t Google say something about using AI for this kind of game state prediction at Stadia presentation?

Doing anything where mispredictions result in a few frames of doing the wrong thing escape to the user is going to make games feel really inconsistent. If the game is running at 60fps and you have a system that can predict with 99% accuracy (which seems wildly optimistic) you’re still going to have mispredictions at a pretty high rate.

Not to mention that the game will have to be written especially to allow for the simulation to be rolled back and forth. For example a misprediction triggers a sword swing it turns out you didn’t make that traps the player in a state for a second. You end up giving the player a horrible experience where the game seemingly has a mind of its own. Or you can roll back and interpolate from the bad state back to a good one which would be ideal. Then the middle ground is to rollback and have a cut in the action back from misprediction. Then you realise this is happening every second or two.

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

#237

Post by hnuser123456 » Fri, May 17, 2019, 8:08 AM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #200

davemp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed up on the wiki article. The citation was a just eurogamer article that had little to with human perception of latency. It did have this nugget: “Criterion said it was aiming for 50ms latency [for burnout paradise]” which agrees with what I’ve heard making handheld electronics. The goal was always Personally I noticed a significant improvement switching to a 165hz monitor in basically every first person gam…

Hm... the topic is quite complex. Human perception is actually much slower than many people want to believe. Parts of the human vision system react no faster than around 1/25th of a second (other parts are faster - its complicated!). Hearing is similarly divided. AFAIK, auditory and visuak stimuli are processed together and merged over a rather large time window (to the point where one system can induce illusions in…

>I am not totally convinced that a high refresh rate monitor allows human vision to respond faster.

Have you ever watched a high-level FPS player? They can aim and shoot in the span of about ~1/5 of a second, occasionally even faster. That's 200ms. At 25hz, that's 40ms. A big part of it is going to be increased input processing, but a lot of it is muscle memory at that skill level. At 165hz, that's 6ms. With two equally skilled players, one will see the other up to a whole 34 ms sooner, in a process that takes about 200ms total. That's going to show up as a highly statistically significant advantage. Of course, the increased sense of connectedness to the game at higher rates is another big advantage, but these effects combine. Pit one skilled shooter against another at equal refresh rates, but with one dealing with 34ms of additional input latency, and they're not going to play as well as they should.

Competitive players explicitly disable vsync, because the higher the game framerate, the faster it processes input. Also, the sooner you see updated information on the screen mid-refresh, but that doesn't help as much as a wholly higher refresh rate.

All of this only matters if cloud gamers were playing against locally-rendered players in the same match though.

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

#238

Post by stkdump » Fri, May 17, 2019, 8:12 AM UTC

I wonder if these cloud gaming efforts will also lead to latency improvements in remote application usage such as rdp and/or vnc. We are considering using 'heavy' software dev and CAD/CAM workstations on servers in our server room or maybe even into the cloud, so that we can use lightweight machines locally.

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

#239

Post by kingosticks » Fri, May 17, 2019, 8:14 AM UTC

shpx wrote: post #196

kingosticks wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it available for Linux? I can only find info about Windows PC and Mac. One of the main appeals to me of streaming services is I don't need Windows to play the latest games, in theory at least...

It's not and probably won't be any time soon, if ever. https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/1034029/pc/geforce-...

Is it naive to think these services might ever work through the browser and be truly cross-platform? Like I'm just streaming a video almost?

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

#240

Post by yc12340 » Fri, May 17, 2019, 8:19 AM UTC

Hikikomori wrote: post #153

ClassyJacket wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yeah, speed of light is actually a lot faster than people think" This would only be relevant if you had a direct fibre link in a straight line from your house to the service. It's packet switching\routing etc. that introduce latency. And even if you DID have direct fibre, the worst case scenario for distance - server on the other side of the world, but with no other latency accounted for - is about 200ms, even half…

Most of those hops would be on ISP equipment with 10G or 100G interfaces, modern routers forward packets in tens to hundreds of microseconds and switches can do it in a few microseconds, so as long as there is a bit of distance it will account for most of the delay, and SOL is 2/3 of its speed I'm vacuum. Switches can even sends out packets on a port before it has been fully received on the incoming port

> modern routers forward packets in tens to hundreds of microseconds

Only when network is underutilized, and there is no throttling/bufferbloat.