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Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

investors.unity.com

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Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#41

Post by shahar2k »

charlietran wrote: post #4

(disclosure: I work on the backend at Parsec) For those who don't know either company: Unity is a popular 2D/3D commercial game engine, and Parsec is a low-latency remote desktop tool that initially focused on gaming, but pivoted to an enterprise product for remote creative teams during the pandemic.

I use parsec at home to run a gaming machine in a gaming room... and use the same machine as an art creation machine in another room, parsec is one of the few solutions that plays well with pressure and stylus, custom resolutions and even 120 hz (surprisingly useful when trying to have responsive UI in art apps)

any of that going to change?

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#42

Post by easton »

VortexDream wrote: post #14

I hope this doesn't mean the end of Parsec as a standalone service. There's nothing out there that comes close to Parsec's performance and it'd be a huge loss.

Parsec's latency is great, but it's not great for text (like to the point I can barely read text in VSCode). Are my settings off, or is this an acceptable tradeoff for the heavy graphics workloads they are targeting?

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#43

Post by girvo »

charlietran wrote: post #4

(disclosure: I work on the backend at Parsec) For those who don't know either company: Unity is a popular 2D/3D commercial game engine, and Parsec is a low-latency remote desktop tool that initially focused on gaming, but pivoted to an enterprise product for remote creative teams during the pandemic.

As someone who used Parsec for ages to game at 1440p 60hz via AWS on my old-as-sin MacBook: thank you for the amazing work you and your team mates did, and I'm stoked to see the company have such success!

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#44

Post by [deleted] »

astlouis44 wrote: post #24

Don't know why Unity is pursuing cloud, you're still going to need a good network speed. They'd be better served investing further in WebGL support, specifically in reducing the file binary size so we can have lightning fast load times for console-quality games running at near native performance in the browser. Shameless plug, my startup is working on exactly this at the moment but for Unreal Engine 4, but we have pl…

[deleted]

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#45

Post by girvo »

CryptoBanker wrote: post #20
chewmieser wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's Game Pass xcloud service for iOS leverages Rainway, a competitor to Parsec. As a user of both I can say that Parsec outperforms Rainway although Rainway works in the browser. Seems like Unity is looking to build a similar stack with Parsec at the helm, but I guess we'll see...

Parsec also works in a browser and quite well I might add. I get very similar performance between their web and desktop clients

I've found the Desktop client lower latency and more stable, but not by a huge amount

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#46

Post by xnyan »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #30
fxtentacle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on something similar, which will be called CloudGamepad. The trick to getting good quality and low latency is forward error correction and UDP. UDP will arrive quickly but is lossy. And the FEC allows you to recover a certain percentage of lost packages.

Does it work similar to rollback netcode in fighting games? Where the game tries to predict what the other player is going to do by looking at what they’ve done in previous frames, and if there’s lag or dropped packets and a destiny happens it rolls back the game state and replays it correctly?

Not exactly, FEC basically means you add in redundant data to your transmission so that if some of the data is lost, you can “rebuild” the missing data from the packets that did arrive. The cost of this is extra bandwidth spent on the redundancy, as well as a little latency.

Rollback is as you say, if the game loses connection with your opponent, rollback 1) uses your opponent’s past actions to predict what they will do next and then presents that to you as if they did it then 2) when the connection is restored, reconcile (if necessary) the difference between what your opponent actually did with what it predicted, rolling back if needed.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#47

Post by Operyl »

wyldfire wrote: post #39
charlietran wrote: post #4

(disclosure: I work on the backend at Parsec) For those who don't know either company: Unity is a popular 2D/3D commercial game engine, and Parsec is a low-latency remote desktop tool that initially focused on gaming, but pivoted to an enterprise product for remote creative teams during the pandemic.

I can't quite tell from the webpage. "Parsec for Teams": is that an AR-meeting-room-with-avatars kinda thing? Or is there some kind of photogrammetry? Oh -- I see, it's for creative teams to share their design work? sketches, models, etc?

It’s the remote control product, with some extra features and permissions for teams (useful for having a cluster of devices and assigning them out to remote workers who need specific hardware etc).

https://parsec.app/teams/

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#48

Post by x0x0 »

shahar2k wrote: post #41
charlietran wrote: post #4

(disclosure: I work on the backend at Parsec) For those who don't know either company: Unity is a popular 2D/3D commercial game engine, and Parsec is a low-latency remote desktop tool that initially focused on gaming, but pivoted to an enterprise product for remote creative teams during the pandemic.

I use parsec at home to run a gaming machine in a gaming room... and use the same machine as an art creation machine in another room, parsec is one of the few solutions that plays well with pressure and stylus, custom resolutions and even 120 hz (surprisingly useful when trying to have responsive UI in art apps) any of that going to change?

... trying to get a random backend engineer to publicly share and comment on company policy during an acquisition. An acquisition into a public company no less.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#49

Post by [deleted] »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #30
fxtentacle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on something similar, which will be called CloudGamepad. The trick to getting good quality and low latency is forward error correction and UDP. UDP will arrive quickly but is lossy. And the FEC allows you to recover a certain percentage of lost packages.

Does it work similar to rollback netcode in fighting games? Where the game tries to predict what the other player is going to do by looking at what they’ve done in previous frames, and if there’s lag or dropped packets and a destiny happens it rolls back the game state and replays it correctly?

[deleted]

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#50

Post by MarioMan »

easton wrote: post #42
VortexDream wrote: post #14

I hope this doesn't mean the end of Parsec as a standalone service. There's nothing out there that comes close to Parsec's performance and it'd be a huge loss.

Parsec's latency is great, but it's not great for text (like to the point I can barely read text in VSCode). Are my settings off, or is this an acceptable tradeoff for the heavy graphics workloads they are targeting?

Constant FPS mode will make a big difference here.

More details: https://support.parsec.app/hc/en-us/articles/360045797752-Re...

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