I think a number of you would find this article at least somewhat interesting. I'm sure some of you have heard about OnLive by now, and any of you who play PC games should be familiar with Steam Cloud (or whatever it's called, can't remember).
Anyway, this is a look into the future of cloud based gaming.
http://arstechnica.com/business/future-of-...loud-gaming.ars
Page 1 of 1
Gaming in the Cloud
#2
Posted 10 April 2010 - 07:08 AM
Proof why Valve are just awesome. But yeah, cloud services are awesome and all but require a constant internet connection, which sometimes just cant be done. Still, I see no other downside.
#3
Posted 11 April 2010 - 05:51 PM
Cloud services don't require a constant connection, though you do obviously need to be connected to the internet to use them. Take google docs, for example. And really, pretty much all email is done through the cloud too.
#4
Posted 13 April 2010 - 01:13 AM
I remember posting about OnLive. It sounds incredible and it would truly revolutionize gaming in so many ways. Is it actually feasible though? You would need incredibly powerful and large servers to handle thousands accessing high-definition Crysis 2, for example, which sounds nigh impossible.
#5
Posted 13 April 2010 - 02:00 AM
It's not impossible, just very, very expensive. I imagine that they'd charge you more for higher resolutions though. And I'm sure they have some way of running multiple games on a single GPU/system. Though I suppose they could do that with VM's, they'd have to be incredibly thin VM's, and they'd have to actually support 3D graphics. And VMWare only recently added that last feature to their products, so I dunno.
The biggest hurdle in trying to do something like that, though, isn't the cost of the hardware or how powerful it would need to be. It's the bandwidth required to stream the video, sound, and control input, and some way to reduce the lag without degrading quality. The greater the distance, the more difficult that task will be.
The biggest hurdle in trying to do something like that, though, isn't the cost of the hardware or how powerful it would need to be. It's the bandwidth required to stream the video, sound, and control input, and some way to reduce the lag without degrading quality. The greater the distance, the more difficult that task will be.
Page 1 of 1