GDC: Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work

By Richard Leadbetter Published 26 March, 2009

Cloud computing or cloud cuckoo land?

I love industry-shaking announcements. I love new, game-changing hardware, and I'm absolutely, almost literally exploding with excitement about the new OnLive gaming concept. I love that front-end, and I love the way OnLive uses video because video is what my company, Digital Foundry, specialises in, and what I spend a lot of my time experimenting with. I want this to be brilliant so much that it's almost painful.

The concept is remarkably simple. The actual hardware generating the visuals and running the gameplay isn't owned by you. Instead it's held somewhere else in the world. That hardware then encodes its visual output and beams it to you over the internet. The player sitting at home simply uses an existing PC or Mac (or 'micro-console') to take the video stream over IP, beaming back control inputs to the server. The advantages are very straightforward - you don't need to upgrade your hardware, the people running the servers do. And that hardware can be state-of-the-art PC kit way in advance of what Xbox 360 or PS3 are capable of, and of course it's upgradable. You'll never need to buy a game again; you'll just rent time on the ones you want to play. You'll doubtless save money and the publishers will make more of it. Piracy will be impossible.

There's only one slight problem. Realistically, there is no way it can work to the extent suggested, and no way it can provide a gaming experience as good as the one you already have without inherent compromises. It's a great idea, and an intriguing demo that is amazing in that it actually works at all. However, away from the concept and the tech demos running in controlled conditions, OnLive raises so many technical questions and seemingly overcomes so many impossible challenges that it can't possibly work.

In essence, we're looking at several very specific challenges for OnLive to overcome - challenges that are either massive in scope, or technologically beyond the very best minds of their respective fields. For this to work, we're talking about a generational leap in not one, but several fields of technology.

The Hardware Question

'GDC: Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work' Screenshot 1

To give the kind of performance OnLive is promising (720p at 60 frames-per-second) realistically its datacenters are going to require the processing equivalent of a high-end dual core PC running a very fast GPU - a 9800GT minimum, and maybe something a bit meatier depending on whether the 60fps gameplay claim works out, and which games will actually be running. That's for every single connection OnLive is going to be handling.

So, let's say that Grand Theft Auto V is released via OnLive, and (conservatively) one million people want to play it at the same time. We can talk about Tesla GPUs, server clusters, the whole nine yards, but the bottom line is that the computing and rendering power we're talking about is mammoth to a degree never seen before in the games business, perhaps anywhere. There may be a way how this can be handled (more on that later), but even having capacity for 'just' 5,000 clients running at the same time is a monumental effort and expense. It would be the equivalent of us running a single Eurogamer server for every reader who connects to the site at the same time. The expense involved is staggering (not to mention the heat all this hardware would generate - think of the children!).

The Video Encoding Conundrum

Not only will these datacenters be handling the gameplay, they will also be encoding the video output of the machines in real time and piping it down over IP to you at 1.5MBps (for SD) and 5MBps (for HD). OnLive says you will be getting 60fps gameplay. First of all, bear in mind that YouTube's encoding farms take a long, long time to produce their current, offline 2MBps 30fps HD video. OnLive is going to be doing it all in real-time via a PC plug-in card, at 5MBps, and with surround sound too.

It sounds brilliant, but there's one rather annoying fact to consider: the nature of video compression is such that the longer the CPU has to encode the video, the better the job it will do. Conversely, it's a matter of fact that the lower the latency, the less efficient it can be.

More than that, OnLive overlord Steve Perlmen has said that the latency introduced by the encoder is 1ms. Think about that; he's saying that the OnLive encoder runs at 1000fps. It's one of the most astonishing claims I've ever heard. It's like Ford saying that the new Fiesta's cruising speed is in excess of the speed of sound. To give some idea of the kind of leap OnLive reckons it is delivering, I consulted one of the world's leading specialists in high-end video encoding, and his response to OnLive's claims included such gems as "Bulls***" and "Hahahahaha!" along with a more measured, "I have the feeling that somebody is not telling the entire story here." This is a man whose know-how has helped YouTube make the jump to HD, and whose software is used in video compression applications around the world.

He recommended a series of settings and tweaks that would allow for h264 processing at the kind of latencies OnLive has to work with, so here's a comparison video: source on the left, 5MBps 60fps encode on the right. As is usual with my videos, the action is slowed down to eliminate macro-blocking on playback as much as possible. Burnout Paradise is the chosen game, which features heavily on OnLive's front-end demo, and is also a good test for arcade-style video.

60FPS video comparison

It's not particularly pretty, but with the constrictions OnLive has to live with, this is the sort of performance the current market leader in compression has to offer. The bottom line here is that OnLive's 'interactive video compression algorithm' must be so utterly amazing, and orders of magnitude better than anything ever made, that you wonder why the company is bothering with videogames at all when the potential applications are so much more staggering and immense.

The Insurmountable Challenge: Latency

OnLive says that it has conducted years of 'psychophysical' research to lessen the effects of internet latency. That's the key issue here, and I can't see how OnLive can fudge its way around this one. In reality, it's going to need sub-150 millisecond latency from its servers at least, and a hell of a QoS (quality of service) to guarantee that this will in any way approximate the experience you currently have at home. The latency factor will probably need to be somewhat lower than that to factor in the video encoding server-side, and decoding client-side, which by any measurable standard right now is going to be impactful.

How Did They Do That?

So, bearing in mind that OnLive is demonstrating at GDC, how is it achieving the results? It's difficult to say, but this is how I would do it. Firstly, I'd have a bank of whopper PCs behind the scenes running the games at 720p60. Each of them would be connected to a hardware h264 encoder which would in turn be connected via gigabit LAN to the clients. If the server-side PCs aren't on site, I'd have them at a very close-by datacenter. At the GDC demo, OnLive bosses Mike McGarvey and Steve Perlmen said that the company's servers were hosted 50 miles away. If this was a true test conducted over the internet, I'm betting that there was a whopping internet connection being used with oodles of bandwidth, even if only 5MBps of it was utilised.

Perhaps this suggests an element of smoke and mirrors, but if I were OnLive and about to give a demonstration of this importance, I'd definitely be looking to control as many of the conditions as possible. The main principles are being showcased, but in a best-case scenario. The thing is, actual performance has to live up to this demo and that's where things get tricky.

Factor in thousands more users, orders of magnitude more traffic at the datacenters, and all the vagaries and unreliability of the average internet connection and actual real-life performance must surely be in question. Much as we all want this to be brilliant, the fact of the matter is that even a Skype call over the internet is prone to failing badly at any given point, so the chances are that the far more ambitious OnLive is going to have its fair share of very tangible issues. Picture quality will be immensely variable and lag will remain an issue - but for the less discerning gamer, maybe - just maybe - it will work well enough.

How Could They Make It Work?

So, could this system actually live up to the claims being made for it? What sort of conditions are required to ensure optimal performance? Firstly, I don't think that the video encoding issues will be overcome and I don't buy into this 'interactive video algorithm' geek-speak. On high-action scenes, you're going to be seeing a lot of macroblocking; it's basically inevitable. I can't imagine Burnout ever being streamed in HD to acceptable standards at 60fps without at least two to three times the amount of bandwidth OnLive uses.

I can see 30fps video being the standard here rather than the mooted 60fps. It'll make the video quality look massively superior, and reduce the load on the client decoding it, plus it will help manage latency if the amount of frames being processed is halved. Plus of course there's the fact that 90-95 per cent of console games run at 30fps anyway. It's effectively the standard and it will lower the CPU/GPU requirements of the PCs server-side. But even then, don't think that this will result in lossless HDMI-quality video - far from it. Any game with fast-moving, colourful video is going to look very rough.

That said, the 1.5MBps standard-def option is intriguing and has a much better chance of working out. Here's the same h264 encoding profile I used earlier, reworked for standard definition. I can even run this in real time in the Eurogamer Flash player, no slowdowns or zoom-ins required.

SD 30FPS video

Let's give OnLive the benefit of the doubt for a moment and say that its encoder is better than the very best in compression available today. If its tech is the generational leap that Perlman and company say it is, maybe it could match that quality at 60fps. But still, blown up to full-screen, it's not going to be especially impressive.

Latency. I can only see one way to make this work and guarantee the necessary quality of service, and that's to adopt an IPTV-style model. The OnLive datacenters will be licensed to ISPs, who will have them at their base of operations. Latency will be massively reduced, the connection will be far more stable, plus the datacenters with the PCs and hardware encoders can be distributed worldwide in a more effective manner. ISPs will be cut into the deal the way that retailers are now with conventional game-purchasing.

But even in this scenario, practically, I still can't see it happening. Microsoft's IPTV venture still hasn't materialised anywhere outside of the USA, so what chance does OnLive have of brokering a deal? And with ISPs complaining about the load brought about by innovations like the BBC iPlayer, why would they want to be involved with a hugely congestive venture like OnLive?

And what about computer costs? OnLive is promising state-of-the-art PCs running your game experience. The costs in creating the datacenters are going to be humungous, even factoring in the assistance of a volume manufacturer like Dell or HP. And what happens when GTA or Half-Life comes out and everyone wants to play it simultaneously? Will we have to take turns on connecting to the available servers? Computer costs, bandwidth costs, development costs, publisher royalties... it's all starting to sound hugely, and prohibitively, expensive. Not surprisingly, OnLive is keeping mum about its cost structure to the end-user.

The Alternative

'GDC: Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work' Screenshot 2

Let's say that I'm wrong. It's not completely unknown. I'm just a man (flesh and blood!) taking a pop at visionaries who reckon they have produced something truly epoch-making. But in order to make OnLive perform exactly as claimed right now, the company has to have achieved the following:

  • 1. OnLive has mastered video compression that outstrips the best that current technologies can achieve by a vast margin. In short, it has outsmarted the smartest compressionists in the world, and not only that, it's doing it in real-time.
  • 2. OnLive's unparalleled grasp of psychophysics means that it has all but eliminated the concept of IP lag during its seven years of "stealth development", succeeding where the best minds in the business have only met with limited success.
  • 3. OnLive has developed a range of affordable PC-compatible super-computers and hardware video encoders that are generations beyond anything on the market at the moment.

At some point, Occam's Razor, along with an ounce of basic common sense, has to step in and bring an end to this fantasy, no matter how much we want it to be true. OnLive boss Steve Perlmen remains adamant: "Perceptually, it appears the game is playing locally... what we have is something that is absolutely incredible. You should be sceptical. My first thinking was this shouldn't work, but it does."

So let's put it this way - I can't wait to be proved wrong.

Picture of Richard.

About Richard Leadbetter

Rich has been a games journalist since the days of 16-bit and specialises in technical analysis. Commonly known around Eurogamer as the Blacksmith of the Future.

Read more articles from Richard by visiting the Richard Leadbetter archive page.

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Comments (331) 4 months ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • MrMud #1 3 years ago

    Finally someone actually taking a skeptical outlook on this thing.

  • Eraysor #2 3 years ago

    This article makes me sad :(

    I really want this to succeed, the idea of never having to upgrade my PC again is brilliant.

  • mcmonkeyplc #3 3 years ago

    This is the fusion reactor of gaming, if this works the world of games will be at peace forever.

    It aint going to happen any time soon.

  • DaDon123456 #4 3 years ago

    Nice article.

  • trav #5 3 years ago

    It all sounded like a scam from day one. Vapour-ware that will go the same way as the Phantom did.

  • Thunderbolt #6 3 years ago

    But will someone of think about the console fanboys wars!

    How will we keep this much loved mud-slinging practice alive?

  • Darren #7 3 years ago

    This is a fascinating article and asks many of the same things I was asking yesterday in the other article's comment section. It sounds like this serive will be either very expensive to use or plagued with issues such that people will be getting an inferior experience. Are we to believe that OnLive are going to have an expensive PC set up and dedicated to each user and that they're not going to charge them for it?

    Seems to me that if you're that bothered about paying £200 for a piece of hardware to play your games on every five years and the cost of those games themselves, you'd be better off buying the hardware second-hard and renting the games as it'll probably be cheaper in the long-run and deliver a much better experience. Just don't buy a second-hand Xbox 360 though... ;)

  • asphaltcowboy #8 3 years ago

    Nice article Richard! Someone talking sense! Even outside of the normal internet connection latency that people have been talking about - what about the input lag? It'll be rubbish!

  • moggsy #9 3 years ago

    Doing a deal with the ISP's would be the way forward. Virgin are already talking about 150Mb broadband in the not too distant future.

  • polaris70 #10 3 years ago

    You haven't even gone into multiplayer games. With latency in single player games, how the hell would multiplayer games work?

  • robg #11 3 years ago

    @designerheadache

    Until the cycle turns one half-turn and we go back to thick clients.

  • JahB #12 3 years ago

    This is the guy who wrote a essay on how choppy the framerate was in the PS3 version of RE5. He also said the 360 version played better. After completing both versions I noticed no difference in frame rate and they both played the same.

    then you must be blind or playing on some 12" SD TV.

  • sh0cked #13 3 years ago

    @Moggsy

    Yeah 150mb/s probably with a 20gig usage limit and a phorm subscription built in.

  • Wastelander #14 3 years ago

    Most people were saying this in the other thread.
    I've got a way for it to work that involves strapping virgins to a centrifuge and feeding priests to Satan, but I just can't get anyone to fund it.

  • JahB #15 3 years ago

    I've got a way for it to work that involves strapping virgins to a centrifuge and feeding priests to Satan, but I just can't get anyone to fund it.

    PM me. this i'll throw my life savings at

  • Masarin #16 3 years ago

    "You'll doubtless save money and the publishers will make more of it."

    Nah, it won't let me to save money. They will keep the same prices for the games for ages while I buy used copies of games
    a few month's old. Microsofts Live is a perfect example of how the prices stay the same for years.

  • Darren #17 3 years ago

    @Coin Op - I've got both versions too and have played both *almost* to completion.

    While the PS3 version's framerate is mostly fine and, thankfully, free from the screen tearing of the 360 version, it does feel noticeably chuggier to me when turning particularly and does suffer from more slowdown at various points in the game (usually where the game tears on the 360 by the way). Try spinning on the spot and you'll see the PS3 version judders slightly whereas it doesn't on the 360. After a while this does stop being an issue admittedly but the difference is there because v-sync is used on the PS3 version.

    Richard Leadbetter showed a video from RE5 which CLEARLY shows the PS3 version's framerate was lower, that cannot be disputed, you clearly cannot sense those differences. I'm betting you never noticed the tearing in the 360 version either. ;)

  • albertofustinoni #18 3 years ago

    Regarding the article: finally, blessed sanity.
    Also, am I the only one concerned by how much worse it could potentially look compared with traditional setups? Years of technological evolution on both the software and hardware side of the industry wasted like this is simply appalling.

  • Garulon #19 3 years ago

    "This is the fusion reactor of gaming, if this works the world of games will be at peace forever."

    More like the free energy scam of gaming. I can feel the injunction heading it's way from Phantom's, erm, OnLive's legal offices now...

  • Malek86 #20 3 years ago

    This thing is getting enough attention that investors will be showering them with money.

    That's probably what they aim to do, anyway.

  • Arwin #21 3 years ago

    From what I understand the games run at 60fps on the server side, but client side you're definitely not going to get that rate for now. Initial reports suggest that you get 30fps at most. Running the game at 60fps server side helps make the response time to the user input snappy though, obviously.

    The real question for latency is whether or not you can keep it within that one frame. At 30 frames per second, that is 1/30th of a second latency you need. This amounts to 33ms. This isn't that different from getting online fighting games to work. What

    I think it will work - not equally well for all games initially and most certainly not for a big number of users all over the world, but it is something that can start small and grow from there, especially as it seems investment on the side of the publishers / developers seems fairly small. And that always helps acceptance.

    Most people I hear about this are nay-sayers. I think most sane people will start with the assumption that it can't work, and then try to find why onlive is different. ;) So far though, I'm getting the idea that it actually can work.

  • joe90 #22 3 years ago

    and this will work when cold fusion does.

    I work with cloud stuff, and this is way out the league of what its initial expectations are.

  • Darren #23 3 years ago

    @moggsy - "Doing a deal with the ISP's would be the way forward. Virgin are already talking about 150Mb broadband in the not too distant future."

    Even if latency wasn't an issue and OnLive could deliver a smooth, perfect gaming experience at 720p @ 60 fps *all the time, without fail*, there's still the question of how much it would cost because each user would require their own expensive piece of PC or console hardware to run it on. That hardware would need constant maintenance and supervision to ensure it's working optimally and that would add further to the costs, costs which would have to be passed back down to the user on top of the cost of buying or renting the game itself. It doesn't sound like it will be cheap to me.

  • Nithron #24 3 years ago

    Aside from technical feasability... 720p is hardly high performance for a PC game. In fact, that's pretty low resolution.

  • Britesparc Verified Creative, ITV #25 3 years ago

    That's an excellent article, probing the questions that have been going through my head since I first read about OnLive and thought "surely that's impossible".

    And I hope it is impossible - I like to own games, in their boxes, on my shelf, thank you very much.

  • sneetch #26 3 years ago

    @robg
    Until the cycle turns one half-turn and we go back to thick clients.

    Yep, it does tend to see-saw all the time. I remember the hubbub when Sun announced that we'd all be using thin clients a long time ago and yet, here I sit waiting for my ant build to finish on my dell desktop. This is nothing new, they've just given an old concept a new name and trotted it out. Again.

    But it's still infeasible.

    I'm, personally, happier with my thick clients: if my net connection fails I can (for example) play Kings Bounty, if Live goes down I can continue to play offline.

    With this? Naw. we'll have a "Service unavailable, please try again later" sign. We'll be completely dependant on their ability to keep this up and running at usable speeds. I don't have that kind of faith.

  • kangarootoo #27 3 years ago

    Exactly. Good article.


    @Eraysor

    "I really want this to succeed, the idea of never having to upgrade my PC again is brilliant."

    And that, is why they will probably get their investment.

  • Darren #28 3 years ago

    @Nithron - 720p is lower than the 1280x1024 resolutions PC games were using over a decade ago so I agree with you, it's not something that would interest me personally even it was working perfectly. I play PC games at 1680x1050 currently and hope to be moving to 1920x1080 shortly since my current machine is capable of it.

    With the push for 1080p HDTVs, games played using this technology would end up looking awful blown up to 1920x1080 on large screen HDTVs anyway, especially the SD stuff, unless the compression algorithms are so superior that the image quality is indistinguishable from real-time 720p. I don't think that very likely in today's broadband infrastructure, certainly not in the UK.

    Maybe in 10 years time when everyone has unlimited 250 Mbps connections and each piece of hardware is so advanced that it can handle parallel processing for a hundred users at a time with ease and compress 1080p video in less than 1ms and deliver it to people's home with no input lag then this technology could work for *all* games. As it is I think it'll have a lot of problems to overcome first and it'll be very expensive to use, which kind of counters the reasons for using it in the first place.

  • Malek86 #29 3 years ago

    "Most people I hear about this are nay-sayers. I think most sane people will start with the assumption that it can't work, and then try to find why onlive is different. ;) So far though, I'm getting the idea that it actually can work."

    Of course it can actually work. The technology is there. But, for it to work at the quality they are talking about and without huge connection-related problems? That's going to be very difficult.

    Still, when the serice launches, we can expect some sort of free trial, right? In that case, I want to be there when everyone will be playing it at the same time. Want to see what happens.

  • Snooz #30 3 years ago

    this and the cold fusion "news" at the same day, why do we care about the financial crisis? Oh did you guys also read about the titaniumoxied (something) nanotubes that convert co2 to methane by sunlight? I'm going to quit working around late 2010 and move in at the Venus project. You just gotta keep being optimistic!

  • butler` #31 3 years ago

    I doubt this will work any time soon, and it's less to do with the rich media side of things and more to do with the networking.

    Even if it does, we wouldn't see it in the UK till at least 2050 at the rate BT are working. 21CN anyone?

  • Fab4 #32 3 years ago

    "Occam's razor"...ffs, Jodie Foster has a lot to answer for.

  • speedjack #33 3 years ago

    I'm guessing they launch with Duke Nukem Forever as their first game... (if you know what I mean).

  • _LarZen_ #34 3 years ago

    Strange how many who becomes experts on the technologi behind OnLive....I think people should just wait and see how it turns out..they have used 7 years to make this work.

    What have you done lately?

  • Eighthours #35 3 years ago

    The speed of light kills this, latency-wise. That's the indisputable fact here.

  • butler` #36 3 years ago

    And more than anything I just can't see the value in it. If you think how well PC gaming (particularly online) works via current methods, neglidgable lag ~15/10ms and 100+ fps with everything client side on very moderately priced machines/connections.

    Of course you could argue that they aren't targetting the core market etc, but then who are they really going to impress and intice here? I really can't see it.

  • rotmm #37 3 years ago

    @Coin-Op,

    I agree with you. With Leadbetter pointing out that the framerate is more inconsistent, and with more dips, in the PS3 version of RE5, it means that nothing else he writes can ever be trusted again.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 11:51

  • udat #38 3 years ago

    The real-time video encoding side is not that unrealistic. I've worked with live HD h.264 encoders and the latency (time to encode) was in the ~3ms range (Tandberg and Harmonic encoders) and at the last trade show I visited there were a lot of ~1ms encoders on show.

    The input latency is the thing that kills this idea stone dead. Then the scalability issue comes along and pisses on its corpse.

    This isn't a new idea either. I have also worked with a similar technology (G-Cluster) numerous times over the last decade. Even in a LAN environment (such as a hotel) the G-Cluster tech is not particularly suited to "twitch" games. I will admit that their most recent solutions are at least playable though, but that is in perfect conditions.

  • The_Programmer #39 3 years ago

    I can't see this working on Virgin. Most of us probably have the 10MB connection & in the evening if you dowload more than about 800MB they'll cut your bandwidth for you. So unless you want to play late at night or very early in the morning then there's no point.

  • polaris70 #40 3 years ago

    @Eighthours;

    1/ Maybe the guys behind this have found a parrallel dimension to send the information through, therefore, bypassing the speed of light and sending information in an instant.
    2/ Or, multiplayer games will end up being 'spot the character model' as your character teleports around the map along with every other players character model in Modern Warfare 2.
    So, which one of the above is more realistic ;)

  • Baranga #41 3 years ago

    Isn't it amazing how random nay-sayers somehow know better than those that worked 7 years to create OnLive?
    Someone should hire these guys.

  • wittynic #42 3 years ago

    Even if this did work, wouldnt it just become another gaming format? I cant see Sony or MS letting their exclusives be played over OnLive. And seeing as MS has a hand in most Console->PC conversions, how would it all add up?

  • trousers #43 3 years ago

    "Isn't it amazing how random nay-sayers somehow know better than those that worked 7 years to create OnLive?
    Someone should hire these guys."

    Say would you like to buy this amazing Phantom console? Some clever people worked on it for years so it must be great. Right?

  • Wastelander #44 3 years ago

    Hi Baranga, I'm selling these fine leather jackets...

  • Byzanite #45 3 years ago

    Maybe these people are aliens bringing us alien technology and they are able to brainwash Telecoms companies, to fund Fibre to every household; brainwash game developers and publishers, for buying into such a scheme which could potentially ruin them through lack of game sales; develop technologies that are far in advance of anything else that is being developed; and get us to pay 000s for it...

    No deal lol

  • Baranga #46 3 years ago

    Phantom's devs were a bunch of idiots that only lost money and pushed back all the release dates.
    OnLive has a scheduled beta already, that's a lot more than Phantom accomplished.

  • Eighthours #47 3 years ago

    Isn't it amazing how random nay-sayers somehow know better than those that worked 7 years to create OnLive?
    Someone should hire these guys.

    Well, some of those "random naysayers" on this and other forums happen to be developers. And you don't have to be a developer to know that the speed of light kills this latency-wise, as it's really really obvious, frankly.

  • VicViper #48 3 years ago

    @polaris70

    Well thats easy, all we need to do is use either send the information through black/wormholes or use quantum resonance to vibrate paired atoms across space there by transmitting the data instantaneouly. Of course we just need to get quantum level computing going but thats just a detail we can work out later.

    On a serious note I was calling Bull on this when I heard it, current online gaming has trouble enough handling gaming when both users already have the game and system in thier homes as it is, and can you imagine trying to play a fighing game across this? they only got it working acceptably recently.

  • Tomo #49 3 years ago

    Seriously good article.

    Those clips make me want to play Burnout. It actually looks quite good... but sadly my Xbox won't load the disc :/

  • Dizzy #50 3 years ago

    Also do not forget that they basically will have to build datacenters with a few million high end PCs running stuff like Crysis if they want to get rid of consoles all together. Even if they do that.... games still need to be started and will need to be mirrored on some kind of NAS that will load them. This will also take time.

    Since google can barely get YouTube to work smooth it really seems more like a venture capital trap.

    Another point is that a lot of good video compression treats the whole video as a stream... while OnLive has to compress individual frames since it is realtime (losing some of the advanced features of video compression).

    It is an interesting idea... maybe in 10 years.

    "Isn't it amazing how random nay-sayers somehow know better than those that worked 7 years to create OnLive? "

    A lot of us here have 10-20 years of professional software experiences behind us.... we know more or less that "state of the art" in many fields. People have been working on different facets of the technologies presented my OnLive and we are very skeptical since it goes beyond was is available right now by a wide margin. That rarely happens in computer land... is usually is a slow incremental process.
    Edited by 3 at 26/03/09 @ 12:22

  • JahB #51 3 years ago

    "I really want this to succeed, the idea of never having to upgrade my PC again is brilliant."

    And that, is why they will probably get their investment.

    that's where you're wrong. if this really worked (which would be awesome) you'd still have the problem that it would kill an entire industry; and this industry has unsaid amounts of money to burn, so in all probability they'd buy onlive and close it down. much like oil-companies do with designs for cars that run on green energy.

  • the_mtfr #52 3 years ago

    That's a very good article.

    I don't have any propensity toward this "cloud" computing, I like the sense of property, control over my own property, and knowing exactly how and why a thing works whatever it may be. I don't get why there's billions of billions poured into turning everything into something centralized and behind-curtains if everything is working fine now. Of course it makes sense in the scenario of a conspiracy theory would put us in a few years later. Are today's computers too slow to do word processing that we need to go back to the terminals concept for that? F***

  • Fab4 #53 3 years ago

    Or tinfoil producers do with the makers of paper hats, which work just as well.

  • ChrisOTR #54 3 years ago

    Great article, sums things up nicely.

  • dog2_99 #55 3 years ago

    I think this could potentially be exactly what I am looking for should it work as advertised. I have all three consoles and Mac. There are a number of PC games that interest me but I don’t have the time; money or know-how to have a PC capable to playing them; plus I have a miss trust of PCs (bad history…hence the Mac)

    I love the idea of merely plugging the mini console to my 50” Plasma and enjoying the occasional bout of Crysis or a good RTS or even taking around my parents place when they insist I visit them. My internet connection ranges from 11-14mb so would like to think this should at least tick that box.

    Whilst the presence of large publishers is no sure sign of success, surely these companies would have insisted on a real-time demo before they gave the ok? Granted the potential new revenue streams might have blinded their judgment

    I find myself sitting on the fence hoping that it works and does not take an age to reach the UK and sure that both Sony and Microsoft are watching carefully; both companies make loss on their hardware (at least during the initial launch years) perhaps a future version (maybe not the next generation) will be of this nature maybe PS4.5 will be merely a piece of software loaded into a SONY Blu-ray player or even OECD Bravia TV.

  • mingster #56 3 years ago

    So you need a 10mb broadband connection for SD resolution.
    And a 50mb broadband for HD!!

  • the_mtfr #57 3 years ago

    @dog2_99 "I have a miss trust of PCs (bad history…hence the Mac)"

    PC = personal computer. Mac is a personal computer (PC) too. Maybe you mean you have a mistrust of the Windows operating system?

  • PearOfAnguish #58 3 years ago

    "Also do not forget that they basically will have to build datacenters with a few million high end PCs running stuff like Crysis if they want to get rid of consoles all together. Even if they do that.... games still need to be started and will need to be mirrored on some kind of NAS that will load them. This will also take time."

    Yeah...never mind the latency (both incoming and outgoing) issues, the ridiculous hardware and power requirements and the fact that most people can't get close to the connection speeds promised to them by ISPs, this seems like an awful lot of work when you could just, y'know, buy a computer or a console and have it in your home where you don't have to worry that you can't play a game because a BT engineer has accidentally cut your phone line in half. And I do use my computer for other things apart from games.

    It's pie-in-the-sky vapourware bullshit that, even if it worked, is just not practical for most of us, the only reason it's getting so much interest from companies is that they love the idea that you don't actually own any of the games. It would eliminate second hand sales and they can fix the prices. If you like the idea of a future where all of your media is rented on a subscription basis then by all means, buy into this bollocks.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 12:27

  • brooza #59 3 years ago

    "And with ISPs complaining about the load brought about by innovations like the BBC iPlayer, why would they want to be involved with a hugely congestive venture like OnLive?"

    Revenue sharing

  • Chufty #60 3 years ago

    There's more to the latency issues here than Mr Leadbetter has touched on. Network latency is patently not the same as input latency, and it's input latency which will be this ideas biggest killer.

    150ms latency on a network game does not mean that when you move your mouse, you character moves 150ms later. It means you're playing 150ms behind the server. You can compensate for that quite easily and the game is still instantly responsive anyway.

    Some of the top end TFT monitors have an input lag of several milliseconds. This means the display is several milliseconds behind what you're doing with the controls, and it's enough to drive many people crazy when playing fast paced action games. But 150ms of input lag?

    The laws of physics simply will not allow a latency over this OnLive system of (conservatively) less than 5 or 6 milliseconds - the speed of light is finite, after all. Add all the rest of the encoding and other challenges on top of that and you're looking at some massive latency figures that far exceed the wost input-lagging PC monitors.

    The only way this system can be as responsive as a PC is with time-travel, and if they've cracked that chestnut I doubt their first thought was cloud videogaming.

  • the_mtfr #61 3 years ago

    @Baranga "Isn't it amazing how random nay-sayers somehow know better than those that worked 7 years to create OnLive? Someone should hire these guys."

    OnLive didn't give you technical details. The article writer filled 2 pages with technical details covering everything. I fell pity for you since being given these 2 simple facts, you can call the critics "random". I can't believe people like you even exist but I guess there must be a target for bullshit marketing after all.

  • Baranga #62 3 years ago

    You are experienced with software and developement, but you still assume these guys haven't figured in 7 years what you figured in 48 hours.

    People said TV, radio, telephone and Internet won't ever pick up too.

    I'm curious how the beta will be. They wouldn't start it this summer if they weren't sure it works.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 12:39

  • kangarootoo #63 3 years ago

    @JahB

    Well I'm not sure who the "they" are that you are talking about. The whole indsutry isn't likely to club together to buy anything anytime soon.

    And IF it works is exactly the point. I'm not convinced.

  • Amazing Bryan #64 3 years ago

    Interesting. My first reaction when hearing about though, was to check to see if it was April 1st or not...

  • dog2_99 #65 3 years ago

    @dog2_99 "I have a miss trust of PCs (bad history…hence the Mac)"

    PC = personal computer. Mac is a personal computer (PC) too. Maybe you mean you have a mistrust of the Windows operating system?

    Correct sorry! :(

    Would like to add great article!

  • StooMonster #66 3 years ago

    dog2_99: plug in an external drive, go to your Utilities folder and run BootCamp, install Windows on your external drive, you can now play PC games on your Mac hardware.

    "I really want this to succeed, the idea of never having to upgrade my PC again is brilliant."

    Yeah, (thinking of suitable metaphor of service providers) like I've never upgraded my Sky set-top-box -- analogue, digital, Sky+, Sky HD, Sky 3D (to come) -- doh! Alright then, like I've never upgraded my cable modem -- doh! Or my mobile -- doh!

    You'll always have to upgrade, what if they introduced a 1080p version (rather than 720p) that would mean buying a new box -- doh!

  • udat #67 3 years ago

    > People said TV, radio, telephone and Internet won't ever pick up too.

    Do any of them violate the physical constants of our universe? ;)

    As I said before, I've been working (on and off) with technology that does exactly this for 9 years, and while it works fine in a completely controlled environment over short hauls (so a LAN) there are real problems with latency on a WAN and then scalability comes into it and pisses on your chips.

    If they *have* solved these issues, why are they bothering with such a niche market instead of redefining the nature of computing?

  • Dizzy #68 3 years ago

    >People said TV, radio, telephone and Internet won't ever pick up too.

    No they didn't.

    You are just pulling random bullshit out of your ass now.

  • IneptPercy #69 3 years ago

    maybe they could stream it to a gizmondo?

  • dadrester #70 3 years ago

    what happens if the game crashes?! how do you reboot? do on live plan on letting players directly reboot their hardware remotely?!

  • CatWeazle #71 3 years ago

    Yeah, a good article. However - Richard makes one error in his argument..

    "On high-action scenes, you're going to be seeing a lot of macroblocking; it's basically inevitable."

    If you watch the OnLive guy's presentation he is at pains to point out that their compression system is not stream-based, but is frame-by-frame. Each frame is compressed in isolation. In otherwords the speed and movement of a game will have no effect at all upon the quality of the video.

    Anyway.. I for one really hope that this does work, but am pretty sceptical too.

  • dog2_99 #72 3 years ago

    @ StooMonster - yeah i have both Vista and XP on bootcamp (cant get totally away hehe)...its more Apple really is no gaming machine :( well at least my Imac and old-ish Macbookpro aren't.

    I think your upgrade point is correct it will not remove such requirements but it might make the experience more user friendly. When I upgraded from Sky+ to Sky HD aside from coughing up too much money I didn’t have to sorry about conflicts; firmware updates or increasing my power management? I understand that this removes perhaps the thrill of the Windows Gamer but for a guy brought up on consoles the thought is prohibitive.

  • JohnnyWashnGo #73 3 years ago

    Its a trap... for VC money ;)

    Actually when I first heard about it, I called bullshit. Their PR sounds like the crap that Sun Microsystems used to come out with in the 90s, the old 'The network is the computer' nonsense.

    I can't imagine any serious gamer would put up with the network latency that will be present on such a system. Even if they did, they would surely have an issue with a system that only lets you play your games when the datacenter hosting them is up. What happnens when you want to play at 3 in the morning and their, no doubt, huge datacenter is offline and their call centres are closed? Do customers have any quality of service guaranteed or are we once again just revenue streams to be exploited?

    It will amount to nothing and many people will invest and lose.

  • JonesW #74 3 years ago

    Even if they get it to work to an acceptable standard, what happens to games which are considered 'old' or 'out of favour', will these games get the same support and distribution their end to enable to best possible experience at home just because people arent playing them any more?

    Say if i wanted to play halo3 again, in a couple of years time, would it still be accessable, or would I have to submit a request for them to load it on their servers or what?

    I just cant get round the logistics of it would all work, but then i guess thats why i didnt come up with it! i cant comprehend, that they're gonna support and distribute every game they release for as long as someone wants to play it.

    Sorry, rambling, but it does say speak your brain.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 12:53

  • collateral89 #75 3 years ago

    Hmmm shud i hav red sauce or brown sauce on my sandwich

  • StooMonster #76 3 years ago

    RE: Input Latency

    In the world of high end AV are Video Processors (VPs), products designed to improve video reproduction for use in home theatre their technologies get spun off into 'upscaling' optical disc players and into modern displays; these VP are made by the likes of DVDO, Lumagen, Crystalio, Calibre and others.

    A couple of years ago VPs had to introduce 'game modes' for their processing, which essentially pass-through the signal from games consoles. Why? Because customers complained that when games consoles were connected to these VPs the few milliseconds of input latency lag they created (i.e. you moved your control, then thing on screen moved) by their video processing made games unplayable, particularly where accuracy is need (e.g. Mario or sports games).

    This system would have latency upstream and downstream; so based on what happened with localised hardware latency I'm a skeptical of games playing right when network latency is considered.

  • ps3owner #77 3 years ago

    Well, I am sure that they could play it at CERN on their Grid network. they should give it a go, and if it works, they should invest all of the goverment stimulus packages into upgrading the current Interenet infrastructure to a high end fibre network, all bells and whistles included! that would surely be a good investment.

  • tonynibbles #78 3 years ago

    10 years ago, the idea of YouTube would have been pretty insane.

    What?! You can upload video and a server will process it in to streamable video automatically, for MILLIONS of users worldwise at the SAME TIME?!! For FREE!?!!?

    Madness! You could never afford the amount of server side processing and storage! Impossible!

    ...It's inevitable.

  • udat #79 3 years ago

    "If you watch the OnLive guy's presentation he is at pains to point out that their compression system is not stream-based, but is frame-by-frame. Each frame is compressed in isolation. In otherwords the speed and movement of a game will have no effect at all upon the quality of the video. "

    That makes the compression seriously fucking innefficient. That's basically a motion jpeg, which is nothing like as good as h.264 compression. If every frame is an "I Frame" then the bandwidth required will go through the roof... or the quality will go through the floor.

  • Azazel #80 3 years ago

    I can't even get an acceptable Quakeworld ping on Virgin Fecking Media. Colour me extremely sceptical.

    I've got a way for it to work that involves strapping virgins to a centrifuge and feeding priests to Satan, but I just can't get anyone to fund it.

    We should talk...

  • PearOfAnguish #81 3 years ago

    "What?! You can upload video and a server will process it in to streamable video automatically, for MILLIONS of users worldwise at the SAME TIME?!! For FREE!?!!?"

    Big difference between streaming a video with a maximum 10 minute length and streaming a game. The YouTube servers only have to encode a video once.

  • MrScruffier #82 3 years ago

    I've always wondered with this stuff if it's going to mean a move away from having one machine running each instance of the game, which ever end of the network it's on - it'll be interesting if 5 or 10 years in the future we're all learning more parallel processing tricks and running many instances of our games on very large computers with lots of data sharing, which might shake things up quite a lot for the development side

  • Darren #83 3 years ago

    @tonynibbles - "10 years ago, the idea of YouTube would have been pretty insane.

    What?! You can upload video and a server will process it in to streamable video automatically, for MILLIONS of users worldwise at the SAME TIME?!! For FREE!?!!?

    Madness! You could never afford the amount of server side processing and storage! Impossible!"

    YouTube has pretty lousy video quality though due to horrid compression. Even the HD stuff looks poor IMO. That's not real-time video either unlike the system that OnLive are offering. It's not hard to imagine that in the real-world it'll be absolutely terrible with the streaming ruined by lag and poor video quality. I mean YouTube is hardly perfect even with SD stuff!!!

  • #84 3 years ago

    Streaming games? Isnt there an app for the ps3 ( linux ) that does this? Streams games to the ps3 to your telly. Infact Ive seen Eve Online run this way and it works okay.

  • Baranga #85 3 years ago

    >People said TV, radio, telephone and Internet won't ever pick up too.

    No they didn't.

    You are just pulling random bullshit out of your ass now.

    Yes, they actually did. You should read A Social History of the Media: From Guttenberg to the Internet, among others.

    Let's just wait three-four months 'till the beta, OK? Then we'll see who was right. OnLive's representatives have enough time to update and tweak the service, their first patents expire in 2020.
    Seems to me most people here think it's an April's Fools joke. But who in their right mind would embark on such an adventure and reveal it if they wouldn't be sure it works? Even the article we're posting under provides solutions to make it work. You really think the armies of suits and consultants of all those companies who already signed up are oblivious to all the theoretical problems?

    Oh-boo-hoo, their encoding is better than anyone else's. Seriously, is that a reason to doubt the service? If Sony came up with such a technology, would people still be bitching?

  • Unclebenny #86 3 years ago

    Am I really the only person who read this article and didnt understand the vast majority of it? I cant be surely? If so it doesn't make me feel good at the end of the day.

    Come on someone join me in ignorance.

  • StooMonster #87 3 years ago

    dog2_99: I play old PC games on my MCP. :)

    When I upgraded from Sky+ to Sky HD aside from coughing up too much money I didn’t have to sorry about conflicts; firmware updates

    First models of Sky HD had HDMI conflicts that bricked HDMI functionality of certain Pioneer plasmas.

    Firmware updates, delivered over the air, to Sky HD have caused recording problems and all sorts of shenanigans. I also note that their big planned major NXE type update to the GUI has been pulled (was due to launch last September); I guess that is due to bugs or hardware compatibilities (there were a lot of models of Sky Digital boxes from many manufacturers).

  • the_mtfr #88 3 years ago

    @tonynibbles, sure it's inevitable. The argument is that the next tech generation needed to bring this to life, ain't gonna happen 'till summer.

  • Matchstick #89 3 years ago

    The tech can move along all it likes but if the problem you're running into is with one of the laws of physics it's not going to do you much good.

    What's the betting that if this doesn't work someone will be back with something very similar that uses Quantum computing and entangled photons in a couple of years :)
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 13:26

  • toa_boa #90 3 years ago

    Coin-Op wrote:

    "This is the guy who wrote a essay on how choppy....
    So forgive me if I don't give a fuck what Richie Rich says from now on ."

    Go ahead ignore real factual findings, while the rest of us just ignores you :-)


  • Sunyavadin #91 3 years ago

    Once 50 meg and up broadband is the standard globally, then I can imagine it being possible. But it just seems economically dubious to me that the service provider can keep the system going AND meet the demands a consumer base large enough to make it commercially viable would place upon their systems.


    ...did any of these guys by any chance work for a company by the name of "Infinium"?
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 13:30

  • dog2_99 #92 3 years ago

    @ StooMonster I agree that very few upgrades are perfectly executed but I think to the average Joe in the street this model (of upgrades mainly being performed behind the scenes by Online or whomever) is vastly more appealing than doing it themselves.

  • DDevil #93 3 years ago

    Let's put it this way, when Cloud computing comes along and companies ARE able to provide this kid of service, then the OnLive guys will be able to get lots of money via the patent.

  • Sunyavadin #94 3 years ago

    Let's put it this way, when Cloud computing comes along and companies ARE able to provide this kid of service, then the OnLive guys will be able to get lots of money via the patent.

    Wouldn't be so sure, at least four different companies have been working on the same system for years. There'll be YEARS of legal action ahead on this one.

  • kangarootoo #95 3 years ago

    "What happnens when you want to play at 3 in the morning and their, no doubt, huge datacenter is offline and their call centres are closed?"

    I think the one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that they wouldn't shut the service down at night. Your internet connection doesn't close down at night, so no reason to assume this would.

  • glaeken #96 3 years ago

    This all very much smells of some sort of investor scam. It sounds fantasic until you actually understand the technical barriers they have to overcome. Aside from the latency issues (maybe they have invented stabel worm holes) I can not see anyway that they could make money off of this given what their hardware requirements will be at each data centre.

    To me this seems to be aiming at investors who have seen gaming go mass market with the Wii and are now looking to get in early on whatever the next big thing is going to be.

    It's certainly going to be interesting to see how well the Beta stacks up and if any memebers of the general public ever get to be Beta testers.


  • username #97 3 years ago

    Another thing to take into account is the amount of protection money they'll have to pay the Russian mafia not to DDoS them all the time.

  • GEE1977 #98 3 years ago

    Things that I see OnLive being

    OnLive won't be aimed at the hardcore gamer, more like the casual gamer whom has an average computer.

    No doubt their pricing model will be based on a usage model i.e. Pay as you go, 10 hours a month, 20 hours month, unlimited etc.

    No doubt they will introduce a pre-play system to cater for new releases, giving priority to say unlimited usage accounts.



  • BobsUncle #99 3 years ago

    @Unclebenny

    Basically, this guy is claiming they can do virtual desktop in 720p at 60 fps for the latest games. For thousands of people. At the same time. You might be right to question this claim.

    This comment thread is made up entirely of people agreeing that he's talking bullshit, except for one person who is deluded into thinking it can work.

    That's both the article and the comments in a nutshell.

  • ukslim #100 3 years ago

    @beemoh

    What you suggest would involve less work at the server end, but much more network bandwidth used.

    Speed server side is a non-issue. They own the hardware, they can throw resource at it (they can do it fast by implementing it in hardware).

    Video compression is all about sending the difference between this frame and the last one. The time consuming bit is working out how few differences you can get away with sending, and expressing that in as few bytes as possible. Then every so often you transmit a whole frame to fix any accumulated 'badness'. If you watch highly compressed video, you'll get a feel for it.

  • tnomad #101 3 years ago

    Troll king is troll.

  • wonton #102 3 years ago

    We will need fibre optic net connections and the server has to be geographically near by since the speed of light isn't fast enough for near-zero-latency.

    Rich is right, this stuff requires future generations of technology in several fields, im going to hazard a guess and say a decade+.

    No one can read the future so no one can say this will never happen. But OnLive may be an idea to ahead of its time.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 15:04

  • ukslim #103 3 years ago

    According to the GDC talk 'geographically near' means 1000 miles.

    He actually admitted that an East Coast -> West Coast (US) deathmatch wasn't practical.

  • 4thVariety #104 3 years ago

    Finally, somebody thinking this though.

    Now please restore that poor butchered irregular verb in the final sentence.

  • jimboton #105 3 years ago

    I find it strange for the best thing these masters of psychophysics could come up with as a game controller to look so much like a no brand 7 year old 10€ dualshock clone for the pc..

  • udat #106 3 years ago

    Someone asked about bandwidth requirements for uncompressed video:

    A 1280*720 pixel stream, using 24 bit colour, running at *30* FPS woud require 632.8125 *megabits* per second. That is a lot. Lossless compression even in a best-case scenario would not get that below 160 megabits per second.

    A motion jpeg of the same stream would require (depending on quality but let's say "medium";) about 30 megabits per second. Still a lot. This is what a previous quotation about the OnLive technology said they were doing by the way - not encoding using P and B frames, each frame only referencing itself. I don't believe it.

    An H.264 stream can be got down to about 5 megabits per second - I have used multi-pass encoders that get great results at this bandwidth, but have no personal experience with a live encoder at this bandwidth. They needed about 9 megabits per second when I was using them.

    So the compression ratio for h.264 over uncompressed video is about 126:1 which is quite impressive really.

  • Nithron #107 3 years ago

    @Darren: Exactly. And in ten years time, 1080p will seem just as crappy as 720p does now, anyway. This wont really work, at least for graphics-conscious PC gamers, unless broadband connection speed suddenly explosively outpaces screen resolutions.

    If you don't really care how it looks, obviously this is a non-issue.

  • ukslim #108 3 years ago

    @udat

    I think the statement about every frame being a key frame was a distortion of what was said in the GDC talk. What was actually said is that they have their own new codec, for which the decoder doesn't need to buffer more than 1 frame ahead.

  • udat #109 3 years ago

    @ukslim

    That makes sense, and I am glad I didn't believe it :) Doing that will make it more responsive but it will have a negative impact on compression efficiency. Probably a worth trade-off in this scenario. Anyway, encoding latency is not the "difficult" bit of this technology.

  • OnliveFans.com #110 3 years ago

    OnLive is a brilliant idea. That is of course if it works. They plan to have beta testing as soon as this summer. After that it will launch in the winter of this year if everything goes as planned. They say there is no lag, and speeds are good, but what happens when there are 1 million people playing at once? I guess we have to wait and see.
    Check out The OnLive Fans News Forum

  • anomagnus #111 3 years ago

    i smell bullshit, but at the same time, i see the potential if it ever did work

    the idea of freeing us all from escalating hardware is a brilliant idea. i just really dont think we live in that time yet

  • Unclebenny #112 3 years ago

    BobsUncle-I get the general idea. Essentially everyone playing games streamed of some giant monster computer in a bunker somewhere. so they dont have to own the hardware themselves. Then everyone seems to be saying its impossible.
    I was just confused as to how no one else on the website was reading the article and not understanding most of the words used. Its all crazy techno babble to me.

    thanks for taking the time to lower yourself to my level though :).

  • IronsUK #113 3 years ago

    @Baranga

    You are the worlds first OnLive fanboy! Congratulations!

    I'm a big skeptic like most of you. However, if this thing somehow does get off the groud there are some games that would work ok with the input latency. Rule out action-based games and you are left with the following genres:

    - Football/sports Management games
    - Card and Board game recreations
    - Quiz games
    - Word games
    - Puzzles
    - Suduko

    Sounds like a gold mine, huh?


  • Sunyavadin #114 3 years ago

    Basically, this guy is claiming they can do virtual desktop in 720p at 60 fps for the latest games. For thousands of people. At the same time. You might be right to question this claim.

    This comment thread is made up entirely of people agreeing that he's talking bullshit, except for one person who is deluded into thinking it can work.

    That's both the article and the comments in a nutshell.


    THIS

  • Bartacus #115 3 years ago

    If this works Microsoft will buy this comapny & it will be the end for Sony & Nintendo.

  • Malixu #116 3 years ago

    As a full time networks & distributed systems researcher (Eurogamer, feel free to contact me if you want a formal quote), I can't see any way this be feasible. I mean, sure, on a controlled network you could do it... for far more than it would ever cost to just host the stuff locally. In reality, I'm not even sure where to start with problems...

    If they genuinely have a demo working with the servers 50 miles away, that's impressive already. I'm not an expert on video encoding, but the comments by the person quoted in the article seem accurate to me. Getting control input from the controller, into the computer, through the network stack and out, down the network connection, into the server, processed and back before the user notices? Difficult already, as I believe most MMOs will demonstrate on request. Even if they can get it to all work in time under perfect conditions, the first packet loss, damaged packet or routing hiccup will almost certainly bring it crashing down like a house of cards.

    We can then start on the data centres. High-end servers already struggle with their power consumption and heat output being major issues, and they want to stick graphics cards into them? If you think your desktop runs hot, imagine a room with a few thousand of them in. So, they somehow get data centres full of gaming systems and enough cooling to run them (this is all a ploy to get funding for their Antarctic base, isn't it...), how do they got enough bandwidth? As much as ISPs complain about the bandwidth costs from iPlayer etc. this is going to make iPlayer look like a drop in the ocean, and that includes someone having to pay for server-side bandwidth for this stuff.

    If they've got video encoding hardware that good, I'm sure many MANY companies would pay them for it, for camcorders, live events, etc.

    If they've got latency managed that well, Blizzard and many other MMO producers would readily pay for anything that would get their costs down.

    To claim they have technology that does both, and this is how they want to use it? Insanity.

  • Malixu #117 3 years ago

    Oh, for latency; speed of light isn't your constraining factor, it's routing and processing time. If you can run a single lump of fibre from one end to the other, you're sorted (sub-millisecond latency to anywhere on the planet). However, for any real network your traffic spends most of its time being checked, processed, batched together with other packets, and generally being stuffed in the right place by network hardware. It's like comparing carrying a parcel from A to B yourself, and sending it by post.

    Edit: My bad, speed of light is an issue. Light in a fibre is 2 x 10^8 m/s, which works out at 200km/ms. The earth is 40,000km in circumference, for reference.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 15:27

  • Ryze #118 3 years ago

    I knew this was bollocks. again, I've done plenty of work with video encoding and streaming, and it all seemed like a pipedream considering the demands placed on the server side and the network connection.

    Again, I'd love to be proved wrong here, but I'd like to see this working outside of the lab. My home connection is 5.5Mbps uncapped at the moment. I should be able to run the HD service - but there's no chance I reckon both due to my connection (and its contention ratio), and that it's unlikely that this will scale up very successfully to multiple thousands of users.

    /waits

  • Olemak #119 3 years ago

    Oh ye of little faith.

    Once in a while technology leaps forward. After reading the article, I have an image in my head of a circa 1950 switchboard operator trying to comprehend how a single switchboard could ever handle more than 5000 calls each day. She would have to grow fifty new arms in order to connect all those calls!

    To me, the 30 fps video looks just fine, and I feel convinced that this is what the guys are going for. Maybe they dont plan to offer all games, but maby focus on "casual" stuff, leaving the twitch gamers to sony and MS. For now. Maybe they actually have a well though out strategy laid out already.

    Oh, and in the future, bandwidth will be free. I've read it so it must be free. In a world where virtually limitless bandwidth is free, something like this will be the dominant gaming platform (although you'll always have enthusiasts). Except, maybe the publishers will stop releasing titles on "enthusiast platforms", seing as "enthusiast" is pretty much synonymous with "software piracy" anyway.

    How has gaming changes over the last 10 years?
    How will it change over the 10 years to come?
    Is OnLive the shape of things to come - maybe not this decade, but surely in the next one?

  • penhalion #120 3 years ago

    I said it had to be an april fools joke because it was impossible to actually do and got called names. Funny how suddenly everyones a sceptic once an article pops up that noticed the exact same claims I made.

    ho hum...i guess that's what I get for always being one of the ones on these forums that's ahead of the crowd.

  • udat #121 3 years ago

    It has very little to do with bandwidth and a lot to do with scalability and latency. Generally you want things to get easier the more popular they become (e.g. mass producing things gets cheaper as the thing becomes more popular) and this will have the opposite problem.

  • PsychoPriest #122 3 years ago

    Good read that, I've got my own thoughts on OnLive here at my blog. It's not as detailed as this though which makes this pimping rather pointless (Y) toodles

    http://videogamesatemybaby.wordpress.com...

  • Malixu #123 3 years ago

    @Olemak: "Once in a while technology leaps forward." - no it bloody doesn't. The transistor may have enabled computers, but was designed in 1947, not a couple of days ago. The Internet is rolling in for 40 years ago. Even the web is over a decade (first formal spec is dated 1996, first browser 1993, and there was Gopher before that). Space flight is as close as you get, and that was because two superpowers through everything they had at the problem, not a couple of dozen guys no-one has heard of before.

  • PearOfAnguish #124 3 years ago

    "the idea of freeing us all from escalating hardware is a brilliant idea."

    So you'd like to rent all your games with a subscription, would you? It's not brilliant, it's a crappy idea.

    Olemak, as has been pointed out both in the article and the comments, what they are claiming is just not feasible. Yes technology moves forward, but not at that pace. They're talking about server farms stuffed with high-end PCs streaming massive amounts of data all over the world. It's ridiculous. Google and others have enough problems cooling and maintaining the server farms that keep their search engine and other ventures running, and they're not fitted with cutting-edge graphics cards.
    Edited by 2 at 26/03/09 @ 15:18

  • rudedudejude #125 3 years ago

    This is like DRM's love child.

  • Malixu #126 3 years ago

    @anomagnus: "the idea of freeing us all from escalating hardware is a brilliant idea."

    Yes, it is, but it's just escalating somewhere else. You might as well set up a subscription with Dell to have them deliver you a new PC every two years...

  • ukslim #127 3 years ago

    I think lots of commenters haven't seen the GDC presentation:
    [link url=http:// www.vg247.com/2009/03/25/gdc-onlive-press-conference-in-vide o-crysis-shown-running-on-dell-laptop/
    ]http://ww w.vg247.com/2009/03/25/gdc-onli...[/link]

    It answers a lot of the questions being asked. And you can watch Crysis playing through the service.

    Now, they might be lying. Or they might be hopeless optimists. But if they go to beta and it doesn't work, the whole thing's a disaster - and they don't seem stupid enough to do that.

  • Malixu #128 3 years ago

    @wush: Speed of light in fibre (not in vacuum) is 2 x 10^8 m/s, so 2 x 10^5 km/s. So... 200km/ms. Yeah, I was way off, sorry!

  • Malixu #129 3 years ago

    @ukslim: Well, I'll be here with my hat, and the BBQ sauce, waiting for that beta :)

  • Darren #130 3 years ago

    @ukslim - "I think lots of commenters haven't seen the GDC presentation:
    [link url=http://ww w.vg247.com/2009/03/25/gdc-onli...
    ]http://ww w.vg247.com/2009/03/25/gdc-onli...[/link]

    It answers a lot of the questions being asked. And you can watch Crysis playing through the service."

    That's in a controlled environment though for demonstration purposes and is hardly conclusive proof that it works in the real world where there may be ten of thousands, possibly millions of users.

  • Ryze #131 3 years ago

    @Baranga

    You might be a 'tard, but some of us study and work with these technologies daily.

    We're sceptical due to the laws of physics, and the limitations of real technology as it exists in the real world in 2009.

    I expect that you're one of those Sonytards still waiting for teh c3ll and blu rayz to unlock 4d 120fps 32:9 graphics.

    Tard alert.

  • Ryze #132 3 years ago

    Technologies such as these will be fine for games that don't depend on an immediate response. It'd be fine to play Uno or RPG & RTS games here.

    Racing games and FPSs though? I need convincing. That said - I'd love for my home Internet to be capable of supporting this in full quality with the lowest latency. Once we're at that point I'll expect several other excellent services to be rolled out off the back of the streaming tech.

  • ukslim #133 3 years ago

    @malixu @darren of course it's a controlled environment. You don't take risks on a presentation like that. But the demo's impressive anyway (as Leadbetter says), and the intro and the Q&A refute some of the points people have made here.

    Bear in mind this summer's beta is for Americans only. Us Eurogamers will have to go by what our American friends tell us.

  • Jos #134 3 years ago

    I can't tell how likely this is to be true, because they aren't telling us what the technology powering it actually is.

    So fair enough for some scepticism but to claim it won't work by citing specific technology that wasn't designed to do this and saying this existing technology can't do it therefore OnLive won't work is daft.

    I mean really - they'd have to have a high spec gaming PC per connection - it's a daft thought, for all the reasons people are saying. So why assume that is how it works?

    I thought there was a couple of interesting things from the interview linked above - the resolution scales with connection speed, you can instantly save the last 15 seconds of play to your clips, and that any player can be spectated in real time - spoke of a million spectators. That just sounds like a different way of transmitting game visuals than I can comprehend.

    Now I am fully aware that this kind of thing is rather unprecedented and it may be VC securing guff, but the list of publishers signed up was pretty interesting.

    My take on it is if it will work as they are talking about then they are doing something fundamentally different or new from the techniques talked about in Richard's article. Otherwise I'd agree with the article but I think it was written too soon and without the facts.

  • KORONZEN #135 3 years ago

    FFS, you're implying it's a "scam" Leadbetter? Seriously?

  • udat #136 3 years ago

    @Jos

    If it is anything other than effectively a large cluster of uber-PCs with good graphics cards then it becomes another platform to port to. Seeing as the majority of software houses already make a shit job of porting stuff to the PS3 or whatever from their lead platform, what gives you any confidence they could add another to the mix?

  • Jos #137 3 years ago

    I agree that would not be a good thing. I just think if it is going to work it would have to be done differently.

    They say it works and so I am waiting to hear how, assuming there is some missing information that squares this circle.

    My issue is that the article has jumped the gun in assuming they are claiming to be able to use standard tech in a way that is impossible.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 16:28

  • ukslim #138 3 years ago

    @jos: they're actually telling us rather a lot. Watch the video. For high end games, it really is one server per player. The servers are very specialised - with GPUs and custom video encoding hardware. The software isn't just PC code dropped onto the servers: developers port their game to the system.

  • glaeken #139 3 years ago

    You know having thought about the massive problem of input latency I do actually see a market for this with Wii owners as they are used to sloppy controls in their games so maybe this is who they are aiming at?



  • Baranga #140 3 years ago

    @ Ryze - 32:9 is kinda impractical, don't you think?

    I think you should have some common sense. Again, why would they create something like this if it doesn't work? Do you really think they fooled all those companies? Do you really think this is a scam, while the world is watching them? I'm still waiting for a response to those questions. All I see is that you don't even consider they admited limitations and answered some of the points raised here, as posted above with the East Coasr vs West Coast deathmatch. There was a post that seemed to imply they'll only have one server farm. You ignore even the article's ideas as why and how it could work.

    And you also ignore the news about the competition. What, is this a brain cancer that only hurts some developers and companies and makes them think OnLive's concept can be applied in reality?

    Give me a break.
    If the beta fails, good riddance, it was fun while this story lasted. If it's a succes... They'll be sued by every hardware company for every dumb thing they can think about.

  • Olemak #141 3 years ago

    Malixu: You seem to be mising my point, and back it up with a series of bad examples of how technology evolves slowly. Except - some of the time it moves in fits and starts.

    "The transistor may have enabled computers, but was designed in 1947, not a couple of days ago."

    So? Personal Computers were a standing joke, crazed enthusiasts only, and then Windows 3.1 happened and PC's were suddenly everywhere.

    " The Internet is rolling in for 40 years ago. Even the web is over a decade (first formal spec is dated 1996, first browser 1993, and there was Gopher before that)"

    Again, in the space of just a few months in 1994 the Internet gained it's momentum, rising from a few thousand homepages to millions, and professional, commercial services too. WIthin a few years, people were suddenly doing their banking from home, getting dates on the internet and outsourcing callcenters to India. Huge changes in a very short timespan, both technlologically and socially.

    "Space flight is as close as you get, and that was because two superpowers through everything they had at the problem, not a couple of dozen guys no-one has heard of before."

    OK, how about mobile phones then? How long did it take from the fist truly portable and reasonably affordable mobile phone appeard 'till everybody had one? Less than three years. In my book, that qualifies as a revolution.

    Broadband bandwidth and processing bandwidth keep on developing, and once in a while we hit milestones that enable brand new services and products. Like call centers in India, or real-time video editing.

    I think most people focus too much on one single ting, and that's 60 frames per second. Most likely it will be 30 FPS, locked. That will be fine - for the first generation of this tech, but the client side will be able to handle more FPS even if the server side solutions and the bandwidth wont allow it. It will still be very much playable.

    Also, the image of each game running on a remote desktop computer with keyboard, monitor and mouse attached is just silly.

  • Lutherian #142 3 years ago

    Light travels at 299,792,458 metres/second. That's 186 miles/millisecond. Living at the 1000 mile suggested limit from the data center it would take light just over 10 milliseconds to do the round trip. This is the minimum possible latency before you add in the encoding and decoding of the video and any other delays imposed by the medium.

    On a console game we sample the input every one or two frames. The extreme case here is sampling every frame at 60fps, which is every 16 milliseconds. Games that run at 30fps and sample every two frames have 64 millisecond gaps between samples. Your button press is likely to take at least 64 milliseconds to show a result on screen when playing on your own console. We perceive this as instant. 60fps makes motion look smoother than 30fps, but input is far more tolerant of delay. I'm going to take a ballpark guess here and suggest that as long as the time between your button press and the result appearing on screen is less than 100Ms you won't give a monkey's.

  • MyPointIs #143 3 years ago

    I don't know why everyone is making the assumption that they are encoding every image as a bitstream. I think they must be encoding and sending just compressed textures and the updated polygon meshes (compressed aswell). And have the micro-console being some kind of 3D card. That could have several benefits (for example, as long as you get the new camera position, you could update and render a new frame).

  • Lutherian #144 3 years ago

    No, its just video.

  • ukslim #145 3 years ago

    @Lutherian: Great post. I gather that some SFII blocks require timing to the exact frame. No biggie - it just means that particular kind of game isn't a good fit for this kind of service.

  • MyPointIs #146 3 years ago

    @Lutherian: And you know that because ...
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 16:52

  • ukslim #147 3 years ago

    @MyPointIs: maybe those people watched the talk and read the article, instead of guessing?

  • Jos #148 3 years ago

    UKSlim - fair enough - I'd watched an interview that was cut down from the full presentation.

    They do talk about their servers being special (not in the bus way I presume) and virtualization for lower end stuff.

    Will be interesting to see how the costs pan out then.

  • MyPointIs #149 3 years ago

    @ukslim: And couldn't they lie and call it video when it isn't?

  • ukslim #150 3 years ago

    @MyPointIs: Of course they could. It would be a very detailed and intricate lie, and I can't see what it would gain them.

  • MyPointIs #151 3 years ago

    @ukslim: Time to get ahead of Dave Perry :)

  • IneptPercy #152 3 years ago

    This technology has larger potential in the home if you ask me, building one good gaming PC and being able to play on it in any other room sounds alright to me.

    As for the rest, it may work one day, the idea is great but I just think that the technology isn't good enough yet for this to work well.

  • ukslim #153 3 years ago

    @ineptPercy - You can already do that: [link url=http://www. streammygame.com/smg/index.php
    ]http://www. streammygame.com/smg/index.php
    [/link]

    If you poke around YouTube, there's someone using it to play Crysis on an eeePC, streaming over WiFi.

  • Azazel #154 3 years ago

    I'm seriously getting the fear now.

    Pretty soon someone is going to start talking about 'paradigm shifts' and 'gaming 2.0'.

    I can almost hear the whalesong now!

  • Xensor #155 3 years ago

    There are only 2 things needed for this to really work:

    Fibre to your doorstep
    Quantum computing

    Easy....

  • Baranga #156 3 years ago

    [link url=htt p://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/liveplace-to-launch-photo- realistic-virtual-world-rendered-in-the-cloud/
    ]http://ww w.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/liv...[/link]

    This is interesting.

  • schachmatt #157 3 years ago

    Something like this will be the future.
    Emphasis on future.

    Watching the presentation I don't believe them. The PR guy is really good, but when presenting the service he laughed the same way he laughed when making a joke, like overcoming the the barrier of speed of light.

    Will be interesting how they will excuse not delivering their promises. However they've probably got loads of patents.

  • Linkified #158 3 years ago

    Cloud computing is the future and this is the first device to actually show this working

    Oh wait you really want to have to get up stick in disks well god. Personally its good anyone who wants this to fail will see a games market crash.

  • schachmatt #159 3 years ago

    Everybody wants this to work. However, few people are living in Dreamland, where it seems to work flawlessly.

  • cyber_nicco #160 3 years ago

    I haven't read all the posts yet, and I have always thought this wouldn't work well, but are we really suggesting they would usehuge banks of individual PC to do this? Wouldn't they be running VMWare (or similar virtualization software/environment) on some supercomputing Linux/Unix (or even Windows) servers, with some custom video/display drivers for the individual OS (presumably some flavor of Windows) instances?

    I mean, wouldn't this be the obvious route to go?

  • studiosonic #161 3 years ago

    I've got to say, this guy needs to think a bit more broadly. If you look at the whole idea of OnLive with today's technology and real world issues (ISPs etc..) it does look like it could struggle but you've got to think of it disconnected from that. Things will change in the technologies this uses, in the business model ISPs work around. Maybe OnLive will fail, but it has put its marker down and things WILL change and move towards this kind of thing. Maybe not by the end of the year like OnLive would want but within the next 5 years. I've put my thoughts to this article in http://www.studioso nic.net/?p=202

  • PearOfAnguish #162 3 years ago

    "I mean, wouldn't this be the obvious route to go?"

    They're talking about running the latest games at 720p, before streaming them to your home, don't think a VMware session is going to cut it. You'd be hard pressed to play a modern game on your own computer using virtualisation (they can run like crap), never mind on a server hundreds of miles away.

    "Oh wait you really want to have to get up stick in disks well god. Personally its good anyone who wants this to fail will see a games market crash."

    Don't be so ridiculous, this gimmick failing will not lead to a crash. I don't mind getting up to put a disc in, because at least then I know I own the disc, I'm not renting it from some company a hundred fucking miles away. I guarantee that if any publishers have signed up for this then it is because they can use it to lease games rather than sell them. No more second hand market, and they control the prices.

  • skillian #163 3 years ago

    You got on reddit :)

    [link url=http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/c omments/87nyn/gdc_why_onlive_cant_possibly_work/
    ]http://ww w.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/...[/link]

  • Freeload #164 3 years ago

    To the guy that wrote the article; did you even watch the conference?
    [link url=http://gdc.gamespot.com /video/6206692/gdc-2009-onlive-press-conference?tag=videos;t itle;8
    ]http://gd c.gamespot.com/video/6206692/gd...[/link]

    It seems to me that every issue you brought up is answered.

    You say they would need to improve the way movies are handled dramatically and reduce latency dramatically etc.

    Norm: 500ms latency
    OnLive: 1ms latency

    That FIVE HUNDRED times better. Is that not drastic enough for you?

    You use the best examples of compression currently available to show it doesn't work. They state there version is vastly superior to that because the current methods think about compression in a linear way.

    Is that not something completely different to what you used in your example?

    If so then how can you use this outdated method to prove their whole new method, that you know absolutely nothing about, doesn't work?

    Christs the guy even tells us he was at Apple when they frikin created the whole compression stuff so I think he knows a little something about it and maybe just maybe since then his team have figured out a way of actually doing things better. I mean it's not like that has been one of their major focuses for at least the last 7 years, with all the current issues in mind and what they need to make it work with gaming, now is it.

    You say the system doesn't work and yet using your outdated methods you stream a game at SD resoultion and normal speed, that anyone other than technophiles would be happy with, and there are far more general consumers out there than those who worry about 720p etc, so tell me how exactly does it not work when your outdated example using far inferior compression etc already does?

    I'm not saying everything they say is the word of God but you seem to be pointing out issues they have already provided answers and solutions to.

    I think you mistakenly assume this service is designed for people like you, when it's not. Just in the same way Wii is probably not designed for people like you, and it's the biggest selling console of this generation and the fastest selling console of all time.

    The era of the nerd is over and it's time for gaming to move into the mainstream.

    Maybe you could try that too and stop thinking that if the service doesn't do exactly what the most geeky of technology whoring nerds expect from it then it simply can't and doesn't work.
    Edited by 4 at 26/03/09 @ 21:44

  • Bennicus #165 3 years ago

    Wow Freeload it's a good thing you pointed out that the people selling the product say it really works and is much better than anything else before. Imagine how foolish the rest of us must feel having not noticed that bit of the presentation!

  • PearOfAnguish #166 3 years ago

    "issues they have already provided answers and solutions to."

    Have they? Them saying they've solved problems with compression and latency is all well and good, but there are no details. I find it strange that people are so willing to accept this on the basis of some PR babble and a demo in a controlled environment.

    The real test will be the public beta, if that ever actually happens.

  • Freeload #167 3 years ago

    Christ!

    You gotta trust somebody some ******* time!

    I mean we can all be sensible and realize that it's not going to be as perfect as it sounds but we can all also be sensible and realize that it must ******* exist in some form that is not that far off what they are saying.

    I mean they have us signing up for a public beta for something that simply cannot work.

    Get ******* real man!

    I for one am completely confident they can do the SD stuff at least based on everything I have seen and read so far and all the other sites impressions and the demo and the answers to the questions about potential problems that they gave and the guys history of creating successful defining products and services.

    I mean if we are just going to ignore everything and doubt everything then we might as well claim we have never sent a ******* rocket out our atmosphere.

    I mean I have certainly never been on one or seen one leave the atmosphere with my own eyes. Have you?

    Then clearly it's all bullshit just because I didn't invent it and know nothing about it and don't understand it.

    Oh wait...Maybe it's all just the biggest and most elaborate April Fools in history.
    Edited by 2 at 26/03/09 @ 21:43

  • AOFanboi #168 3 years ago

    @Baranga: <em>Again, why would they create something like this if it doesn't work? Do you really think they fooled all those companies? Do you really think this is a scam, while the world is watching them?</em>

    Yes because it very often works. Scams involving some dazzling impressive promises are par for the course in economic downturns when everyone are desperate for the Next Thing that actually will make them rich again. Much like the "cold fusion" physicists or the "human cloning" doctor in Korea, this house of cards will come crashing down as soon as the guys can cash the VC checks and vanish to Cayman Islands.

    @Freeload: <em>Norm: 500ms latency
    OnLive: 1ms latency

    That FIVE HUNDRED times better. Is that not drastic enough for you?</em>

    Reminds me about the Dawn developers who promised they had "negative ping code" if you took their math at face value. Face it, you ONLY get that low latency in a LAN, NOT across multiple switches on the internet. Heck I get 40-50 ms ping across the 10 jumps to one of the most popular Norwegian online newspapers, and that is considering that ping packets are small and have PRIORITY on the network.

    What is drastic is that people like you actually SWALLOW the snake oil and claim it tastes good!

  • PearOfAnguish #169 3 years ago

    You gotta trust somebody some ******* time!

    Not when they make outlandish claims you don't.

    I mean we can all be sensible and realize that it's not going to be as perfect as it sounds but we can all also be sensible and realize that it must ******* exist in some form that is not that far off what they are saying.

    I for one am completely confident they can do the SD stuff

    That is not 'not far off'. Are you actually suggesting that you'd pay for a service that gives you the latest games in stunning SD quality, rather than just buying a console or computer that can do hi-def properly? And that still doesn't eliminate the problems with input lag or huge server farms pumping out more heat than the sun.

    I mean if we are just going to ignore everything and doubt everything then we might as well claim we have never sent a ******* rocket out our atmosphere.

    Now you're just being silly.

    Then clearly it's all bullshit just because I didn't invent it and know nothing about it and don't understand it.

    You need to apply some logic and critical thinking. These people are claiming to have groundbreaking technology that is far in advance of anything seen, yet they've given no details whatsoever. A demo is not proof.

    I mean they have us signing up for a public beta for something that simply cannot work.

    Gosh, nobody would ever do that! People are always completely honest and trustworthy.

    I hear the first OnLive game is going to be a port of the Phantom version of Duke Nukem Forever.

  • Freeload #170 3 years ago

    Like I say,

    No one should take everything as gospel, but if they are claiming 1ms when the norm is 500, even if you doubt that then it would be ridiculous to think it isn't significantly better than what exists.

    Maybe even enough to make their idea plausible and indeed real.

    Wouldn't that be a shock!

    But you are right.

    When the beta rolls up we are all going to be playing on our Wii's and somehow we will have been tricked into believing this is a real beta of a service that is downloading games directly to our PCs etc.

    It's all just a big scam!

    I get it now.

    When they say 1ms what they probably mean is 499ms.

    When they say they spent the last 7 years developing the technology what they really mean is the spent the last 7 days setting up this hoax and the rest playing videogames on their Xbox 360 and dreaming up ways how to rip us all off.

    It's all bullshit and we should just ignore them and continue to buy new PCs every year because it's ridiculous to even imagine it's possible to come up with better solutions than those that already exist.

    In fact. It was impossible to ever move gaming beyond and oscilloscope and everything we have ever seen since then and all the improvements that have been made, that most people could never have imagined back then and would call you a liar if you told them, are in fact just all make belief.

    No one can do anything that some dude on a website and his industry friends can't do or explain.

    That would simply be impossible!

    Guess what they said about Einstein when he came up with E=MC2...

    Or Newton when he talked about gravity.

    Or Stephen Hawkins when he talked about black holes.

    Or Darwin when he talked about Evolution.

    Or Steve Jobs when he first claimed iTunes and iPod were the future of music.

    Or Iwata when he first showed the Wiimote and told us it would change everything.

    It's all impossible because we never thought of it first and because when we see it we can't explain it and because there is nothing like it already, so it must be fake. It must be a lie. It simply cannot be possible for things to move forward and for people to come up with concepts that evolve those ideas that came before them.

    Thank God not everyone is like you or all the other narrow minded small thinkers like you in here or else nothing would ever move forward because if you can't rationalize it or explain it then it simply can't be done.

    When they talked about something like Phantom I didn't buy into that shit because it was clearly just a box and half assed idea and a load of bulltalk and that is all it ever was.

    I think this is ever so slightly different.
    Edited by 3 at 26/03/09 @ 22:05

  • Freeload #171 3 years ago

    Oh by the way.

    Those 10 developers, which includes the likes of Ubisoft, EA and Take 2 etc, some of the largest publishers in the world. They have been duped and are developing all their games for a service that doesn't actually exist. In fact they never even showed their games running on the system at all.

    That was actually just Derren Brown on his new Channel 4 show.

    I think it's called ConLive.

  • PearOfAnguish #172 3 years ago

    You're coming unglued.

    They have made some claims that are very unlikely based on currently available tech, it is therefore not unreasonable for us to ask for proof before we start declaring this the future of gaming, particularly when professionals who deal with this stuff on a daily basis are suggesting that maybe everything is not quite as it seems.

    Maybe it is real, but you're acting like nobody has ever run a scam that fooled people with a fancy demo. I'm calling bullshit until they come up with a public demonstration that proves their claims, and that's a far more sensible position than your deranged ranting about how nobody believed in black holes and space travel.

    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 22:12

  • Freeload #173 3 years ago

    The problem is not that you guys are being healthily cautious and analyzing what has been proposed taking into account everything that is known, everything that has been said, and everything that is already confirmed and real etc, such as the working demo, the signed on publishers, the hands on experience of all the attendees, the beta that is coming up, the confirmed launch time, the fact that the guys have a very solid and successful history creating defining products and services, the fact that they even have answers to all these questions people came up with, which clearly shows how much they have thought about this, and so much more.

    You are simply saying it doesn't and will not work because it doesn't using any current methods you know of and because you and your friends cannot explain a way that it could work knowing what you know.

    That is ******* retarded.

    I don't know shit about the technology etc but I can say with 100% certainty that they have convinced me this is real more than you and all the other numpties on here have convinced me it simply cannot work.

    You know...I designed the Wiimote 10 years before Nintendo ever showed it, and I have the sketches and ideas in various books etc to prove it. I remember my flatmate at the time telling me it simply couldn't work and no one would want it etc. Now you can believe me or you can doubt me but the Wiimote is here now regardless of what you think or what he thought and it is doing exactly what I claimed at the time and is changing things in exactly the way I claimed.

    Just because he didn't believe it and didn't understand it, which is his problem, that doesn't mean I was lying or that it was fake etc.

    It just mean he was a small minded fool that felt more comfortable believing it was fake because trying to understand it or believe that there were people who thought bigger than him was too much for his little ego to take.

    End of.

  • Freeload #174 3 years ago

    There were people that claimed you couldn't make a car run on water (give or take) and provided all kinds of evidence to back up their opinion, even when at the very same time there were people making cars that ran on water (give or take).

    Now we have cars that run on water (give or take).

    It makes me wonder just how much faster we could have got there with less of the first kind or people and more of the second.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 22:36

  • polaris70 #175 3 years ago

    @Freeload
    You can't blame people for being highly sceptical, me included. When new things are discovered it usually takes ages until their potential is realized. Look at radiation, it took about forty years to realize that you could harness the power of the atom to make efficient energy. look at mobile phones, people had sat phones for years before the technology was compressed enough to make it viable mass market. New technologies don't just magically appear with an 'economically viable' tag on them from day one. New technologies tend to progress over a number of years.

    Don't get me wrong, I'd love Onlive to work because it sounds fantastic. But there is an old saying...'If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is'. Until we see a proper beta with thousands of peope connecting then you can't blame people for being sceptical.

  • schachmatt #176 3 years ago

    Perlman also has a history.
    He worked for General Magic (how appropriate!), which never delivered the content they promised (to the public). However their stock apparently doubled on the first day. The company doesn't exist anymore, but it was still profitable for a few people.
    Plus he's in bed with Microsoft's Paul Allen, who certainly knows how to make more money out of a lot of money.
    There are probably people behind this, who know they will never get problems with the SEC.

    I don't say there aren't some great ideas and technological advances (and a whole lot of patents) behind this, but if this works we should all confess our sins before world's end.
    For us non-profiting end-users, the best thing that can come out of it is something similar to this in the unforeseeable future. It would be kind of what Wolfenstein was to the FPSs.

  • Ryze #177 3 years ago

    ^ WTF?

    I think that 'those 10 developers' will be happy to get a a fat cheque (of your money, Freeload), for the PC versions of their games.

    The money will be coming straight from your bank, it seems, regardless of whether the damn thing works well or not.

    How are your 120fps 4D 32:9 (2xHDMI, Baranga) PS3 visuals at the moment?
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 22:42

  • Freeload #178 3 years ago

    Like I say,

    I have no problem with people being sceptical.

    I have a problem with this: "Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work" and the following 3 pages that supposedly prove how it cannot work when in fact all they do is show that the guy trying to prove it cannot work knows nothing beyond his tiny little bubble.

    It's funny how the SD video example of Burnout that he used in his article designed to show "Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work" actually convinced me that it can in fact work more than pretty much anything else I have seen thus far. The fact is that he can do that with outdated technology and little knowledge of anything beyond the popular thinking and current methods etc has convinced me that it's blatantly obvious that if these guys have achieved even half of what they claim that their service already works.

    I clicked his video and it ran perfectly, smoothly, looked perfectly good, didn't have any download time, and that was just him pissing around for a few minutes to create something to show me just how limited all this technology is and how the latency and stuff prevents it from working etc.

    Now let's just imagine what we could have if someone with more intelligence, more knowledge, more money, more time, more resources more experience more vision and more imagination than him actually spent 7 years (and however many before that) trying to prove it could work...

  • busboy33 #179 3 years ago

    @tonynibbles:
    Agreed its inevitible -- even the harshest detractors (IMO) will agre that EVENTUALLY such a system will happen.

    The question that has the naysayers going is when: 20 years from now, or 2?

    You said 10 years ago, YouTube was pie-in-the-sky. Go back another 10, to 1989. If somebody announced then that they had a YouTube beta ready to roll within the year, they would have been talking pure, refined bullshit.

    As the commenters (and the post) are pointing out, what they're talking about is a quantum leap above anything that is possible. They've essentially re-created (a) the internet (latency? Network traffic? No problem!), (b) HD-quality video production (per frame? They're gonna encode and transmit 720p 60 times a second? Lossles?), (c) production/ecconomic models (could this be done with a dedicated T10 line and a Supercomputer? Sure. So my supscription fee to the service is, what . . . $500,000?). As has already been said repeatedly, if they've truly licked all these things, then the company could simply license the service as middleware to MS/Sony/BritTelecom/etc. and make a few trillion dollars overnight. They're not. They don't like easy money?

    All the detractors are saying how much they wish this would work. I wish ant-gravity would work, too, but when somebody claims to have a working antigravity generator and decides to use the technology to market a sneaker line rather than antigravity cars . . . something isn't right. And by "right", I mean believable.

  • Ryze #180 3 years ago

    I'd love to know when this tech will get to the point where it has the majority of this site's readers abandoning their consoles (and regular game purchases).

    2015? 2020? 2050? I'll be 70 in 2050.

    I think that this has great potential, but probably not for us lot for a while.

    Also, we spend A LOT.

    This has to become markedly better than the 360 & Wii (or their successors) to win. I'll exclude the PS3, as it's still too expensive to build.

  • polaris70 #181 3 years ago

    Lets say that OnLive can actually deliver a service. Who owns the game if you decide to buy it instead of renting it? If I buy a game can I then give it away to a friend if I can't afford my internet anymore? Or maybe swap my game with a friend's game after I've completed it? Who owns the game or is there no difference from renting and buying? I'm confused :/

  • Baranga #182 3 years ago

    How are your 120fps 4D 32:9 (2xHDMI, Baranga) PS3 visuals at the moment?

    Amazing, dude. It's like, whoa!

  • Sunyavadin #183 3 years ago

    You gotta trust somebody some ******* time!

    Is that so?
    Well in that case, my name is prince Steve Ngumbu, from Nigeria. I have 10,000,000 (ten million) dollars in offshore bank accounts in need of a deposit of your entire life savings to access, which will then result in transfer of 10(ten) percent (1 million) dollars being forwarded to you. Please email all your bank details to me, I look forward to your correspondence!

  • Darthus #184 3 years ago

    I'm not going to comment on the whole article, but I think the argument that they couldn't have enough computing power to handle rendering the games is a bit of a stretch. They are not going to line their server racks with 2000 dollar home desktops with 4 gigs ram, a new Nvidia card, and a dual core. They are going to be running gaming specific servers with Quad SLI top of the line GPUs, 32 gigs ram, multiple quad cores and SCSI hard drives. Then they are going to split those into a number of virtual PCs for the game. That server alone I just mentioned can probably run 16 instances of GTA4 at 720P resolutions. When these servers are bought in bulk or simply rented (renting servers from datacenters is fairly common), they cost will not be too much. Say on average each subscriber plays GTA4 2 hours a day. That's 12 subscribers per day * 16 instances of GTA4 or 192 subscribers a month using that server. Say they're paying 20 bucks a month on average, that's 3840 dollars a month going toward that single server. I realize all the numbers I just gave are debatable, but I don't think they're unreasonable. I think nearly 4000 dollars a month can rent you some pretty amazing hardware. They get more subscribers/users, they just add more servers. If each server pays for itself plus the other costs/profit, then I don't see an issue.

  • Ryze #185 3 years ago

    I also have some Snake Oil you might be interested in.

  • Freeload #186 3 years ago

    @Sunyavadin

    I'll send that money to you right away Prince Ngumbu.

  • Ryze #187 3 years ago

    Darthus,

    They then have to encode all of the video for each user in realtime in 1ms.

    Double all of that up, swapping the GPUs for video encoders of whichever magical flavour they choose. They better be making some serious money, or their beta will be tiny.

    They're depending on the fact that many of the money people, and the decision making people just don't have a clue what this involves.

    I'd love to see this working at my house, while another 5000 people are using it to play a fast paced game.

    Slow games - no problem. It'd work right now.

  • Freeload #188 3 years ago

    @polaris70

    I think the idea is that if you buy it then you just make that one of payment and in the long run it saves you a lot of money compared to if you were going to keep renting a game for example.

    So you might pay $5 a week to rent or say $15 to buy. So if you know you are going to be playing the game a lot then it would make sense just to pay the $15 and get the game for as long as you are likely to ever play it.

    Beyond that, in terms of being able to give it to others etc, since technically you now should own it outright...I have no clue.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 23:13

  • Ryze #189 3 years ago

    ^

    'own it outright'

    'Now we have cars that run on water'

    'tard alert!

  • polaris70 #190 3 years ago

    @Darthus
    OnLive intends to launch this winter. Have you heard of any bulk buying from intel or AMD (we're talking thousands, possibly millions of CPU's). How about graphics cards, same again probably millions of them have been ordered from ATI, Nvidia, or have they? How about RAM, or are OnLive using matrix crystal solid state memory that they've just invented :) I don't buy into this, surely these bulk orders would have to be in place now, and we haven't heard a peep.

  • Freeload #191 3 years ago

    Why would you know about it?

    LOL

  • Darthus #192 3 years ago

    @Polaris

    Is this a thread to argue that the concept is impossible, or that it's possible, but they're just fleecing us and trying to run off with investor money?

    I was arguing against the former. If you agree that it's possible that they could handle it hardware wise, then there's no need to argue that the former CEO of Eidos and inventor of Quicktime has devoted the last 7 years of his life to a way to get a bunch of investor money and then run to the bahamas.

  • Ryze #193 3 years ago

    About your 'tardation? You make it very, very clear.

    Cars running on water is a great concept, but it's difficult to extract the hydrogen without using at least as much energy as you get back.

    It's possibly a good way of moving pollution to the powerstation, though.

  • Freeload #194 3 years ago

    @rYZE

    [link url=http: //news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7456141.stm
    ]http://ne ws.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7456...[/link]

    look it up.

    Hydrogen plus oxygen = Water (give or take).

    Also when I buy a WiiWare game the idea is that I own it. Sure it may not be in a box or a physical product but I don't have to return it next week so for as long as the service exits (and who knows what happens beyond that) I own it outright. That doesn't mean I own a physical copy, it just means I don't have to pay any more for it at a later date etc.

  • Ryze #195 3 years ago

    That's a hydrogen car, you cock. Water comes out of the exhaust.

  • Freeload #196 3 years ago

    Yes and it uses Hydrogen and Oxygen in the first place you fuckin dick, which is what creates the electricity the car runs on. Which like I said, is give or take, water(which is just H2O anyway) to run a fucking car!

    Dick head
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 23:28

  • Baranga #197 3 years ago

    No, it's the water that runs on car :p

  • polaris70 #198 3 years ago

    @Darthus
    I think it is techically impossiblie to get video compression down from ~500ms to ~1ms in one jump. Maybe they have done it, I don't know but new technologies tend to progress in stages. This seems like going from stage one to stage five and missing out two, three and four. Why would they use that for a gaming system first? Surely they would license it out and make a huge amount of money, then develop a gaming system with the small change in their pockets from the vast amounts of money they would make in other areas. Lets wait and see the meat, because ther seems to be only bones so far.

  • Ryze #199 3 years ago

    Yawn Freeetardlol,

    So my car runs off of Carbon Monoxide!!!! We're saved!!!

  • Freeload #200 3 years ago

    7 years is a pretty long time when it comes to any kind of computer technology.

    If they had made the process visible then it would have evolved over that time in a way that you could suddenly accept?

    Just because you didn't see it though then it's not happened...

  • Henrik_se #201 3 years ago

    @Darthus:

    The problem with server hardware is that it is much more expensive than home PC hardware, which in turn is much more expensive than mass-produced console hardware, if you look at it from a performance/cost perspective. You get the most "bang for your buck" if you buy a low-end computer. A single server with ten times the processing power of an xbox costs a lot more than ten xboxes. A single server that could virtualize 10 gaming PCs at once is going to cost a lot more than 10 gaming PCs, and you also have to pay for the overhead you need to compress the video, stream the video over the internet, and handle virtualization itself.

    I can see how you could do this technically, but the thing that really makes me doubt this is how they're gonna get the economy behind this to work. They're gonna have so much economical overhead in terms of staffing, hosting centers, bandwidth costs, keeping spare servers for peak hours etc, that they simply cannot offer consumers a service that is cheaper than buying new games and gaming machines now and then, while still offering the same quality that dedicated local hardware can give you.

    Something's gotta give, and my guess is that it's gonna be quality.

  • PearOfAnguish #202 3 years ago

    Why would you know about it?

    Er, because companies announce big deals like that as it raises their share price, and insiders leak details of said deals to newspapers and web sites?

    They are going to be running gaming specific servers with Quad SLI top of the line GPUs, 32 gigs ram, multiple quad cores and SCSI hard drives. Then they are going to split those into a number of virtual PCs for the game. That server alone I just mentioned can probably run 16 instances of GTA4 at 720P resolutions.

    Have you ever tried to run a game through a virtualised system? They run like crap. You'd be doing well to have a single game playable, 16 is fantasy land. As for those system specs, they best have come up with some fucking fancy-pants software to make the GPUs and CPUs run 16 games at once without reducing it to a stuttering mess. GTA 4 is a fucking pig to run native anyway, let alone 16 instances virtualised.

    They need to release some technical details before we start speculating to that extent.

    Why would they use that for a gaming system first?

    Never mind the massive technical question marks, this alone justifies the scepticism. Are we expected to believe that they've invented this groundbreaking new compression and streaming technology and the first thing that popped into their head was playing videogames? It'd be much simpler to prove your tech worked by streaming high-def video, as adding user-input into all that just complicates things.

  • Freeload #203 3 years ago

    Do you really think the original guys that claimed they could run a car on water meant just pouring it into the tank and off you go?

    Retard.

    All that's happened now is the basic principles of the idea have evolved and they have figured out it's the base elements that make water that they have to use in a certain way to create the effect they were proposing back in the day.

    It's not like they claimed it ran on tomato sauce and suddenly they switched to Hydrogen mixed with Oxygen and claimed that's that same thing.

  • busboy33 #204 3 years ago

    @baranga:
    "Again, why would they create something like this if it doesn't work? Do you really think they fooled all those companies? Do you really think this is a scam, while the world is watching them?"
    I want to be very clear on what you're saying -- do you think that a company would not make public claims they can't back up? Or promise something that they can't (yet) deliver on?
    That's whatI'm reading, and it seems a bit circular. They wouldn't do it because they'd get called out on it, so the people calling them out on it must be wrong because they wouldn't risk getting called out.
    You point to the companies that have been "fooled", saying that they're too smart to get suckered so they must know its good. First, tell that to Trip Hawkins' 3DO partners. Second, depending on the "agreement", the other companies might not give a damn if it works or not:
    "Hey Activision! I want to pay you money to play your games over my vaporware. You don't have to do anything -- just let my buy and use your existing games for a fee. There's no risk of the games being pirated. No cost, no risk, potential for profit? What do you say?"
    "Uhhhh. . . sure. Why not?"
    The only thing that seems sure from their model is that hte games can't be pirated, so the companies IP isn't at risk. As has been noted, it sounds like OnPlay is using pre-existing game code, so there's no cost for the developer to make a port. I would asume OnPlay pays the companies, then recoups the costs through the user's fees -- it doesn't make much sense for software developers to pay OnPlay to make money renting their game out. Why wouldn't a developer say "you get it to work, you can pay us to use our games"? If the system is vaporware, then there's no loss to the developer.

    Maybe it does work -- but just because a PR dude says it does doesn't make it true.

  • polaris70 #205 3 years ago

    @Freeload
    Thats fair enough, they've managed to keep it a secret for a number of years but I'm not buying into that either, this is the era of blogs and big mouths. The more I think about it the more sceptical I get, and nothing you have said is changing my mind, unfortunately.

  • Freeload #206 3 years ago

    @PearOfAnguish

    Have you ever tried to do anything like they are doing?

    How the hell would you know a single thing about how they are handling this.

    You are using examples of stuff you know on something you know nothing about.

    I once inserted a videotape into a slot to watch a film. Is that how I run a 3D movie in and Imax theatre?

    I don't have any clue about Imax theaters but I once inserted a videotape into a slot so it's probably the same thing right?

    I mean I'm probably and authority on Imax 3D cinema now.

  • Freeload #207 3 years ago

    Did you hear anything about the Wii MotionPlus before it was shown?

    Did you see or hear anything about the new Zelda DS game before Nintendo showed it?

    Did you know that EA, Take Two, Ubisoft etc were working with these guys in any way shape or form before they announced it the other day?

    Then it simply cannot be real.

    Someone who works at Rockstar North in a high up position didn't know there was a DS version of GTA in the works until they brought in a copy from Rockstar Leeds for the Edinburgh Qa team to test. Did you know that?

    These things can and do happen and you are as likely to know as any other joe nobody.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 23:45

  • Ryze #208 3 years ago

    You're talking SHIT mate.

    James Bond flew in a hydrogen powered jetpack several decades ago. The waste product was WATER.

    This is real technology - but it isn't practically or commercially VIABLE to be placed into mass production yet.

    Hydrogen cars need Hydrogen. Where does this come from? Why, WATER - but how do you separate it? Using ENERGY, from somewhere else. So - it just moves the pollution to somewhere else, at the moment.

    Just like this streaming idea just moves the expense to the server farm. It's still hideously expensive to run, and doesn't work too well considering our current broadband infrastructure. Just like hydrogen cars and how they're impractical given our current energy/fuel infrastructure.

    These are very interesting technologies, and they WILL gain momentum - but we already KNOW about them, and we know their shortcomings.

    Just because you've just got Sky Digital - stop telling me about shows that have been on repeat for the past 3 fucking years.

    You 'tard.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 23:46

  • Freeload #209 3 years ago

    No.

    James Bond was suspended on wires and that thing he was attached to was a prop.

    Turnip!

    [link url=http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=TOfzbaglUOo
    ]http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=TOfzbaglUOo
    [/link]

    Sooner than you think...


    The technology has been ready for years. Just because there are people like you who are not ready to take the leap that doesn't make the technology any less real or viable .

    Just because not everyone in the world has high speed broadband that doesn't mean their system doesn't work. That's just logistics.

    They never claimed such things as everyone can use it perfectly etc. They claimed that if you meet certain criteria in terms of the connection you have and the hardware and you download their application and so on, then it will work.

    There's nothing yet that anyone has said that has convinced me that much is not accurate.

    They even stated you would have to be within a certain distance of the servers due to the time, speed of light etc, and that is why they used the 1000 miles statement and not that you would have perfect lag free gaming across the known universe and so on.

    From what I have read and watched I'm going to choose to believe most of what they are saying, give or take a few details, and believe that the service exists in a form pretty much as they say it does and that it does pretty much what they say. I'm going to believe that at worst the service will offer SD gaming on demand with none of these issues that everyone else is bringing up, based on what I have seen, and for me that's all good.

    It may not be 1080p 120fps motion controlled virtual reality but it seems to me that I should basically expect the equivalent of what I got last gen on say my GC, in terms of res and framerate etc, running on my TV directly and streaming from online somewhere, with no need to upgrade hardware or download patches, with cross compatibility etc etc.

    Sounds pretty sweet and just as groundbreaking as they claim.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 00:00

  • Ryze #210 3 years ago

    ^ What a fucking 'tard we have in our midst:

    http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Rocket...

    http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderball...

    1965! Amazing, eh?!

    Cock.
    Edited by 2 at 27/03/09 @ 00:00

  • polaris70 #211 3 years ago

    All I can say is put any spare cash you have into Intel, AMD and Nvidia if you believe this nonsense. Because they will be selling millions of CPU's and video cards over the coming months, or will they? I'm sure these companies wont give a sh*t whether they are selling to the public or to server clusters. If this OnLive service is true or bullsh*t you probably find out with the said companies share prices over the coming months.
    Edited by 1 at 26/03/09 @ 23:55

  • PearOfAnguish #212 3 years ago

    @PearOfAnguish

    Have you ever tried to do anything like they are doing?

    How the hell would you know a single thing about how they are handling this.

    You are using examples of stuff you know on something you know nothing about.

    You do know I was replying to someone's speculation about system specs, and that I did state that such speculation was pointless until we knew more about the technical details?

    You need to calm down, pal, you're starting to sound like a proper foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic.

  • hiddenranbir #213 3 years ago

    I honestly can't see our UK ISPS willing to commit their already peaking bandwidth to this. Especially when they're still in the process of trying to keep up with the current demand.

  • McP #214 3 years ago

    If I was to make my own onlive service here's how I would do it:
    1) License this software: [link url=http://www.streammygame. com
    ]http://www.streammygame. com
    [/link]
    2) Build 1000 half-decent PCs at a cost of £500 each (total = £0.5m). With a contention ratio of 10:1 that allows me to have 10,000 customers.
    3) Sell the service at £30/month
    4) Assuming I get all 10,000 customers, after 1 year I've made £3.2m, enough to cover my initial purchase of PCs & other costs.

    Clearly I'm greatly simplifying here, but I think it demonstrates the point that this service is feasible.

  • Freeload #215 3 years ago

    @PearOfAnguish

    You sound a bit like a rapist but who am I to say what you are capable of.

  • Ryze #216 3 years ago

    ^ I watched that clip when it was first broadcast - you cock. You're not teaching anyone anything, you 'tard.

  • polaris70 #217 3 years ago

    @hiddenranbir
    Have you ever watched BBC iplayer? Its video is just about watchable even though I get enormous amounts of blocking on it with a 10meg connection. the video is already encoded with no alterations needed. Now imagine a game were the video needs to be encoded 60 times per second not to mention the processing required from your inputs and the uploading of that! Jesus, give me strength. These guys might as well have said they've invented interstellar travel.

  • PearOfAnguish #218 3 years ago

    Shush now, Freeload, it's quiet time. Go have a sit down and a nice cup of tea.

  • Spekingur #219 3 years ago

    You can have non-polluting power plants. Windmills, dams, ocean-thingies and probably more. Those in turn can help create other non-polluting sources. However, in any kind of production process there is always waste.

    As for On-Live. This is a nice idea. Humans have gotten things to Mars so why should this be a problem? ;)
    Also, the video feed itself just goes on the same basis as IPTV and VOD through IPTV. VOD has stop, pause, fastforward, etc and those controls have immidiate effect. I see no reason why this shouldn't work as well. Besides the obvious problem of the machines running the games.

  • Freeload #220 3 years ago

    @Ryze

    So I was wrong about a movie prop...but somehow I feel it just kind of validates my point about the water based car all the more...

    I'll take that.


    The time it's taken for this to become commercial, and it still isn't really, doesn't change the fact that those guys were pretty much right all along.

    The difference with OnLive of course is that they were telling everyone behind the scenes about the basic idea 7 years ago and in a few months we will be beta testing it and then hopefully shortly after that it will be out in the real world.

    That's what they are claiming and so far I still don't see a single thing that convincingly shows me otherwise.

  • Freeload #221 3 years ago

    @PearOfAnguish

    And you're possibly controlling and violent too.

    I mean you don't know me and you're telling me not to speak and what to do.

    That's quite frightening.

    I hate to think what you might do to someone in the same room as you if you didn't like what they were saying.

  • Ryze #222 3 years ago

    He's just got bad DNA. He can't help it.

    /gives up

  • PearOfAnguish #223 3 years ago

    Have the meds not taken effect yet, Freeload? You should take the whole bottle just to be certain.

    "VOD has stop, pause, fastforward, etc and those controls have immidiate effect. I see no reason why this shouldn't work as well."

    The difference there is that you're just pressing a single button every so often, whereas in a game you might be hammering buttons and pressing analogue sticks and all the rest of it. That's a lot more input to handle, and reaction time is massively important in fast-moving games, even the slightest lag would be enough to deter a lot of gamers.

  • polaris70 #224 3 years ago

    @speakingur
    Because going to Mars is feasible if you know what force you need to get out of Earths gravity which was known in the 18th Century. Yet we still didn't get to Mars until the middle of the 20th Century, do you see a theme here with stages of technology?
    Now, run a fibre-optic cable from my house to every other house on the planet and what OnLive is proposing might just work because it bypasses all the bottlenecks in the system. Either that or someone at OnLive is of Einstein genuiss who just happened to have kept it quiet for the last seven years. To be honest, I don't even think Einstein could make this work.

  • Freeload #225 3 years ago

    @polaris70

    Look, I can't say about anything else but they had it running live on the show floor at GDC, supposedly from their server 50 miles away, and no one so far has said it didn't work. They have the games running across multiple platforms, including Mac, and Crysis isn't even on Macs so I've been told. They had the conference with all the interface being demoed. They officially announced that major publishers are already supporting them, so something must have convinced them of the service for them to jump on board. I mean these publishers are not completely retarded you know. they are veterans in the industry and have track records of successful products and services. They are letting people sign up for the Beta now. They have given solid dates (although whether they will stick to those is a different matter, but that doesn't mean it's not real, it's just they might do a Nintendo on us). They took the time to answer any concern anyone came up with with.

    They can't do much more to convince us that that, until it's actually out and by that point they don't have to convince anyone because it's out.

    I say they have provided enough proof for the stage they are at and all you people who are still doubters are clearly the type of people who just want to doubt everything because you are negative about everything unless you get to experience it too.

  • Freeload #226 3 years ago

    @PearOfAnguish

    And apparently you possibly also like to prey on those who are weak and sick and need medication, simply for your own pleasure and amusement.

    You are probably racist too and sexist and discriminate without thought.

    It just gets worse and worse.

    I'm off to bed :)

  • PearOfAnguish #227 3 years ago

    Assuming it all worked as promised, would you want to give up your console and/or computer? I like having my Xbox there for video and music as well as games, and when something goes wrong I can take the disc out and hit it. The PS3 does all kinds of cool media centre things. And I like having a collection of games on the shelf. Do you want to lose all that for a system that relies on your internet connection being 100% reliable?

  • PearOfAnguish #228 3 years ago

    Well I can't deny that, Freeload, I am the sexiest.

  • polaris70 #229 3 years ago

    @Freeload
    They have provided absolutely no proof accept from a controlled environment and taking them on their word. I hope this works, I really do but I will wait until the end of the year when we will have at least some proof with a public beta test. I hope they succeed but until they do I'll file it under 'cold fusion', not because I'm heartless but because I'm sceptical of guys standing up on a stage introducing technology that doesn't exist or is 50 years in the future. I stand to be corrected, I hope they do it.

  • Ryze #230 3 years ago

    VOD also uses caching and hard drives to manipulate linear media. It wouldn't matter if there was a delay, but there's not because pressing pause just pauses the video as it's being displayed on your local machine. rewinding just backs up to the cached video on the HDD or in RAM.

    Your inputs on a gaming system need to be picked up by the server and interpreted by the game, with the results being encoded, then forwarded to you as a compressed moving image.

    Pausing that image, or even recording it would be very easy, if required for any reason. Different concept.

    I'll enjoy watching this develop.

    It has to beat the Wii and 360 (in terms of quality / cost / reliability / convenience), to be viable. Integration with other living room devices such as TVs and digital boxes will probably be key.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 00:47

  • Syneisha #231 3 years ago

    IPTV is available in many places outside the US, including the UK in the form of BT Vision.

    Edit: Man, that makes me sound like some viral marketer... but yeah.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 00:52

  • niteninja #232 3 years ago

    Lot of tech heads here think this wont work maybe they are right,but Ive look at this from a simple point of view that nobody else has mentioned.
    Would all those big name publishers have backed this if they wernt confident in it?
    they must have been very impressed with what they have seen to have jumped onboard.

  • VicViper #233 3 years ago

    Ok so if they have really got this tech working why in gods name would the have kept it to this type of service, every media distribution company on the planet would want to license it, they would be rich from that alone. Is all just to good to be true.

  • Ryze #234 3 years ago

    They want a cheque - that's all. They only need to licence their PC games and collect a cheque. They don't care.

    I wouldn't!

    This is now a tardmagnet, so I'll leave it.

  • niteninja #235 3 years ago

    So ea would back any crap?
    Publishers would not sign up to this unless they were confident it would work.
    If the military can fly remote drones from thousands of miles away using data streams this can be pulled off.
    Its going to take military technology to get this working.
    Edited by 2 at 27/03/09 @ 01:03

  • polaris70 #236 3 years ago

    @niteninja
    Maybe thats why so many wedding parties have been bombed. They thought they were over the hill in the caves, but they didn't factor in the lag, lmao
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 01:05

  • niteninja #237 3 years ago

    Seven years of secret development?
    Did the department of defence allow onlive access to military computers to build this thing?
    Public tech is 10 years behind.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 01:26

  • polaris70 #238 3 years ago

    I think you've been reading too much Area 51 pal.

  • schachmatt #239 3 years ago

    The game companies don't invest anything, they just gave them the right to use their software at the moment, surly because they don't want to be left out whenever those people can come up with the real thing.

    The investors and Perlman will make money with stock, patents and selling assets. Nobody will have to run. They will found another company and when they come up with another thing a lot of people will say admiringly they were the ones coming up with server-side gaming.
    Stupid small-time investors easily impressed will be the primary losers. But nobody cares about them anyway.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 01:53

  • MyPointIs #240 3 years ago

    Well ... time will tell, but I do think this article was retarded exactly by the same reasons my poor friend Freeload pointed out.

    Time will tell. My bet is that the earth is pear-shaped :)

  • rauper Verified Managing Director, Eurogamer Network #241 3 years ago

    I personally think this article is on the money, but I think it'll be interesting to see what happens. I spoke to someone involved in the project today at GDC, who said:

    1. It'll be a US-only launch [so this is all a bit of a moot topic for most of us!]
    2. They have already done deals with ISPs to put servers directly into their facilities, so theyll be close to the users
    3. He's used it on a 3mbit connection and it's worked fine
    4. They expect to be the 2nd biggest consumer of bandwidth in the world within 12 months (presumably Google is #1?)
    5. They have created their own custom blade servers which can run multiple instances of the game (1000 game sessions in a single server rack)
    6. They have $100m in funding
    7. It takes one week to take a game from a publisher and port it to their server platform
    8. They are well aware of the other uses for this technology but gaming is the first interesting app.

  • sanctimoniousqf #242 3 years ago

    Dear lord, some people will believe anything. Even their website screams "VAPOURWARE!"... look at the positions that they are hiring for...

    Operations:
    Network Engineer

    Engineering:
    Embedded multimedia engineer
    Games SDK engineer
    Mechanical/Thermal engineer

    Those "open" positions are pretty much the types of people that would tell you why it cannot be done with current technological limits (the-last-mile, heat generation and dissipation dynamics, cluster failover, etc). I wonder what the patents describe, and whether they have the video compression working in anything other than highly controlled environments...

    The first 10 minutes of the presentation (all I've watched so far, but have read a lot of the articles floating around about it already, and am an online engineer myself) list multiple technical challenges that simply cannot scale with today's, or even tomorrow's, technology. Virtualizing that many game instances in parallel whilst maintaining a level of interaction that is acceptable is not a linear scale-up, as anyone with parallelization experience would be able to tell you. They may well have gotten real-time compression of a non-linear video output down to 1ms, but that will not hide the problem of input lag to the server, which will be around 50ms at best (3-4 frames at 60fps), game simulation of 17ms (1 frame at 60fps), video compression time of 1ms (which I am assuming to be best case with no other instances vying for contention time), relay to the client (50ms, again at best) and decompression time, which you can BET is not going to be 1ms - let's be generous and assume 10ms... it is, after all, hardware decompression :)

    So all in, you're looking at:
    50ms + 17ms + 1ms + 50ms + 10ms == 128ms

    Best case.

    Not too bad. Most online game now rely on that kind of delay in order to provide synchronization between peers. But...

    ...that's best case. And a single instance. Add virtualization costs, context switching multiple instances of virtualized sessions, maintaining said instances in huge banks of memory (you cannot cache them - fetching them from virtual memory would be a huge performance hit), compression of multiple non-contiguous video streams, transmission of multiple compressed video streams, storage and restoration of "paused" sessions, etc, etc, and you have now got to face and handle a multitude of technical challenges that a lot of very smart (and specialized) people have been working for many years to overcome. 7 years and this relatively small company have got the video compression problem licked? That's the least of their problems, and one that would have solved itself gradually over the years with increased computational capabilities and exponentially decreasing silicon manufacturing costs. The scaling problems are far more challenging and require several technological paradigm shifts before they can be realized, but must be overcome before the system is viable for the mass-market.

    The only question now is how many VCs will they fool into parting with their money before the impossibilities of what they are proposing are accepted...

  • Elrabin #243 3 years ago

    Rauper,

    in responce to your points, i offer the following from the perspective of a Senior Windows and VMware Engineer. I specialize in blade servers and virtualization

    1. It'll be a US-only launch [so this is all a bit of a moot topic for most of us!]

    No arguement from me here

    2. They have already done deals with ISPs to put servers directly into their facilities, so theyll be close to the users

    Alright, plausible, but i have my doubts, I don't see ATT, Verizon, Comcast, COX, Cablevision being terribly receptive to oodles of bladeservers shoehorned into their datacenters

    3. He's used it on a 3mbit connection and it's worked fine

    Haven't used the service, can't comment.

    4. They expect to be the 2nd biggest consumer of bandwidth in the world within 12 months (presumably Google is #1?)

    I severely doubt this, the sheer costs involved with building a server infrastructure that large is insane.

    5. They have created their own custom blade servers which can run multiple instances of the game (1000 game sessions in a single server rack)

    I find this particular point HIGHLY unlikely. 1000 game sessions in a single server rack? A standard rack is 42U of rackspace.

    The most space-efficient blade design i know of its the HP Bladecenter C-class, it fits 16 server blades into a rack space of 10u. Thus, you could fit 64 blades in a single rack, this is NOT counting any SAN, which you would have to have.

    The most powerful blade available is the HP ProLiant BL680c G5 server blade, which supports 4x 6-core Xeon e-7450 2.4ghz CPUs with a max of 128gb of ram.

    Now, keep in mind, although this system has a total of 24 processing cores with 128 gb of ram, it has NO VIDEO CARDS to speak of.

    There is absolutely no way in hell you could fit a single, let alone multiple Nvidia 9xxx or 2xx series or ATI 3xxx or 4xxx series cards into a blade. There isn't physical space for one, there isn't thermal tolerance for another.

    Those Intel Xeon E-7450s have a 90watt TDP, so a total of 360 watts of thermal dispersion is needed for all four.

    For comparison, the Nvidia GTX 280 has approximately a 300 watt TDP. Yes, THREE HUNDRED watt TDP. For one card. Imagine now the cooling issues with a system with 2 GPUs, or 4 or god forbid 8. Quad-SLI is a strain on the cooling system of a fullsize tower, its impossible in a blade.

    Even if i give them benefit of the doubt and say they're using Nvidia's TESLA external GPU concept, that opens another can of worms. Those are horrendously expensive. $1300 per card, which is basically an Nvidia 280gtx with 4gb vram.

    The only one i can find for sale is this.

    http://www.tycrid.c om/?page_id=33
    $9k for 4 GPUs which aren't even designed for gaming in the first place! They're designed for CUDA!

    The final problem is how are they going to run multiple instances?

    If VMware and any other virtualization platform that i know of can't do true hardware accelerated 3d graphics, how did these guys do it?

    A startup doing virtualization better than a company(VMware) who does 1.5 billion in sales per year and has a market cap of 20 billion dollars? I don't think so.

    I hope they prove me wrong, but i smell snake oil. Lots of it.

    6. They have $100m in funding

    Barely enough to set up for 20,000 users even going by THEIR highly unlikely estimates of what will run in a single rack.

    Going by the above numbers for blades. The blades alone cost $20k apiece, 64 in a rack. That's 1.28 million for just the blades. It'd be another $54000 per blade for the GPUs if you use the Tesla solution. 1 GPU per core. 6 tesla units at $9k apiece for a total of 24 GPUs.

    $54,000 x 64 blades is another 3.45 million dollars. So, for a "mere" 1000 users, we're already at 4.8 million dollars. Just for the blades, Tesla setup. We haven't yet talked about Blade Enclosures. Data center rental or owning costs. Power. Networking. SAN. Fibre. BANDWITH. Not to mention the costs incurred installing and supporting this beast with Virtualization experts and server experts.

    In hardware alone, you've blown through your 100 million dollars after allowing 20,000 users concurrent. Before any of the other ESSENTIALS that i mentioned above.

    This setup isn't implausible, its IMPOSSIBLE.

    7. It takes one week to take a game from a publisher and port it to their server platform

    Ok, i won't argue.

    8. They are well aware of the other uses for this technology but gaming is the first interesting app.

    *shrug* alright.

  • aggies11 #244 3 years ago

    Here is what they are likely using to do their realtime encoding:

    [link url=http://www .haivision.com/products/mako-hd/
    ]http://www .haivision.com/products/mako-hd/
    [/link]

    A bit of a misunderstanding on what "zero latency" means. Turns out it's marketing speak for "under 100ms latency", which supposedly is the cutoff for hand eye coordination.

    This system is rating at 70ms end-to-end latency, which seems about in line with the figures people have been reporting about OnLive. So it's certainly not "magic".

    That being said, scaling it into something workable for an actual distributed service is something different altogether ;)

  • Freeload #245 3 years ago

    Assuming it wasn't all smoke and mirrors and there was some truth in what they were saying then they already had a working version of this service up and running at GDC.

    If we are to believe what they were saying was true then it was running from a server 50 miles away across multiple machines of different formats (PC, Mac and TV), which they claimed it was capable of doing, and it seemed to work perfectly fine and exactly as described. From every single impression and hands on I have read this version at least worked.

    So if you believe that much so far, and quite frankly I have no reason to doubt they could at least do that, then the only problem might be that the version they had was only really set up to work over that 50 mile area and over larger areas it wouldn't work as quite as well.

    So even if that were the case then surely, accepting that everything all the attendees experienced was not an illusion, theoretically a worse case scenario would be that they would have to have one of these servers every 50 miles for the service would work perfectly as described.

    Does that sound about right so far?

    So if we are then to be reasonable and maybe just consider that it is highly likely that if the example shown worked over the 50 miles no problem that maybe it's just possible that 50 miles was well within any potential range limit they have for this service and therefore it could be argued that they don't even need to set up a server ever 50 miles, maybe it could even be as far apart as 100 miles or 300 miles or maybe even as far as they suggested which was in the range of 1000 miles.

    I mean maybe we have all been duped. They could have just been running a few PCs locally with the games on them and just been linking them to the units the attendees were playing. That is indeed possible I suppose.

    I don't believe this that's what happened but it's possible.

    In my opinion it's just as likely that rather than setting up the elaborate scheme and lying to everyone including all the publishers and investors and so on for 7 years that they actually developed something over this 7 year period, and even more years of experiences of this stuff in general, that did in fact allow them to stream a game from 50 miles away and let someone play it on a Mac notebook at GDC...but that's just my thinking.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 08:10

  • Freeload #246 3 years ago

    "Here is what they are likely using to do their realtime encoding:

    http://www .haivision.com/products/mako-hd/ "

    So there is an example of something that sounds remarkably like what OnLive is claiming. It already exists and is already proven to work apparently, and all the OnLive guys really had to have done is find a better way of doing the compression than this example above.

    Does it REALLY sound that implausible that they may have actually done just a little bit better still than the example above...

  • joe90 #247 3 years ago

    @Elrabin (listen to this man.. he knows his stuff, unlike all the kids on here)

    Im a coder that dev's for cloud images. anyways..

    I agree with 99% of all your points.. just a note: they will not need gfx cards.. They will prob just send the gfx to a encoder (i know they gfx cards do more than just render) but i suspect they are banking on multi cpus to do the job of a gpu..

    However, like you I just cannot see this working, without some serious bespoke equipment, any off the shelf stuff is just going to be stupid.

    I hope to be proved wrong.. but based on what i know.. no chance.. !

  • yegon #248 3 years ago

    Hilarious comments thread at times, genuine lol at the believers!

    At best, a few years down the line, it'll manifest itself in a massively compromised, watered down approximation of it's advertised form, by which time 720p will be the equivalent of flash games.

  • PearOfAnguish #249 3 years ago

    Wonder how they're gonna get round the bandwidth problems in the US? The infrastructure over there is far behind even ours, 'broadband' in the US is still commonly a 1-2Mbps connection, with the bigger packages going up to a blazing 6Mbps, and the situation obviously gets worse once you're away from the bigger towns and cities.

  • xcession #250 3 years ago

    I don't want to be a total bastard about this, but there are several uncanny similarities in phrasing and language in this article, to one posted on http://po tentialgamer.com/2009/03/26/onl... several hours before this was posted. "painfully brilliant", "occam's razor", "wait to be proven wrong" ? Fair enough, Richard's article has added a great deal more science and examples, but still.

  • Comet #251 3 years ago

    I understand the skepticism in the article but still I believe they may have achieved sucess.
    First there is already a service that provides something similar but you use your own connection to stream games from your server to whatever device. The service is Streammygame.
    Second regarding the huge undertaking in terms of their services having enough bandwich to answer demand we already got lots of cases of high bandwich demand services that provide very high quality
    streaming to thousands and thousands of users at the same time. Apple TV, Apple Trailers, Netflix, Gametrailers and so on. They have lots of content and there can be thousands of concurrent users. And were not even mentioning high speed networks such as used in Universities and all sorts of high tech firms.
    In terms of being able to encode stuff really quick enough to send it to the user thus having a video with a latency of 1ms this is what I have to say. What he says is true. When creating video codecs latency is not an issue. There really hasn't been many companies interested in creating a codecs suited for this sort of very low latency video.
    Fact is he also does know a lot about what he is talking about. After all he was part of the Quicktime team. But lets not take this into consideration. The truth is that there are companies that already support this and have created this extremely low latency codecs. They are few but they exist. So encoding the info fast enough on the server side should not be an issue. Just google it and you'll find the companies providing this.
    The tricky part is sending it fast enough to the client as we all know it. That is really the big technological achievement but that is possible. Even a service such as Streammygame without any ISP support or anything provides some good results. If you can get access to extremely fast networks and build on top of it you'll have the necessary requirements to deliver your service with almost instant on access.
    There is a reason why they're making a region by region release. Basically this guys need to build they're network just like cable companies or mobile companies create them. As need increases they also create more hotspots. Also they need some pretty fine tuned hardware to achieve this. And that is precisely what they focused on the interviews they've given. They have achieved the necessary quality to provide this quality of service.
    And the fact is they've proved that. They've proved that in both the GDC and to they're partners on closed trials. So the last mile really is just building a bigger and bigger infrastructure to deliver this as number of users increase. Do you really think any ISP will have an issue to provide a client willing to invest on such a network the service they want? What this guys are saying to ISPs is. "Look we need this type of services and were willing to pay for it."
    Did the ISPs turn down on Netflix or other high demand services? No. What they criticize are the services they get no payment for. That is the p2p networks and stuff like that. Those that are willing to pay them they're more than happy.
    So now what about the processing power needed? As the reporter states they'll need extremely powerfull machines running to answer demand. So what? Companies have been building this sort of stuff for some time now and it is possible.

    Final point and I think this may help people get a bit more faith on this. Onlive is not the only company looking into this type of stuff. AMD IS building a super computer capable of streaming games in real time to thousands of users.
    It is called AMD Fusion Render Cloud and is slated to be ready in second half of....2009. Yes this year. Check the articles
    http://bl og.wired.com/games/2009/01/amd-... and http://ww w.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fus...
    What I really do think and this hasn't been anounced, is that in fact Onlive and AMD have a secret partnership that hasn't been anounced yet and the AMD Fusion Render Cloud being built will in fact power the Onlive services. This is me speculating but I find it curious that the dates for each service availability to match so perfectly.
    Anyway being that true or not we got two solutions looking to offer the same. If both a major company like AMD and the gaming industry has seen good enough results to see this as a viable direction I think they are in a much better position to say if indeed the time is right for this or not.
    Fact is Onlive already showed they have a product. Reporters could try it and it DID work even if in a close enviroment. BUt it worked. Now it is only a matter of time.

  • hiddenranbir #252 3 years ago

    plagiarism?!!

    Or like minded people?

    I do not know. :(

  • PearOfAnguish #253 3 years ago

    Technical hurdles are the least of their worries, I think a more pertinent question is: who is going to pay for this?

    It's going to offer 720p at best, assuming you have a very fast connection. For many people in the US and the rest of the world that's not going to be possible, so it'll be streaming SD quality visuals.

    Given the choice, would you go for a console that's capable of up to 1080p quality with games you own, or a streaming game box thing that'll give you 720p under optimum conditions, but more often SD 480p, and relies entirely on your internet connection being stable? We already know gamers are graphic whores, can anyone seriously say they'd swap their PS3 or Xbox 360 for a box with a subscription that will give them poorer visuals?

    If they have this working as claimed they should be looking at arcades and internet cafes as a potential market, not home users.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 10:49

  • VicViper #254 3 years ago

    I find your lack of lack of faith distrubing...

    Force Choke!

  • Jos #255 3 years ago

    If gamers are graphics whores why is the Wii doing so much better than everything else?

  • PearOfAnguish #256 3 years ago

    "If gamers are graphics whores why is the Wii doing so much better than everything else?"

    Because it has mainstream, family appeal and a unique gimmick that allows you to play games in a different way to other systems. OnLive is the same games as your console or computer, but with poorer visuals.

    And yeah, most gamers do care about graphics. Do you actually think your average PS3 or Xbox owner would swap their console for a internet box that does SD visuals? SD looks like shit on a modern HD TV. I sure as hell wouldn't give up my 1920x1200 res PC monitor.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 11:24

  • ukslim #257 3 years ago

    @PearOfAnguish: "Given the choice, would you go for a console that's capable of up to 1080p quality with games you own, or a streaming game box thing that'll give you 720p under optimum conditions, but more often SD 480p, and relies entirely on your internet connection being stable?"

    Assuming my internet connection is already stable (and Demon/BT seem to be in the habit of increasing its speed at the same price without even asking) - then the rest depends on price.

    Yes I'd like to play something as pretty as Crysis at 1080p - but not enough to pay for a suitable PC. If I could play a reasonable approximation of it for a fiver's weekend rental, that's a sale.

  • sneetch #258 3 years ago

    @Elrabin

    Good, compelling stuff.

  • bloodflowers #259 3 years ago

    You forgot traffic shaping which is becoming more and more common at ISPs. That'll kill it stone dead, even without all the other 'challenges' faced by this blatant attempt at fishing money out of silly venture capitalists.

  • Ryze #260 3 years ago

    ^ traffic shaping shouldn't be a problem if they're in partnership with ISPs, with kit on the ISPs premises.

    I'd still be astonished if this works well with high speed, graphically intense games.

    Comet,

    VOD services - or even broadcast services for live video only have to encode the video stream once, before sending it out or storing it for everyone to recieve the same thing. This service would be sending a unique stream to each player.

    This means that you can't dream of an efficient multicasting utopia - everyone needs their own real-time & low (/zero) latency, 60fps, 720p stream.

    Again, I'd love to see this work - and for many casual game types it will likely be fine - and perfect to be integrated with a TV service or similar, but to take on the 360 and its successors?

    I'd be VERY pleasantly surprised if they're anywhere near doing this on a large scale. Can't see it happening for many years - and the competition wont be standing still.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 13:38

  • decays #261 3 years ago

    This is not a new concept. I remember reading about a startup wanting to do the same thing back in Edge magazine around issue 8 (I don't remember which one but it was early on).

  • Ryze #262 3 years ago

    Means fuck all until they demonstrate it working on a mass scale. This isn't easily scalable like broadcasting digital TV.

    There's much more work involved in the video processing, encoding and streaming requirements. Again - this is fine for playing simpler games, or if lower quality is acceptable.

  • Bennicus #263 3 years ago

    Anyone remember Ageias promises of revolutionary physics-based gameplay? Plenty of "professional" developers and publishers signed up to that scheme, because it cost them nothing and they get a decent free SDK and some extra press coverage. Ageia then gets to put some developer logos on their website in order to convince you of its future success.

    Now they never "lied", but we seem to have missed this gameplay revolution. Perhaps their hardware could simulate 10 million boxes in real time, but after that you have the real-world problem of actually rendering 10 million boxes in your game, plus of course the many gameplay balance concerns with so much non-deterministic behaviour running about ruining everything.

    Seems like much the same issue here, there's no reason what they claim can't be done to a certain extent but the issues of server hardware cost & heat, and network latency put some very real limits on how far they can go at the moment. And $100 million dollars may sound like a lot but you can't just buy cheap desktop pcs and pile them all up in a datacentre, I believe the cost of server hardware has been covered pretty well further up.

  • tw.ed.uk #264 3 years ago

    Another engineer chiming in here - I'm an electrical engineer involved in signal processing, among other things.

    I read the Eurogamer article, and it's pretty accurate. The journalist responsible for it seems to have a good understanding of the technical issues. Elrabin's comments above are spot on. The whole scheme, as advertised, is simply impossible at present both due to economic and technical limitations.

    In my opinion, OnLive will at best be another example of a "successful" dot-com startup based on horseshit and lies:

    1. Secure a pile of investment money from gullible people who don't have access to expert technical advice.
    2. Pay founders enormous salaries along with company cars, benefits etc.
    3. Spend initial capital.
    4. Issue excuses and attempt to secure additional funding. If unsuccesful, go to step 6.
    5. Spend additional funding.
    6. Wind up the company.

    I say "successful" because the object of such an enterprise is not to achieve any kind of success in the market, but simply to enable the founders to pay themselves enormous salaries.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 15:18

  • Kerome #265 3 years ago

    Well, I'm a game programming lead with several AAA titles under my belt, and I have to say that although Elrabin's analysis looks mostly right - the data center costs will be huge, and GPU usage is a major obstacle - there are ways I can see this working from a technical pov, by restricting the range of titles that are available on the service.

    If they're willing to do that, by disallowing any games that use too much CPU grunt (so that they can fit multiple game instances onto a server chip), and they make some compromises on graphic quality by using blades fitted with several low-end mobile chipsets, then perhaps it could work. The approach for sound would have to be the same as for graphics, as you'd need to stream that as well.

    But the question is, is it economically viable? Most people playing these games have paid for the platform as well as the games they currently play standalone, and even considering economies of scale the initial outlay to absorb the infrastructure costs - because you definitely can't charge that up-front to the consumer - on a server-side project like this would be massive. Then you'd have to convince enough consumers to actually pay for bandwidth and maintenance costs on your data center while you struggle towards profitability - it sounds like a very tough ask, a little akin to starting up an mmo built out of 100's of third-party publisher products (who of course will all want their cut).

    From a player's point of view the idea of play-anywhere has questionable value, the social patterns of playing games just don't require it for the mainstream, and the fact that the platform is remotely upgradeable is not much of a win if you can't exploit it through graphics. Plus the latency and low res will make it inherently inferior. And on top of all that you're still going to need custom hardware at the user end for the input - be it console controllers or keyboard - and an upstream pipe to get that data to the server.

    I'm sure they had something working at GDC - hell, given an 8 mb ADSL line and a full gaming PC sitting remotely that would not be too hard to arrange - but the question is "will it scale".

    It's the kind of thing that might find applications in set-top TV boxes or the like, but really I'd expect the next gen consoles to kill this idea pretty quickly when they start invading the living room.
    Edited by 2 at 27/03/09 @ 16:33

  • Xcite79 #266 3 years ago

    Great Article. Just registered because of this article. I have to add that this would kill the idea of import titles. Nobody can enjoy Japanese titles that would never come here. If anyone really takes this as a great cheap alternative because the miss out on a lot of games, go freakin get a subscription at blockbuster to pay 25 dollars monthly or get gamefly! It would obviously be cheaper than OnLive's monthly subscription. Last note. I love physical meda. I actually feel I bought something and can play it ANYTIME and ANYWHERE.

  • Elrabin #267 3 years ago

    @joe90

    Thanks for your comments, however, this point of yours confuses me no end

    "I agree with 99% of all your points.. just a note: they will not need gfx cards.. They will prob just send the gfx to a encoder (i know they gfx cards do more than just render) but i suspect they are banking on multi cpus to do the job of a gpu.. "

    Of course they need graphics cards! An Nvidia Geforce 280 GTX is MASSIVELY powerful compared to even a Core i7 in both parallelism and cores.

    Core i7 is 4 cores at 2.66, 2.93 or 3.16ghz.

    GTX 280 is 240 cores at 600ish(depending on factory clock or overclock speed) with a wider bus and faster memory.

    There isn't a CPU on the market that can turn polygonal models to final textured/shaded/lighted pixels the way a GPU can.

    GTX 280 is 1.4 billion transistors, 933 GFLOPS

    Intel Core i7 965 XE, the fastest PC processor (quad-core) perform over 70 GFLOPS

    We're talking a $300 graphics card vs a $1000 CPU. And the GPU wins hands down in raw performance. Ok, it can't handle as broad an instruction set as a CPU, but its a massively parallel system.

    you'd theoretically need 14 Intel Core i7 965s to match the processing ability of one GTX 280.

    Thats also assuming you could figure out how to run DX9 and DX10 code natively on your CPU.

    They have to be rendering the game, it HAS to be by CPU.


  • mobile1 #268 3 years ago

    Ok Dude

    I live in SF and yesterday visited the Dev Conference.. and played ONLive on one of the 4 systems they had setup.
    First, there was no space to have any hardware anywhere nearby so it was piped in externally.
    Second, There are no artifacts whatsoever - it looks like the real thing.. graphically you can't tell a difference.
    Third, there is a slight lag... its not enough to get bothered but it is noticable. I think its too much for your hardcore gamer.. however for 80% I think they'll put up with it....
    So I think it's time to eat your words. The compression works, they cracked that, the thing was running on this little box hardware... it was pretty obvious how the tvs were hooked up.. so no smoke and mirrors there.

    So here is my suggestion before you write crap like this.. just check it out or listen to what people say who actually saw it.. ok.

  • Ryze #269 3 years ago

    So... you had noticable lag on the game, and this was with you and probably 20 other people (if that many) using it at the same time, and the server only 50 miles away.

    So we should eat our words?

    riiiiiight.

  • Bennicus #270 3 years ago

    I dont think anyone here is denying the existence of some sort of working demo at GDC???

  • Muppet64 #271 3 years ago

    Having worked with video editing/compression with digital media for around 20 years, this was pretty much what was going through my mind also, but not so succinctly
    We wait with baited breath...

  • SuperNashwan #272 3 years ago

    wilkl ity have teh power of sixaxis ?

    RIP Jade, you are an angle who must be kissin jesus now xxxx

  • Bennicus #273 3 years ago

    lol

  • Ryze #274 3 years ago

    :D

  • Reikon #275 3 years ago

    Mbps, not MBps. There's a big difference. 5 MBps would be the same as the video on a Blu-ray.

    Not to mention, I don't know why you're doubting whether the video encoding speed is possible or not. It was already demonstrated, wasn't it?

    Latency is the biggest issue they have to overcome.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/09 @ 17:53

  • muzzer77 #276 3 years ago

    Bloody hell, we get latency problems on games when the console is in our homes, i can't imagine this being any better. Future, yes. Distant Future.

  • Ryze #277 3 years ago

    There's way too much fluff in the video presentation as well.

    If they wanted to avoid a 'bullshit' backlash, then they'd be putting more effort into showing how this thing scales up, and how they've managed to get the video streaming tech to work so quickly.

    I'm not interested in Geni4 or how good the pre rendered Benjamin Button visuals look. Cool, but fuck all to do with sending 720p Crysis game visuals to 1000s of people concurrently.

    I'd like to build some faith in this exotic tech. I love new technology - especially when I get to learn how they cracked it and gain an understanding.

    The issue here, is that those that defend it probably don't have a clue how a TV even works. They see most electronics and computer tech as magic boxes that get better every few years.

    The Playstation 2,3 & P were hyped based on these 'tards willingness to blindly follow this nonsense. I really HOPE that there has been a breakthrough here, and that within a year or so, Sky, BE, Pipex, etc will be promoting their new OnLive partnership, with servers in each major city of the UK.

    Until they do a better job of convincing the logical thinkers in here - I can't be confident.

  • keety #278 3 years ago

    So, what are the odds on this being an artistic scam, to sucker in some foolish hedge funds/rabid fan boys who want to invest in some stock, let the company go tits up in say a years time and pocket $50m followed 6 months later by an odd car crash in the desert, a smashed up Ferrari and a strangled hooker?

    There is not a cat in hell's chance of this ever working. Anyone that thinks it will is clearly fucking delusional.

    Would you like to buy some magic beans?

  • mobile1 #279 3 years ago

    Well when I played on the console, they had 4 consoles in the show.. all being played on.. however there were probably a couple hundred people playing in the cloud... so when you look at the user interfaces.. all the screens are people playing.. you can go into any screen and just spectate... or open your own game.. even when you click on a game you first see about 5 screens underneath with people playing the same title.

    In terms of lag... it was not like running your own game on high end hardware.. there was a tiny lag.. but the lag was not large enough to be a deal breaker.. the games were playable.. however if you wanna kick ass in some of those games.. having no lag gives you a little bit of an advantage.

    Personally the lag was not as large to really bother me, at the end of the day I'd still sign up with'em and not having to run my own hardware, pop in the disc and all that BS.

    So all those critical, the video compression works - the key by the way is hardware as one of the guys explained to me. They have specific hardware that does the encoding on the server side and decoding in the box. But the quality is AMAZING... no artifacts or anything.

    To those about it being a scam.. well guys first grow up and do your research. You don't get 100 mio in funding unless you can put up. Also Steve Balmer is an investor... so forget it this is not a scam, this is here to stay. They deliver the compression technology. Also as they said not all games require the top notch hardware..so they have some advantages there.

    So PLEEEEEASE guys.. there seem to be a lot of 12 year old in here..that have no clue how technology works, how the VC game works. All those being critical you all be eating your own words when OnLive is ripping your gamer rigg a new asshole everytime your machine can't keep up. They are real, and they deliver, and the system ran with a few hundred users... period.

    So you all can talk shit whatever you want.. you haven't seen it life. there is min. lag.. but not bad.. unless you are a real gamer you don't notice it. So stop talking shit guys and start worshipping those guys.. they've just unleashed a revolution.. that will rip your old gamer rig a new a$$hole :-)

  • DerFlange #280 3 years ago

    mobile1

    Pop down the shops and get me some tartan paint and a long stand please.
    Ta.

  • Elrabin #281 3 years ago

    @mobile1

    "mobile1
    27-Mar-09 16:15:42
    Ok Dude

    So here is my suggestion before you write crap like this.. just check it out or listen to what people say who actually saw it.. ok."



    And here is my responce to you Mobile1.

    I don't think that ANYONE is denying that they have this system working on a VERY small scale at GDC.

    But, realistically, if i had 10k or 20k to blow, i could set up a tech demo like this.

    Have 4 game systems, (core i7, 6gb ram, Nvidia 280gtx or ATI 4870) running Crysis hooked up to the video encoder which is hooked up to a high bandwith business line(50 or 100mbps) I have a server handling the Onlive input, piping the controller or mouse/keyboard input to my game systems.

    All thats required on the tech demo end is an equally high bandwith line and any PC with the plugin.

    Voila, i'm now playing the game on game system 50 or 100 miles away.

    No smoke and mirrors, no tricks. It works.

    BUT, there is a LOT of difference between getting this to work on a small scale demo vs getting millions of users on simultaneously.

    Take a look at my above posts as to why they can not POSSIBLY get this system working on a large scale.

    The article was never about "its impossible", its about why Onlive is impossible on the scale that they claim.



    Oh, and mobile, before you say "No one gets 100million in funding without being able to put up"

    Take a look at Infinium and their Phantom console.

    They blew 63 million dollars of investor funding without a working prototype to show for it.
    [link url=http://www. gamespot.com/news/6144631.html
    ]http://www. gamespot.com/news/6144631.html
    [/link]

    So yes, companies that are full of shit can rake in big investments.
    Edited by 1 at 28/03/09 @ 09:18

  • 4thVariety #282 3 years ago

    Being part of the Quicktime team. What is that supposed to mean? Quicktime is mainly a container format, inside you have other codecs, such as Soerenson or mpeg, doing the real compression grunt work. So if he co-developed a proprietary container format for other codes, that is not going to say anything about the quality of the encoding taking place there.

  • keety #283 3 years ago

    Mobil1:

    Sorry mush, you say this place is full of 12 year olds and the you write a post in the style of an illitirate 8 year old, full of text speak and "dudes"

    You say we have "no idea how technology works" really... what technology are you referring to? Gene Splicing? CPU design, Automatic tin opening???

    You are either some blind gullible fool who will believe anythign he's told or fucking rat shit insane. I'm guessing it's a little of both.

    You may have seen a demonstration, but like just about every other demonstration of new gaming devices it's all smoke and mirrors mush. You have no idea if the "hundreds" of other people were actually playing (you yourself said there were only 4 consoles there). More than likely it was just a video feed with no one at the other end.... after all, they were hardly likely to make it look shit for potential investors....

    The people syaing this is mental are the people with some semblance of reality. You clearly have no idea just how much work and equipment would need to go into the backend to even get close to offering what they are suggesting and that's without them breaking all laws of physics on the latency side of things. Many people on here have quite a bit of experience of virtualization and whilst it's bloody good in the enterprise environment it's expensive, and not really scalable to the levels these chimps are suggesting.

    If MS's Live servers fall over when too many people get bought 360's at christmas how on earth will this little company outplan,outperform and fix these issues if one of the largest and most cash free companies on the planet cannot do it???

    And being part of the quicktime team?? Ha... it takes ages to encode QT at a decent quality in full HD, and that's on my quad core at home.....how the flying fuck is it expected to say (a conservative figure) compress the video streams of 20k players in REAL TIME???

    It's simple. They can't.

  • voxar #284 3 years ago

    Many argues that the lag will be too high. The article states "it's going to need sub-150 millisecond latency from its servers at least" so I'm a little curious about what the normal ping rates are in the US? 150ms from server to client makes about 300ms in roundtrip ping. I agree that 300 ms input lag is not going to play very well. If that is the state of the internet connections of the US today, onlive probably choose the wrong country to start up in.

  • Ryze #285 3 years ago

    mobile1 obviously hasn't a clue what he's talking about - so there were 200 people playing, eh?

    Where?

    So, because it worked for you 5 people - it's all great and wonderful, and will work as a business. Great.

    I reckon that this technology has great potential, but it will be severely restricted in terms of who can use it, and the types of game it can offer a decent experience on.

    SOME people will be satisfied by this service. A tiny fraction of eligible Americans to begin with. I can't wait for the beta to launch...

  • avoozl #286 3 years ago

    The demo I saw looked pretty lagged especially at certain points. It looked really annoying to me. The guy presenting it kept talking about no lag and basically forced the guy playing to agree with him. Yeah mate, whatever you say.

  • CuriousJoe #287 3 years ago

    I think if it does come out and works as they intended it to work it will be a very limited service. It will probably only be available to certain people within a certain distance from their data centers. Just like how certain internet services over here in the stats aren't available to everyone (FIOS or fiber optics for example). I'am sure they won't just have one data center serving everyone in the world.

  • CuriousJoe #288 3 years ago

    "Many argues that the lag will be too high. The article states "it's going to need sub-150 millisecond latency from its servers at least" so I'm a little curious about what the normal ping rates are in the US? 150ms from server to client makes about 300ms in roundtrip ping. I agree that 300 ms input lag is not going to play very well. If that is the state of the internet connections of the US today, onlive probably choose the wrong country to start up in."

    For me on the east cost I usualy get pings in the 30's to 50's. The highest being the 100's if the server is on the west cost.

  • OnliveFans.com #289 3 years ago

    They are planning on having 2 data centers so that it splits up the country. However I think they will need a lot more as it grows in size.
    Check out OnliveFans.com for future Onlive Gamers
    Edited by 1 at 28/03/09 @ 21:50

  • Funkytown #290 3 years ago

    "This is the fusion reactor of gaming, if this works the world of games will be at peace forever."

    This sums it up beautifully. Permission to use this phrase in future.

  • Ryze #291 3 years ago

    They'll have to peddle this to the casuals by the looks of it so far. I guess in 15 years if I'm too busy paying for my daughter's uni costs or whatever, then I wont be interested in buying the latest physical console and games for the odd play.

    This is something that could come integrated with a TV or set-top box, where I press my Onlive button in the same way I hit the Sky button now.

    The casuals wont care so much about the lag, but they might also be the ones to overlook this service - especially where it comes to paying for the top packages.

    You never know with the mainstream - a hit game or a hit gimmick + decent marketing could change everything.

    The thing is - they still have to prove that this will work well on a mass scale. I have my doubts where it comes to the biggest, memory and storage munching games, with advanced 3D and little tolerance of lag before the game breaks.

    Even Pac Man CE & Bomberman could be broken by this, truth be told. The encode/decode delay and network latency... is there anywhere online where they're trying harder to convince us?
    Edited by 2 at 29/03/09 @ 07:56

  • Weezer #292 3 years ago

    I think this is a great idea, but too ambitious. Why didn't they start with something akin to PS2/GC/Wii-level graphics. That way they aren't throttled by bandwidth and processing power (how many instances of Wii bowling could a top-of-the-range blade server handle??). There are still millions of gamers who, I believe, would have been happy with an SD system that was cheap, fun and provided instant access to a vast library of games. Heck, there are Flash games online that are brilliant - so why set themselves the impossible task of piping Crysis down the twisted copper pair?

    I can't help but agree with the more informed posters that it seems like an improbable - if now downright impossible proposition.

  • SirDrexl #293 3 years ago

    Well, by the time the compression gets through with it, you may very well end up with that kind of graphics quality. We'll see.

    The reason they didn't go for that kind of quality is because it's already served well by those consoles and low-to-midrange PCs. They needed to promise Crysis-level graphics to get people to think this will swallow up the competition. The visions that are dancing in the heads of the supporters of this are of saving a lot of money on computer hardware, and playing state of the art games without having to upgrade.

  • DFawkes #294 3 years ago

    The more articles I read by Richard Leadbette, the more I'm convinced he's one of those guys that makes up stuff in an authorative tone to give the impression he knows more than he does. No matter how much he actually knows, I'm always left with the thought he'd pushed further than he actually knows and was bullshiting, just a little.

    Not that he is lying (this time, I've seen him mislead in a previous article), he's just one of those people.

  • spammage #295 3 years ago

    This technology will dovetail into some future HD video IPTV streaming service which doesn't have the insane hardware and logistics issues. Once broadband connections (on european average) catches up.

  • Ryze #296 3 years ago

    ^ That's more like it. if Sky licenced the service, and had a server in their rack in my local BT exchange, shared with possibly a cache of the most popular HD VOD content to avoid network congestion.

    They could move the servers closer and closer to the users depending on the popularity of the service in a given area. If you're the only one in your area subscribing, then you get to share a server with other users in your nearest town / city.

    A company like Sky could pay for such a scheme. It'd still be crazy running multiple instances of Crysis or the latest cutting edge games, though. Not sure how they'd get around that expense.

    What happens when the next Crysis comes along? Then the next 5 after that? Mass server replacements? Who pays? Once the VOD / IPTV systems can play 480>720>1080 content, they're sorted until 1440p TV becomes available. That gives them decades with income from Sport, Movies and Porn in the meantime.

    So many questions...
    Edited by 2 at 30/03/09 @ 22:25

  • ManicMiner #297 3 years ago

    Here is what I don't get: I'm driving along in RacePro and having to input adjustments to steering, acceleration and braking constantly. Pressing buttons and moving the stick sends electronic signals to the console which get processed in microseconds (or nanoseconds?) and the results reflected back on my TV. Now, if I was using OnLive to play RacePro all the adjustments would have to go through the device, through the router, through the ISPs equipment, through the internet, through OnLive's datacentre **AND BACK AGAIN**. It is physically impossible to do this, you would get microseconds of lag which would make games unplayable. Unless OnLive can predict your inputs. Yup, I'm a doubter on this.

  • YenRug #298 3 years ago

    Might this be OnLive's secret plan?

    http://ww w.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.p...

  • PearOfAnguish #299 3 years ago

    Don't post links to Ctrl-Alt-Del, it's not funny, the art is crap and Tim Buckley is a cock.

    B^U B^U B^U B^U
    Edited by 1 at 01/04/09 @ 09:14

  • paulf #300 3 years ago

    [link url=htt p://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7976206.stm
    ]http://ne ws.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/79...[/link]

    it will work says man who made it ! - it is april first though

    (however I'm not gonna make a judgement till I've actually seen it in action)

  • Ryze #301 3 years ago

    ^ After the continued 'custom silicon' fluff being spouted in that - I would still need convincing that this bloody thing would scale up.

    They say that the naysayers haven't played it. So - nobody has - not with 1000s of people on at the same time, on normal broadband connections. They'll need a beta before that happens.

    I'll look forward to seeing reports on the performance once the beta goes live and has several thousand participants playing at once.

    I'm very interested in us all being proven wrong - as this would mean that a REAL revolution has taken place.

    Once that happens - they'd better break out the VOD porn service if they REALLY want to get rich.

  • Ryze #302 3 years ago

    ^ After the continued 'custom silicon' fluff being spouted in that - I would still need convincing that this bloody thing would scale up.

    They say that the naysayers haven't played it. So - nobody has - not with 1000s of people on at the same time, on normal broadband connections. They'll need a beta before that happens.

    I'll look forward to seeing reports on the performance once the beta goes live and has several thousand participants playing at once.

    I'm very interested in us all being proven wrong - as this would mean that a REAL revolution has taken place.

    Once that happens - they'd better break out the VOD porn service if they REALLY want to get rich.

  • Jos #303 3 years ago

    From BBC article

    ""It's a very ignorant article," said Mr Perlman, who said Eurogamer had conflated issues of frame rate and latency."

    Ouch.

  • YenRug #304 3 years ago

    @PearOfAnguish

    Not a problem; I happen to like his art style and find him funny most of the time, that's my opinion, you have yours. Mine's right for me and yours is right for you.

    On the other hand, however, did you even bother to look at it to see what he said? That was the part that was more applicable to the thread, than what you happen to think of Tim Buckley.

    RE: the BBC interview...

    Well, he's claiming they've resolved the video compression problem, which they might well have done, but still doesn't really answer the whole scalability of systems/storage/cooling that everyone else has brought up.
    Edited by 1 at 02/04/09 @ 13:48

  • jmg123 #305 3 years ago

    I doubt that this is scalable to a level that is economically viable. Also I would love to know about their compression algorithms, as my masters was in image/video processing.

    From the bbc website:

    Mr Perlman said the chip was "high performance for video compression", running at less than 100Mhz clock speed and drawing about two watts of power.

    So they reckon that they could encode using custom silicon running at 100Mhz drawing 2 watts of power in realtime 720p @ 60 fps . Personally I find that very hard to believe. Smells like a scam to me, or maybe that have some entropy busting encoding schemes, but if they get up a system that can serve 20K users at thes specs then I will be the first to apologise.

    Edited by 1 at 02/04/09 @ 15:22

  • raion #306 3 years ago

    chessmaster ultra 75k omega plus will work fine.

  • Freeload #307 3 years ago

    Perlman went on to say, "We are not doing video encoding in the conventional sense". That was in reference to a Eurogamer article. "It's a very ignorant article", he added, noting that the piece 'conflated issues of frame rate and latency'.

    [link url=htt p://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7976206.stm
    ]http://ne ws.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/79...[/link]

    Original source: [link url=htt p://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7976206.stm
    ]http://ne ws.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/79...[/link]

    Just thought I would add that comment in here.

    I'm not saying it means everything they say is going to work perfect but it reflects my view that the article is indeed very ignorant.

    I mean if the OnLive guys claim they have actually developed new technology to do this stuff effectively then really how can the who wrote the article use old technology and methods as a way to prove this can't possibly work.

    That was what always seemed a bit ignorant and narrow minded to me.

    If however the guy writing the article could prove they couldn't possibly have developed a new kind of technology that is superior to what currently exists then maybe this article would actually be valid.
    Edited by 1 at 02/04/09 @ 18:42

  • AOFanboi #308 3 years ago

    <em>I mean if the OnLive guys claim they have actually developed new technology to do this stuff effectively then really how can the who wrote the article use old technology and methods as a way to prove this can't possibly work.</em>

    Because of something called REALITY.

    Latency: Just do a ping to some popular site, and when you see those numbers keep in mind ping uses SMALL packets with HIGH priority in the network. Video streaming from a game company? Not so much. Heck, doing a traceroute tells me I have 1ms just to my home router, let alone to some remoter machine, are they going to magically bypass all electronics to get the speeds they claim?

    Cost: If 16 people are playing Crysis that is a farm of 16 DX10-capable graphics cards chugging away just to serve those few players. PLUS CPU for the game logic, AND the realtime compression of 60 frames per second, AND the bandwidth to send all the data. How much would be the monthly fee to support those 16 players alone? Which ISPs would buy into this (since placing the machines at the ISPs is the only way to make them close enough)? What could POSSIBLY be the business case for the hosters of the OnLive service?

    A company I worked for once thought they were going to save money by retaining old PCs and instead run Winframe or Metaframe to servers elsewhere. The savings on hardware were quickly eaten by needs to upgrade the networks (at some locations they only had 64 kbit ISDN or 56k dialup), and costs in lost productivity as the network becake a much greater point of failure than it had been... Software as a Swearword.

    This is as likely to be something real as cold fusion or quantum medicine (look it up). Except in this climate, VCs are hungry for anything which can be the Next Big Thing and are likely to shower them with money and the "inventors"/"scam artists" can laugh all the way to the bank...

  • m0thr4 #309 3 years ago

    @AOFanboi
    Latency: Just do a ping to some popular site, and when you see those numbers keep in mind ping uses SMALL packets with HIGH priority in the network. Video streaming from a game company? Not so much. Heck, doing a traceroute tells me I have 1ms just to my home router, let alone to some remoter machine, are they going to magically bypass all electronics to get the speeds they claim?

    Apparently their target is below 80ms, that no customer will be more than 1,000 miles from a game server and that they will be getting ISPs to host the servers. I get around 8-10ms pinging my own ISP's servers.

    Cost: If 16 people are playing Crysis that is a farm of 16 DX10-capable graphics cards chugging away just to serve those few players. PLUS CPU for the game logic, AND the realtime compression of 60 frames per second, AND the bandwidth to send all the data. How much would be the monthly fee to support those 16 players alone? Which ISPs would buy into this (since placing the machines at the ISPs is the only way to make them close enough)? What could POSSIBLY be the business case for the hosters of the OnLive service?

    You seem to be thinking in terms of the PC hardware required to play one copy of Crysis, multiplied by the number of people playing it. What you are forgetting is that playing games on personal computers has always been about hammering square pegs into holes that are anything but square.

    For a start, they won't be using off-the-shelf copies of Crysis; they will be using custom versions of the software, designed specifically to run on their server platform. This alone will solve a multitude of performance problems. Given a high-end enterprise server (like the Sun M9000), running a proper multi-threaded, multi-tasking, multi-user os (i.e. not Windows XP/Vista!), I expect much of the hardware could be emulated sufficiently.

    Also, remember that all of the compression (client-side and server-side) is being performed on custom chips that they claim cost $20 to produce.

  • Nemihara #310 3 years ago

    Ooh, this sounds great. Too bad I CANT USE THIS BECAUSE HAWAII-MAINLAND LAG IS SO HORRIBLE.

    "It will perform like LAN." LAN stands for Local Area Network. Local. Did you know that copper wiring, commonly used in ethernet cables, power cords, and other electrical appliances, has quite a bit of electrical resistance? The maximum range for TCP/IP connections is about 100 meters before the signal can't reach the other end of the cable. You'd need tons of little servers to boost the signal, and when these servers boost the signal, the take time to process it to make sure the data is correct. Also known as the VLAN, or as we use this today, the World Wide Web. The bigger the data, the longer it'll take. Unless they're going to tell me that they invented a new protocool that's more effecient than TCP and faster. UDP might have been used, but it's somewhat sketchy considering that there's no guarantee that the data actually arrives.

    You can't compress anything that much without corrupting the file and adding artifacts. Just taking an HD stream from your cable box a few feet away and converting it in and out of a relatively good quality format, you're going to add tons of corruption factors. Sound will degrade, picture will have multicolored squares littering the screen. There's a reason why we can't compress a movie file over and over again and email the file to people. Corruption, sucks. If they invented a method that "new form of compression they created called Interactive HD Video Compression", perhaps they should FUCKING SPREAD THAT? Because that would be a major breakthrough.

    I was on this other forums before, where this one user was asking why there's no way to remote play Halo on his PSP, redirecting screen output and controller input to his PSP. Well, has anyone ever used RDP? Cool, yeah? I love to play around with it at home for my computer when I'm in bed on my iPod Touch. That works because I'm on my WLAN. Wireless LAN. Yay, not much resistance to get past, not much signal boosting, not much servers processing all the information. Plus, since it's MY WLAN, it's not like I have a hundred people all using my network, using up the bandwidth, forcing TCP to slow itself down to avoid data collisions. However, what the kid on the forum wanted to do was to play his Halo PSP at school. At my school, the network outpipe is a T3 connection. That's high end stuff, around 45 MBps. I get about, what, 5 MBps, on my home network? So logically it should be faster? Nope. First, the Xbox would have to get out of the 5 MBps network. That effectively slows the entire process down to 5 MBps, tops. But that's not the big problem. The problem is at my school network, we have hundreds of computers, printers servers, and hell-knows how many wi-fi users all using the same network outpipe. I've done some measurements on our speeds, and it ranges from around 3 MBps to 250 KBps. 250 KB isn't even fast enough to stream music decently (not having to wait 10 minutes for the media to be able to buffer enough to play). Have fun trying to load a game off a network. Even if the game was processed and rendered on thick clients, that speed made the LAN and Internet 2D games of Soldat and 3D games of Half-Life noticeably slow due to lag. That illustrates the problem of the amount of users that OnLive claims to be serving. Granted, the idea of licensing out these superservers out to the ISPs might partially solve that problem, but since when have ISPs and other

    Incidentally, they're claiming that they're compressing the video stream and decompressing each frame as they come to your screen. Yeah. Even if their supercomputer can compute those individual frames and compress them to your OnLive client, which then decompresses it (not even talking about sound or anything, this is just hypothetically if we had a perfect 5 MBps connection with no fluctuations), and these frames all come at you within milliseconds of each other, that's impossible. There are typically 60 frames per second. 30 can be done, but they claim 60 per second for the HD. How much is a standard 720p video frame? 720p is in a 16:9 ratio, 1280 by 720 pixels (hence the name). On a sample image that I took of my desktop and resized to exactly 1280x700 pixels, it measured out to 293.8 KB in JPEG format. If I have a 5 MBps bandwidth, and there's 60 FPS, at the maximum I can have 85.3 KB in any given frame (compressed eh?). So I stuck my 293.8 KB file into GIMP, compressed it in JPEG format to 85.3 KB or less (less would be better, if we're considering sound and player controls. A ratio of about 3.4:1. Compressing my file to that limit, 85.3 KB, made me have to use a compression of 85% quality. Not bad, actually.
    However, my desktop picture is pretty much a black screen with little color on it, not sure if that had any effect on the file size.

    And what about sound? Surround sound? I'm not going to try to do any measurements for that, but that's not exactly small, either. My crappy, lossily-compressed MP3 track of Clint Eastwood - Gorillaz is 10.4 MB. Well, that'll be fun if I ever do attempt to test it.

    Right now, this sounds like an old 50's fad where you'd call a TV station and they'd play Space Invaders for you by pressing the shoot button everytime you said "BANG!" Stupidity arises.
    Edited by 1 at 08/04/09 @ 07:30

  • commonsense #311 3 years ago

    And I assume 500 years ago you would be saying the world is flat.
    It is best that you understand a technology prior to saying it will
    not work. By your own words you admit to being ignorant to the
    technology and your words show it. You use phrases like "I don't
    think" or "I don't buy into" or "I still can't see". These are not
    intelligent statements but merely opinions from an ignorant person.
    Please do you research prior to wasting our time. Or better yet
    just stay on topics where opinion is sufficient like whether you
    enjoyed a game or not.

    The real question is not whether they can do it - but rather how
    can they make a profit. If they need to dedicate a powerful PC
    and graphics card for each client then that will be expensive.

  • andras1944 #312 2 years ago

    any thoughts on the recent Intel Transgaming collaboration??

    http://in telstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/20...

  • t0pz #313 2 years ago

    Good article, but:

    1. OnLive has already cut a deal with two major ISP's in the U.S. Not with the rest of the world, but that's the startup.

    2. Claims of such "revolutionary" technologies are ALWAYS overstated. Why? It's a company, not some dude excited about gaming. They want investors, and a big piece of the market. So they want to sound like the superior provider of all that's been believed to be impossible.
    Of course the actual outcome will only live up to max. half the promised claims, but it will get them onto the right track. I haven't seen a "perfect" solution in gaming, ever. What makes you expect that OnLive will be? It will be another cool approach to gaming, as we have seen before, but nothing more than that.

    3. Again, with such big claims and promises, they may disappoint a lot of end-users, and publishers, but the investors will be in the net, from the start. They will use this to work on solving the issues that are ahead.

    4. You are claiming in your article that thousands and millions of users are going to be using this service when a new game comes out for example. If that is the case, then this technology must have lived up to what it promised in the first place, no? And IF it comes to millions requesting to play at the same time, i'm sure OnLive has collected enough capital to expand and resolve most of the lag issues. It may sound like delusions of grandeur, but it is not impossible, in theory.

    5. Practice always feels different than theory. Of course there will be lag. There is no questions about it, no matter what Mr. Marketing expert tells you in his cool presentation. That's what it takes to get people interested, and to act/buy. Once that is achieved, it won't be hard to keep users attracted (see Steam: Complete fail software, yet one of the largest gaming platforms around. People constantly trying to find work-arounds on how to get Steam and its respective games to work). I see them complaining, but not quitting, so expect the same for OnLive.
    Edited by 1 at 02/01/10 @ 06:42

  • viralarchitect #314 2 years ago

    The perceived time is 80ms. That is, your vision won't spot latency unless it's more than 80ms. They have servers in key locations to overcome the speed-of-light limitation and signed up with all ISPs in the area to avoid their packets being routed. If you can get the frames to the user in 80ms, they will feel like their response is in real-time.

    As for server processing, games processed on your machine have to load the games contents into RAM and process it, however, I assume the platform is not identical to a PC. Perhaps these games were ported in such a way that they don't have as much of a load on the CPU and GPU because the machine is designed just for running games.

  • m1cky69 #315 2 years ago

    I think that perlman is a genius! Onlive will rock! No upgrades on ya pc, no having to buy nrew consoles every 4-5 years and i found out that the price is going to be $15 on http://www.onlive-gamin g.com

  • Eppidemic #316 2 years ago

    I am skeptical, but I think it could work. First of all you have to forget that he said we will be playing on state of the art computers. Thats all marketing. What you can expect is that we will be playing on computers that are powerful enough to play computer games on medium settings with a little AA on. Or even more likely... We will be playing on computer that have more power than a console.(which I could build for next to nothing) I mean, take Crysis for instance. Even on low settings looks 100 times better than any console came. And what kinda hardware would it take to make a pc run it on low? I think I could piece together a computer that would do that for under $200 now. A new 9800gt would easily play Crysis on low and only costs $60. Plus add in the amazing bulk deals they will strike with nvidia/ATI, Intel, more likely AMD. They will get stuff for 1/3 what we do.

    Then if onlive really took off. those same companies nvidia,ATI,Intel,AMD, would start building spacific boards with only the features Onlive needs built in. Further lowering costs. I know there are other budget builder out there like me. If I looked around I know I could build a computer that would play Batman AA better and look nicer than console for a couple hundred bucks. And I'm not a big company with huge buying power able to negotiate amazing deals.

    I'm no genius in this field, and I'm grossly over simplifying things. But I think we need to get over the thought that they will need a $2000 computer for each person. and think more along the lines that they will buy a computer that will out perform a console and then factor in buying power price reductions. So somewhere between $150-$300.

  • chocolate_log #317 2 years ago

    anything that takes power away from the user and gives it to the host ultimately isn't good. I don't want some mega-rich dick calling the shots on how my games should be played by making a 'one-world' system. this comes in the guise of offering advantages but at the end of the day takes power from us and gives it to a corporation.

  • jdonner #318 1 year ago

    The author is too much focused on the technical aspect and totally ignores the rights this company has to pay to be able to stream these games, which only adds to the financial burden.

  • jdonner #319 1 year ago

    The other thing I want to add; these are no amateurs, Steve Perlman has done some excellent things in the past and especially in the area of multimedia, he's quite a talent and very respected in the industry, anyone who knows him wouldn't label him as a clown. So instead of making all kind of assumptions that they don't pull it off technically, let's assume that they do. Can you imagine what kind of impact that would have on the industry, even if the gaming aspect wouldn't be any success? It would be a revolution if you ask me. I'm also 100% certain that Perlman already looked beyond gaming before they even started. Instead of having cheap online alternatives of Office, Photoshop, 3DS max, we would have the real deal. Sure, it sounds impossible that he pulls it off, but what if he does....what if he does.... Steve Jobs managed to do the impossible in a garage...

    Btw, Perlman's not the kind of guy who jumps into things that don't stand a chance, so I hope he does pull it off, although I sense that the author rather likes to see him fail, probably to be able to use the almighty sentence to stroke his ego; "I told you so!".

    Edited by 2 at 19/11/10 @ 05:03

  • Coastalgerman #320 1 year ago

    Where are all the experts that were badmouthing on live now? I'm a German by birth now living in the US. At home I have a standard road runner turbo connection (15mbps max / 9 avrg)...so no fancy 30-50mbps FIOS. I was an on live founding member (beta tester) and also have a ps 3 and a dual xenon system at home. Of course on live can't compare to the xenon, but came close to the ps3...even in beta and while playing shooters....it will surpass the ps3 within months. As such it is a viable alternative for families that do no want to spend more than a thousand dollars every other year on a new pc, but also don't want to be stuck with outdated consoles.

  • AC-Revolution #321 11 months ago

    I appreciate the right to be sceptical and back then we all had lot's of questions and doubts, but in right now in Feb 2011 , having used OnLive right here in the UK, I can say the article is well and truly incorrect.

    It actually works and works really well. I've played a few games on 30 minute free trial each - Assassin's Creed 2, Dirt2, Metro 2033, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Splinter Cell: Conviction and the technology is truly amazing.

    It was impressive already, but I can imagine the quality/latency will improve when officially in the UK, with UK servers open for us. If it can be this good using servers half way across the world, it will surely be even better. The interface and speed is fantastic too. All this from a Netbook in HD! Amazing.

  • AC-Revolution #322 11 months ago

    I appreciate the right to be sceptical and back then we all had lot's of questions and doubts, but in right now in Feb 2011 , having used OnLive right here in the UK, I can say the article is well and truly incorrect.

    It actually works and works really well. I've played a few games on 30 minute free trial each - Assassin's Creed 2, Dirt2, Metro 2033, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Splinter Cell: Conviction and the technology is truly amazing.

    It was impressive already, but I can imagine the quality/latency will improve when officially in the UK, with UK servers open for us. If it can be this good using servers half way across the world, it will surely be even better. The interface and speed is fantastic too. All this from a Netbook in HD! Amazing.

  • DrGeekit #323 11 months ago

    Honestly when I first read this article some years ago when Onlive started becoming a big chatter, you made me think for a moment maybe you were right. So I started researching the technology and realized the technology they were implimenting to make this possible was already in wide spread use, under different platforms and different methods. So then I came back and read this again after 6 months of research of my own. I trolled through allot of other forums that were "nay saying" like this one.

    You open well with the statement that this would be awsome! and then instead of going into a big "what if" you go into a "matter of fact", and the end resulf of yoru "matter of fact" was that you were wrong.

    It does work, exactly how they said it would, which is to be expected being they worked on it for a very long time, and it wasnt a fast pushout like the PS3, and the Xbox360. For the future of Gaming this system will definitly change the face of how video games are played. I put up a few posts from the beginning showing the research of how this system could work, why it would work and how and why the technology we currently have in place is ready for this. The only people who aren't ready for this are the video game console makers. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo. In the long run they will be hurt by this platform, but not if they get on board. If they fight the battle to get the console or PC installed games the primary method of gaming, they will fail just like saga did when it refused to catch up and GO CD fast enough.

    If you don't invest and invision the latest and greatest in technolgoy you will die. That's the truth in all of the technology world.

    My point to this post is just to say that maybe in the future it would be a better idea to research the technology currently in use such as Cloud computing, SaaS, and many others, before going on and right out saying "this isn't going to work and here's why". You stated your lack of knowledge as fact and in the end were wrong.

    Congrats.

    (Oh btw just recently HTC paid out something like 40 MILLION dollars to have this software brought to thier phones, yup... this technology can't work at all.. and here's why)

  • Kiba27 #324 11 months ago

    lol "Why OnLive Can't Possibly Work" such an idiotic and pessimistic statement. I love it when pompous idiots are proven wrong :)

  • loriopatrick #325 8 months ago

    isn't it obvious, they're from the future. JK; nice article. 2011 and it seems to be working. I'm just curious to know how many systems they would need to pull this off. I'd think 1 super computer could run at most 10 games with the stats they're claiming. It's crazy.

  • slader #326 7 months ago

    Take this Eurogamer: http://on livespot.blogspot.com/2011/06/u...
    Edited by 1 at 28/06/11 @ 17:24

  • zilch #327 7 months ago

    Wow. Funny how the people who said this ABSOLUTELY could NOT work seem to have disappeared. Well I just love seeing people who have no fucking clue what they are talking about proven wrong.
    "But but it cant work because no one has ever done it before!" LOL!

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  • obiadekanobi #331 4 months ago

    well ive just played assasins creed, burnout, metro2033,dirt 2, all on free trail and it was running on intel atom notebook and the experience was amazing there was no drop in framerate the game didnt lag on the controls once and it was one of the best things i have ever seen and i was very impressed with it bravo to onlive for even trying this ive signed up to the tenner a month deal awsome!!!!!