Technology Review
A startup wants to do away with consoles, games resellers, and expensive graphics chips.
OnLive, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup wants to do away with gaming consoles, game resellers, and the need to buy any more expensive graphics chips. Today the company announced a service that lets any computer run the sorts of graphics-intensive video games traditionally reserved for high-end gaming systems. Games can also be played on a TV using a small device offered by the company that connects a television to a broadband Internet connection.
The idea is to separate games from consoles or desktop computers, says Steve Perlman, founder and CEO of OnLive, a spinout of a Silicon Valley-based incubator called Rearden.
The intense computation needed to render each game happens remotely, in a specialized server farm with thousands of computers crunching numbers. But critical to the success of the venture will be a number of new compression algorithms developed by the company to let even the most graphics-intense games--including the realistic first-person shooter Crysis--render on a player's screen in real time.
Perlman, who helped develop the QuickTime video compression format while at Apple, says, "You don't need a high-end PC to run these games. The all-digital distribution means that you'll never need to upgrade the hardware in your home."
The idea of playing video games via the Internet is nothing new, of course. Companies such as Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo offer online services that let players collaborate and compete over a broadband connection. But these games are still tied to their companies' respective game consoles. World of Warcraft, a popular, massively multiplayer online game, streams content to a player's computers via an Internet connection. But, as any player knows, one of the biggest problems with the game is that players must often wait for the on-screen visuals to catch up to their instructions.
"You still need a pretty respectable PC to run World of Warcraft," says George Dolbier, CTO at IBM's gaming division. "Games need to be very responsive to user so when you push a button, that game better react instantaneously; the big technical problem is when you push a button at home and it's actually running at a computer potentially thousands of miles away, there's going to be a lag," Dolbier says. "Solving that problem has been a major challenge that Rearden has been aggressively tackling for some time."
Perlman believes that OnLive's compression technology can solve this problem. Most of the game processing and compression occurs where the powerful hardware resides: inside data centers with specialized graphics-processing units. Still, while compression schemes for video need only to compress data from a source to a viewer, video games need to compress data both ways--from a source to a player and back to the source--so that the servers can compute the next move. Without giving away too many details of the proprietary approach, Perlman says that OnLive's algorithms consist of a feedback loop that constantly monitors the network that a player is using, trying to anticipate and adjust for the inconsistencies of Internet traffic.
Sifteo blocks aim for an interactive, physical computer-game experience
Computer scientists are visualizing the world's most gigantic datasets without graphics clusters.
This is inevitable for the future of On Line Multiplayer Gaming. Low latency is critical for any High resolution high speed gaming.
Most all the concerns/issues people have with the concept can be addresses simply by placing these robust Game Servers on a local Service Providers data center or Cloud and require them to provide both the Server itself,maintenance of same, as well as a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) tool that will assign these games broadband links a precidence over the SP networks.
These remote servers will also be connected back to OnLive central Cloud to allow Worldwide Gaming (with precednece as well).
OnLive could develop and deploy a Grid approach here tying these remote servers into their main Cloud.
OnLive's investment would be nominal if anything at each SP site other then remote updates and Level #1 Tech support.
A Revenue share arrangement would also be appropriate.
Jim A.
SP
The raw processing requirements don't change because you’re processing the data remotely. We are already seeing super computers being replaced with GPU arrays. Does anyone have a video card that runs the latest games at the highest settings smoothly. Does your card run hot when gaming? In other words do you have a lot of free GPU cycles when playing Crisis? Why would a server farm handle this any differently? In fact the server farm would require greater resources and/or processing power to handle the communications and process distribution for multiple customer streams. You would have to maintain a certain amount of overhead as not to over subscribe the resources because this will have a cascading effect. It would seem the answer is to make the game engines run more efficiently using more pre rendered content. Does my grass need to sway. Make it look like grass but focus the GPU power on particle effects and quality.
So each time a game hits the market we can expect the software company will have a huge capital investment to get it running live. All of the innovation in GPU hardware will be driven by a handful of gaming companies. Since the consumers won't be buying high end cards anymore the smaller startup gaming companies will never have the capital to launch a hit title like the makers of the original UREAL.
Gamers expect performance. We buy the best routers. We rarely use a wireless mouse. We take pride in building and tweaking the ultimate gaming rig even when it isn’t anywhere close. The hardware industry produces more than just video cards. We have cpu coolers, high end cases, memory, CPUs, and hard drives, and motherboards.
We are already at risk of loosing PC gaming to a dumb down console market. Now we are at risk of loosing the dumb down consoles as well. People really need to reject the idea of huge companies controlling your content by taking control of the hardware.
This article was thrown out there like spilling a cup of milk and walking away and expecting someone else to clean up the mess. Broadband providers are no where close to supporting this kind of load on the networks. The server model provides no performance or cost to cycle benefit. The business model is based on providing a benefit to the customer that the customer will have to pay for a gaming experience based on a system that could be best described as communist.
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stradric
33 Comments
Interesting...
I suppose this was inevitable with cloud applications being all the rage these days. I guess I'd have to see it in action before really making a judgment, but right now I'd be pretty apprehensive to a system like this. It sounds great as a concept, but what kind of reliability does it have over a standard console like the 360 (RRoD issues aside)? If my internet cxn goes down, I can't play anything. Or worse -- I lose all of my progress. Also I couldn't bring it to a friend's house for gaming action if he/she didn't have a 5mbps internet connection. And what happens when the connection degrades during peak hours on some ISPs? Also, what happens to my games during peak play hours where the cloud servers are under heavy load?
And then there's the other issue that the PS3 and the 360 are these amazing multi-function boxes. They play video games, sure, but they also play DVDs or BluRay and stream Hi-Def multimedia content from a PC.
So, I don't know about this. I like the concept, but I'm not sure it could work out in practice. I'm guessing that subscription charges would actually exceed the cost of a stand-alone console in order to keep the number of users down and the load on the servers low. But that is contrary to what this article is saying about being cheaper than buying new hardware every 5 or 6 years.
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SirSindi
2 Comments
Re: Interesting...
You are right, but of course, there is a niché of players who don't want/need/can invest into a console or store it. I will buy a physical device as long as there is remarkable functionality like PS3 Blu-ray and it isn't remarkably more expensive.
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