Play Crysis in HD on a Netbook
Gaming service OnLive announced in a perfect storm of buzzwords.
Words like ‘innovation’ get bandied around a lot in gaming, yet innovative products are few and far between. Even then, many such products exist in marketing documents only, failing to make it to the markets they were supposed to revolutionise. However, one gets the suspicion that newly announced game streaming service OnLive will actually make it to market at some point.
OnLive is basically a cool implementation of the old thin client computing model. Using either a small plug-in on a PC or Mac, or OnLive’s MicroConsole plugged into a TV, gamers can essentially play any high-end PC game, despite the hardware. OnLive achieves this by taking the processing power of the gamer’s system out of the equation entirely, rendering the game in its data centres and sending a compressed video stream of the output to the gamer. Essentially, one is firing keystrokes out into the internet and watching a video of the result.
It doesn’t take a cynic to wonder just how pleasant an experience this will be. Latency is bad enough when playing online games that are designed to cope, but playing games with inbuilt input lag is a whole other ballgame. OnLive claims that it has solved the problem of latency through several patented tricks, and the general feedback from news sites that have played with the technology is that claims are indeed valid.
Of course, this is being done on-site at GDC, where one suspects that demo systems are sitting on a fat Ethernet connection to servers out the back. OnLive claims that it has spent years testing and tweaking performance over broadband, but it will probably be a while before we get a definitive answer on just how well it does perform on an average internet connection.
Perhaps the most credible indicator of the system’s viability is the number of companies ‘partnering’ with OnLive. The press release lists Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive Software, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, THQ Inc., Epic Games, Eidos, Atari Interactive, and Codemasters – some of the most important players in games publishing today. One can see the attraction of such a service to publishers. Having the actual games running in a data centre rather than on a user’s PC is perhaps the ultimate form of DRM.
Hardware companies would likely be less impressed by the technology. OnLive is designed to stop the need for end users to stay on the upgrade treadmill that hardware manufacturers rely on for survival. If the minimum requirement to play a game like Crysis is a broadband-equipped computer capable of running video, then the incentive to purchase a $600 video card is much lower. That said, Venturebeat mentions that NVIDIA is a development partner, working on the server hardware with OnLive.
It will still be some time until we get a good picture of just how well the technology works. It will be even longer until we get a chance to see this in action, here in Australia. OnLive’s initial plan is to launch late this year in the US, with five data centres covering the nation. One would assume that expansion plans would come well after the US launch. With our relatively low population and the massive distances that it spreads out over, it is unlikely that we’d be a prime target in that case, anyway.
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Supporting our habits:
2009.03.25 15:55
Not only will player commands endure high latency when reaching the server, but actually seeing the result of those will be another round trip back. Outside of installing these data centres every square kilometre, OnLive is talking about overcoming that pesky speed of light limitation, which is close to what any reasonable network connection already achieves.
Early April Fools's hoax?
mcgarnagle
2009.03.26 08:15
Okay, let's for a second assume that they manage to get the latency down to 50ms. That's a playable latency level for any game, right?
Yes, assuming that the game has been written to render locally, and take advantage of client-side predictions to minimise how much the player "feels" the lag. This system is a video and command streaming engine, and nothing more. If nothing is local, and nothing can be buffered because the player's actions can't be predicted ahead of time… this is going to suck balls, and not in a good way either.
Stange
2009.03.26 13:00
Eh, it's just a peak into the future. Hopefully graphics cards can continue to exist by its side, or at least allow the same kind of modding that is currently possible on the PC. I mean, PC enthusiasts would have a hard time giving up full control to something like this, right? It seems hard to imagine that one day we would all just trade in our rigs (or at least stop upgrading them) for this kind of system.
I'll still give it a try on day one (when/if it comes to Canada), control lag aside, my biggest fear is that I can't continue to do things the same way i always have.
mcgarnagle
2009.03.26 15:04
Yeah, you can take my rig.
When you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I completely agree that it's just a little vision of the future, but it worries me that there is a lot of mouth-frothing going on around the internet in relation to this technology. And the attempt to sell it as a realistic prospect today is rather unethical, in my opinion.