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Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by Paul_S on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @11:27AM (#12598403)
People laughed when onlive said they could do it. And then onlive went bankrupt.

As you admit yourself you can't do anything about network lag and reliability. Even if you get down to 0ms video enc-dec this will be not viable for any games where the camera moves.

Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by chrisd1100 on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @11:41AM (#12598553)
I've played CS:GO from NY to Virginia with Parsec (to an AWS machine) and topped the scoreboard consistently (in pugs).

Also did a 3 hour raid night on the new Legion content with it on WoW, lot of dynamic camera movement there. Cleared Nythendra on Heroic as the 4th DPS.

May not be to everyone's liking, but worked for me.

Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by ttul on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @11:43AM (#12598569)
Hmmm. I have 10Gbps fiber in my office that is 3ms away from us-west-2...
Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by reitzensteinm on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @11:52AM (#12598667)
At the end of the day it's just about how local you can make the data centers. If you have a few ms of ping, great bandwidth and hardware to encode the video, it's absolutely feasible.

While the speed of light isn't getting any faster, bandwidth and hardware encoding both are (relative to the speed at which we're increasing resolution and image quality).

And the really nice thing about it is that you can afford to spend an order of magnitude on the hardware if it's shared around and played casually than if it just sits in your closet most of the time. And you can game on laptops or even mobile devices easily.

The experience could actually be fantastic, and hugely social; imagine reading a review with screenshots from the game, and clicking on them allows you to start to playing in under a second from that exact moment, just like you can send a YouTube link mid video.

The trouble is, there are a hell of a lot of cities in the world. In Chicago, everyone could be gaming like this in ten years; but in rural New Zealand?

Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by duskwuff on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @12:35PM (#12599068)
> The experience could actually be fantastic, and hugely social; imagine reading a review with screenshots from the game, and clicking on them allows you to start to playing in under a second from that exact moment, just like you can send a YouTube link mid video.

IIRC, Gaikai was aiming for that exact application (live game demos) before they got acquired by Sony.

Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by toast0 on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @12:20PM (#12598933)
I think this may be a solid option for some people; and the number of people is going to continue to increase. AT&T is actively building out fiber to the home, which dropped my ping times to nearby servers from 22ms to 5ms. (from interleaved VDSL2 to GPON; earlier i was on fast path ADSL1 and had ping times around 7ms, but much lower bandwidth)

I found some people on dslreports forums with Comcast's DOCSIS 3.1 service, and their ping times were around 15ms to a local server, which is still ok enough.

The upgrade process is gong to be slow, but 4 years after OnLive died, there's a significantly higher number of people who have a good enough connection to use it. It sounds like there's a lot of improvement on the server side too, as well as in hardware assisted compresison/decompression. Monitors have also been encouraged to decrease processing latency too, and everything adds up.

Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by benologist on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @11:45AM (#12598587)
You're right, networking will and can never, ever get better.
Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by phoboslab on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @12:03PM (#12598782)
The Nintendo Wii U renders on the console, encodes to H264 and streams it to the GamePad. The lag doesn't seem to be a problem there.
Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by Retr0spectrum on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @12:15PM (#12598889)
There's a huge difference between LAN and the internet. And I assume the Wii U has some kind of dedicated RF channel for streaming video.
Re:The Technology Behind A Low Latency Cloud Gaming Service by phoboslab on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @02:08PM (#12599861)
You're right. I misunderstood Op's "Even if you get down to 0ms" to be referring to network latency, stating that encoding and decoding would still be a problem (which the Wii U shows it's not).

That said, 15ms network latency isn't too bad at all, considering that it takes your TV 40-80ms to display a frame through HDMI. Fortunately, with the advent of VR display manufactures finally took notice of this built-in lag. So that's getting better, too.