This may spark a revolution in the game industry

No more going to a store to buy your games?

No more corner blockbuster visits to rent?

Instant free trials?

Almost non-existent download times?

No more piracy?

No more hacks or cheats?

...No more GeForce cards?

 

 

 

http://kotaku.com/5181300/onlive-makes-pc-...ysis-on-your-tv

Edited March 24, 2009 by Krotas

Thats pretty neat. Although I dont know what i'd do w/o my 15 inch by 4 inch vid cards. They're neat to look at!

I'll buy it if Vince sells it

I'll buy it if Vince sells it

 

I'd buy anything that man sells.

 

You getting this camera guy?!

One slap you'll love my nuts.

Two slaps you'll love my nuts.

So... The client-side hardwar is easy... The delivery of the streamed images to your TV is easy-ish... But isn't a server, at its heart, a jacked-up PC? It may have quad processors, a big RAID array with lots of storage, and a lot of bandwidth... But can it really replace the processing power of a million, or a hundred million PCs and their video card GPUs?

 

I'm a little skeptical on that side of it. Sounds cool though! WoW (or SCII) on my 50" plasma would be slick!

im thinking gaming code would have to be written completely differently too, like rendering graphics remotely and then sending them across the wire also sounds more bandwidth heavy than 5 mbps. im just very skeptical on the idea, i think it's one of those looks good on paper but may not happen for another 20 years.

do not want.

that's genius!

I expect they have the bandwidth more-or-less covered (at least at the client's end - You have to wonder how much bandwidth the server would need at that end, when connected to a million clients though). I'm more questioning how they would come up with the CPU power to render all of those graphics in the first place.

 

Despite being a "server", it's still limited in how many polygons it can render per second.

 

I guess they can aproach it by figuring out how many clients one server/router/T3 or whatever can handle, price the service so that many clients pay for that equipment with profit left over, and just buy up a big ol' warehouse and start filling it with more and more servers as people enlist. Could work, I guess!

My understanding of this, is that it is no different (from the end user perspective) than receiving an HDTV signal. All the servers are doing is broadcasting the video output of what your game is doing to your TV. There is the control aspect of it but sending keystrokes over your internet line is trivial. The whole thing is basically terminal services (remote desktop) on steroids. The school district I work for already does this sort of thing for user desktops, they launch a connection and servers execute all the code for Office, IE, whatever and just display the screen to the end user what is happening.

 

That being said I agree with Pete, they still have to launch and render these games for all their subscribers. What kind of monster machine would you need to run even 10,000 copies of Crysis in very high graphics mode?

^^ What he said. Imagine Steam as a device instead of an application.

 

Since the resolution is directly connected to the required bandwidth its pretty safe to assume its going to work like terminal services shooting up steroids while snorting a line of Chuck Norris. And from the looks of it all the games I saw in the article can support physics cards which would thin out the processing load. Load balance X amount of server farms like terminal servers with X amount of players per farm. The back end is all connected internally for fast multiplayer connectivity instead of relying on client-network-client connectivity. Definitely hot shit. Almost every aspect of the network and functionality would be in-house which makes things 100% easier to fix and work with. Which on the same hand puts an enormous amount of 'you better do it right' on their part.

 

If they get the technology to work together smoothly, this will take over PC and Console gaming extremely fast as long as they get the full spectrum of games to buy into it. And the pricing would be gold lining, cheaper than a console and subscriptions are on par with XBox Live.

What kind of monster machine would you need to run even 10,000 copies of Crysis in very high graphics mode?

 

I'd buy anything that man sells.

 

ditto

WoW (or SCII) on my 50" plasma would be slick!

 

you could do that just as easy now you know, but you probably would regret it once you see your UI burned into your plasma screen...

 

you could do that just as easy now you know, but you probably would regret it once you see your UI burned into your plasma screen...

 

Andrie beats me on healing meters..... FOREVER BURNED INTO MY TV, HAUNTING ME WHILE I WATCH HGTV!

today's special episode of How It's Made: NERDRAGE!

i love how it's made!

Can you guys say, virtual machines taken to the next level?

 

'Cause that's basically what this is.

I can't watch how it's made anymore D: I used to love that show TOT

did you watch the episode where they made lunch meat or hot dogs? blech