So one announcement during GDC really took the media by storm and everyone’s been hailing it as something that will change the face of gaming. Something that means how we play games will never be the same again. Something, in short, that is so truly earth shattering you nice expensive consoles and graphics cards have become redundant. Welcome OnLive. The Future is here, allegedly.
For those who have not heard of the amazing technology that is OnLive allow me to explain it to you in one sentence and see if your reaction is the same as mine. OnLive allows you to play any game, on your PC, Mac or OnLive console, by connecting to the OnLive servers and gaming on them with a live stream right to your monitor/TV. If you are anything like me your thoughts were along the lines of “That sounds cool. Wait, you want me to give up direct control of my machine and play on something of yours? Have you heard of lag and how much gamers hate it?” Apparently you’re supposed to be sceptical, apparently it shouldn’t work, but don’t worry, it’s supposed to.
Everywhere I have read analysis of this new gaming experience and it spouts the quoted numbers at you without really putting them into context. Eurogamer did that nicely for me before I got round to writing this post. If you want to read their whole article please do, I’ll give you a quick idea of what it says here though.
Onlive claims it will stream HD (720p) at 60fps to you dow your 5Mbps line. Before data compression to stream that is mentioned consider that (according to Euro Gamer at least) each client playing a game of that sort of qulaity would need to be connected to something with a nice GPU on it (9800 GT-type). So if this goes wide, with a real distribution scale, imagine just how many of those beasts will be needed by OnLive to deliver the sort of service they claim they can offer.
The compression of the video to travel down your tubes and deliver this quality will have to be well beyond anything we see already. That is clearly stated by OnLive, but what isn’t stated is quite how far beyond the current technology it is. YouTube’s encoder delivers HD video to 2Mbps customers at 30fps, and that encoding takes a while. OnLive claims its encoders introduce 1ms lag. That would mean it could encode at 1000 fps. And anyone who has watched an HD video on Youtube has probably seen that it isn’t the least resource intensive process, and this service will run on “low end” computers.
Now, how about Latency. Gamers have come to expect some lag in multiplayer, but should that get a tad annoying we go off and play a nice game of single player. OnLive puts the game in a machine probably quite a few miles from where you are (The GDC demo had the game 50 miles away, but how many people will live that close to a Data Centre) so the latency involved won’t be that small. EG says that it needs to be sub 150ms, that seems about the maximum I would put up with, preferably a lot less, and EG says it can’t see a way for OnLive to fudge it, again I agree.
EG says it doesn’t see the encoding barrier being broken, maybe showing the game at 30fps, but no higher. 30FPS is very acceptable, console games run about that anyway. Latency however is almost impossible for OnLive to have overcome without having their servers in the ISP’s DCs. Microsoft haven’t had that accepted anywhere outside of the US, do OnLIve really stand a chance?
OK so the service is only state side for the Beta, and seems to be set as staying like that for a while, and even when it does the claim that you can watch any player on the service and then play against them seems very unlikely, You may get low latency for me to play as if it’s over LAN with someone in the same county, you can try for the same country, but I doubt you will have me playing against a guy in Los Angeles like that any time soon.
That’s all been technical and already the post is running far too long. I’ll leave you all to think about that and how OnLive could have beaten that and come back at another point and contend the problems they face from game publishers and developers who have a steak in consoles (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and studios owned by them) and the biggest barrier of all, hard core gamers.
MTFBWY
Filed under: Gaming | Tagged: cloud computing, Gaming, OnLive
[...] Well as promised here is part two of my stupidly long explanation of what it is I think of OnLive. Last time I gave you an idea of the technical claims made by OnLive about their service which has been [...]
[...] claim, at least to me seems a tad silly. I have made a few posts before about why it is that in a technical and business sense that OnLive shouldn’t work. I even touched on why gamers wouldn’t [...]