After yesterday's
announcement, we've all wanted a first-hand look at OnLive's gaming performance. Can Steve Perlman, the creator of QuickTime and WebTV, really "change the landscape of the Games industry" using OnLive's new interactive video compression algorithm? Latency through the algorithm is just 1-ms instead of the 0.5- to 0.75-second lag inherent in conventional compression algorithms used in corporate video conferencing solutions, for example. While OnLive's backend servers do the heavy crunching, pretty much any PC or Mac has the power to decompress the video at what's perceived to be real-time. As Steve puts it, "video is trivial for us now." The demo starts at about 10 minutes into the video and looks damn impressive running on a
Dell Studio 15 (16 minutes in) -- yes, it runs Crysis. Controlled yes, but very, very promising. See for yourself in the video after the break.
P.S. Don't forget to
sign up for the Beta starting this summer.
Update: During the Q&A, the very real concern of network latency was raised (35:20 into the video). Perlman said that OnLive will work with a data center that is about 1,000 miles away from DSL or cable connections (probably 1,500 miles away with fiber). OnLive data centers already exist on the left and right coasts in the US with a 3rd coming on-line in the mid-west. When streamed to gamers in Australia "just for fun," OnLive found that "you can kind of play the game, but you see the lag."
posted March 25th 2009 5:31AM
I think the naysayers who are using all this technical jargon is all wrong. For anyone to understand what they are doing you would have to have a Masters in 3 fields. Video, IT, and Brain (Like a neurologist. Nor I claim to have any or all three of these). The reason I say that is because lag happens in 3 places. Compression, Network, and of coarse your Brain. You have to process what your looking at to determine if you have lag. 1ms is faster than you trying to react when your pulling the trigger in Crysis. Yes our brain works alot faster than 1ms but we don't react that fast so when they say we won't notice it that will be true also remember the person on the other side would react the same. In saying that I am giving the benefit of the doubt that this bad boy can run 1ms. They probably have alot of bandwidth and they have 2 Server Centers one in the East and West and soon in the Midwest. That should eliminate any overload on the servers. They have worked on this project for 7 years. All the numbers you guys are posting up are exactly that numbers all theory with nothing to back it. Your probably thinking no im wrong well im here to tell you im right until you proved me wrong not 1 person in this board has any real knowledge of what OnLive has in there buildings nor has any IP address to ping these servers to prove the lag case and how many MS's it takes to hit it and return so stop the tech babble. If they can hit the 1ms mark than this would be a huge success. It would benefit both games and developers. This service obviously turns your pc to a dummy pc and what your looking at is basically a direct connection (ie. Remote Desktop or LogMeIn) using a plugin to sit on there servers. Basically it's like if you were sitting right in front of these servers and playing the game from a monitor connected to it. If OnLive have direct pipelines into let's say a Verizon CO or Comcast or etc. Then there is no reason why there would be anything more than a 1ms hit. That's what I think.
I hate to break it to you kid, but you're talking out your ass more than anyone else here.
There is no such thing of anyone in the world playing over the internet with a game with less than a milliseconds lag. All games are played with way more than 1 ms and guess what nobody notices lag. I play with 8ms and guess what I don't have lag. There a people who play on a 1.5mb dsl line that have 27ms lag and there is no notices in lag. I just don't see where all these numbers matter. I can ping my verizon CO with less than 1ms. No one knows how there systems are setup and I bet they have everything built in house. They have proved it works in the video they are in San Francisco in a building that normally no one would play any games and it worked. Again no one here can prove this impossible i don't care what your background is. For all anyone know's they can all be using SSD drives to make this possible. It's anyone's guess. Let's all wait until Beta comes our before we start putting together mumbo jumbo.
Since you obviously haven't a clue as to what SSDs actually do, I have to question the merit of your opinion on all things technical.
If this system actually works as advertised companies that employ office workers in cubes with high speed connections are doomed. They will at least have to block the site or nobody will get any work done at all.
There are a lot of comments about how they'll need a server for every person that's logged in. This is untrue. I would imagine they would use industrial GPUs, I know NVidia makes a GPU that cost several thousand dollars that could probably run 15-20 instances of Crysis on max. Obviously these aren't advertised or marketed to the mainstream consumer given their highly specific use but it is very efficient.
Also, concerning the latency. An earlier comment said the best ping he had to a server in Chicago was 40ms. You don't know the kind of connection and hardware you were pinging. I'm sure the OnLive servers have gone the extra mile to ensure great connections to major ISP hubs, so your packets traveling from your ISP (which you can ping VERY quickly) to the OnLive servers is probably a route that has been given a lot of attention by OnLive.
As boring as they were as presenters it was still intersting watching this and will be looking forward to beta testing and see how its gonna be in the real world scenarios and practicalithy wise vs. the conventional gameing devices (PC & Consoles )
I'm still thinking over cost... Surely these are existing PC games in current usage and hence require the Windows Direct X API, hence Windows licences. Sorry just thinking aloud forum like.... and rant to my last post.
Also, in terms of bandwidth and latency of course as others have noticed, this ideally would need to be provided through fibre to home networks. I could see some form of alliance between Onlive and fibre cable providors in the future perhaps. Just another random thought.