What do you guys think about Cloud Gaming?

With services Nvidia GeForce now and vortex. Having access to stream any highly demanding video games for about 10$ a month. What do you think about these services? Will the future of gaming now be cloud based?

The problem these type of services face right now the state of the internet:
Not everyone has high speed internet
Most internet connections have data caps

I like the idea of cloud gaming but the way the internet is in the states it faces a tough battle.

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I think it’s a positive for pc gaming. It lowers the barrier of entry so people can get into pc gaming without having to actually buy a full gaming pc (which costs about a million dollars minimum with these gpu and ram prices right now :sweat_smile:). I think it has the potential to be a gateway to getting people into buying a gaming prebuilt or building as well.

There is also the potential for it to be a turnoff for those that might not have great internet, but the potential looks like a net positive.

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unless there is datacenter in my timezone the latency will probably suck for everything except an RTS

and I dont even play RTS so no go at all for me

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They work really well, if you have a decent internet connection and low latency to their servers. Pricing is still way too high, though, and many of them force you to go through hoops. The Nvidia service forces you to install Steam and then download the game every time you want to play.

When you think about it, your high-powered gaming PC is sitting idle the vast majority of the time. That’s wasteful.

If bandwidth was to increase and datacaps were to vanish, the latency would still kill it.
I prefer having my machine locally.

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It has great potential down the line,I’d like to know the lowest I put lag in optimal condition on GeForce now.

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I used PSNow (or whatever its called) to stream PS3/4 games to my PC. There is noticeable input lag, but for games like ratchet and clank and any non shooter, its pretty nice.

I mentioned this before but I think its the future. The processing speed of per processor is hitting a diminishing returns on the amount of investment it takes to improve per core performance. So they started going to multiple cores. This is why languages like Golang which google came up with are taking popularity because concurrency is becoming more and more important because to expand processing in a parallel situation is simple and linear. Far easier to build a cluster that can each part can be replaced and chucked away if broken. I over heard a colleague once at a user group meeting that for Microsoft’s cloud service they have cargo pods that have servers in them. Once a certain amount go bad they just move the cargo container and replace it.

This is coming from my limited enterprise experience but my guess is it just makes sense that at some point its going to all go to cloud gaming. It just makes sense from a performance perspective. I think if the internet access was better it would already be mainstream.

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In my opinion no. The Picture quality and delay are just so bad that only the most casual games work.

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Various companies have been at it since early 2000s at least.

IMHO it’s living proof business people don’t understand physics.

Their target market are casual console gamers who are used to extra TV latencies, who might not want to pay for a console or a game (because they’re price conscious)

General idea is that the hardware on which games would run would sit no further than 20ms away from the gamer, apparently people can get used to that delay.

The annoyance is that you’re still going to have TV delay.

Billing model would be either subscription based, or per hour, different prices for different games.

IMHO a better model is one where you rent a game and a console and ship it back after.

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I had to google it.

I think that says enough.

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It’s a niche. It’ll become a bigger niche, local PC gaming will become slightly smaller, but neither is going away, as long as the companies doing it can scale to the size of their customer base. If not, they’ll fizzle out, one at a time.

Video compression is getting better all the time. I’ve been trying out nvidia’s streaming beta on mac os. The frame rate and compression have been awful (10ish fps while wired to 75/75 fiber), but the latency is so low, it feels local.

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most people in the uk don’t meet the necessary bandwidth requirements, and the one’s that do… barely.

last thing you want is your game switching to 240p because someone else in the house is streaming netflix :smiley:

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I wouldn’t bet against internet access getting faster and cheaper, would you?

Cloud gaming has improved immeasurably since the OnLive days and is pretty good now. You wouldn’t want to play competitive CS:GO or seriously latency-sensitive games like Street Fighter on it, but the experience is basically fine for everything else.

Now as people posting on an enthusiast site like this we all have 1080tis with 144hz G-sync monitors sitting at our desks and obviously it won’t compare to that. But it’s fine for most people.

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I understand it wouldn’t be possible right now. But doesn’t it resemble little bit like a Netflix for gamers almost? (If people had access to better internet)

I would definitely bet against it getting faster / cheaper as ISP’s are arseholes that don’t want to have to upgrade their infrastructure AND want to double dip by charging companies extra to access their audience.

To an ISP you are both the customer AND the product.

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I understand. I live in a rural area in Canada that is about 1h away from Montreal and we recently had our infrastructure upgraded to fiber optics. :slight_smile: . So I see benefits for people who have the infrastructure but I understand if people do not have access to that good of internet it can be difficult.

With amazing internet connection would you think the image quality would get so close to a local computer that the quality wouldn’t matter or a person would not notice. Obviously latency is not going to be completely removed in the future.

noooope