RSSOnLive threatens the typical PC gamer lifestyle
By Tim Conneally | Published March 24, 2009, 9:45 PM
PC gaming is a lifestyle. It's not like console gaming, where a user can just plop down in front of his TV, turn on a game for a couple of hours, and walk away satisfied. Side effects include fanatical hardware consumption and relentless resource tweaking.
The newest and most cutting-edge games demand the most from a user's system, and this drives PC gamers to have, at the very least, knowledge of what's newest in graphics, processing, sound, and peripherals. Moreover, it causes much of PC gamerdom to fall in the "power user" category, or those who put heavy demands on their computers for long periods of time. It's been that way since the dawn of the Sound Blaster, and many after school jobs been taken to feed the need for more gear. Of course, the PC gamers I grew up with also had part-time careers as electronics store shoplifters, but that's another story.
Today, OnLive premiered a product that threatens to change that whole lifestyle aspect.
OnLive is a platform upon which PC games can be played, where processing takes place "in the cloud," totally eliminating the need for discs, expensive hardware, and system customization on the user's end. Any broadband-connected PC supporting the service's browser plug-in can access OnLive.com (site goes live at 10:15 pm EST) and play PC games that used to demand computing power. The company even offers what it calls the Onlive MicroConsole, a device no bigger than a Nintendo DS which plugs directly into the TV and accesses the subscription gaming service.
The service requires a modest 1.5 Mbps connection to deliver the systems base-quality experience, and for the experience comparable to a full-power PC gaming rig, it requires a 4 to 5 Mbps connection. The service was unveiled today at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, showing off what it could do with 16 popular PC games (including the resource-hungry Crysis).
Availability and price of the service has not yet been announced, nor has a public beta, but inquiries are pending, and more information will go live in a matter of hours.
i'm down with testing this out! Hopefully "trophies" or "achievements" will be implemented
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|"This is probably one of the most ignorant statements to date on BN"
Come on now! This is a really ignorant statement!
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|Battlefield Hereos and Quake Live have shown that this is the way to go. I couldn't believe the graphical quality and speed of Quake Live. I was expecting it to be an epic fail but instead, I ended up wasting 2 hrs playing it....
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|Well, I'm at least going to give it a try. Random uninformed conclusions about this or any other service, without have tried said service first, serves no one.
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|Meh, basic 3d power etc is found on many modern motherboards anyway. A nForce board with an oboard GeForce system and 4 gb of RAM is far more capable than this "plan".
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|This is probably one of the most ignorant statements to date on BN. You may want to take your "onboard Geforce system" and compare it to a couple of other "systems".
For starters*
www.tomshardware.com
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|i don't really see this going anywhere :P
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|This looks like a large scale implementation of video/audio compression technology, or PCoIP. There are several players involved already with this for CAD/CAM applications... IBM has blades with PCoIP cards, HP makes a product called RGS, and Dell is also now offering rack mounted workstation servers that use PCoIP to get the video/audio and control (USB) to a thin client PC or a software based client.
This is truly nothing new, just a different application of the technology. Kudos to the person who saw this apply in the world of gaming.
The only real problem is that latency and bandwidth are the worst enemies of this type of technology. We use RGS at my place of business and on 1Mbit links with about 50ms of latency, it's unbearable. I can't imagine what a "lite-speed" cable or DSL user would see on this type of technology.
It would definitely be a strategic move to delay the launch of this type of technology until lower latency and higher bandwidth connections are available. On a LAN, PCoIP works great, it's practically like local.
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|i dont see this affecting hardcore gamers. at the very best it's cool for people that dont have time or the desire to keep up with the latest technology and/or spending $400+ in upgrades every 3 years. this could also target console gamers.
im not really sure how much cheaper this would be with an initial hardware cost + monthly fees spread over the same lifespan as an average upgrade cycle. since everyone that games already has a PC, the only added costs incurred for a gaming PC would be a gfx card, upgraded power supply, and possibly marginally higher quality motherboard, RAM, and CPU. if an average gaming rig can be built today for $900 sans monitor and accessories, you can subtract $150 for GFX card, 50 for PSU, and maybe 100 between the RAM, mobo, and CPU combined for a total of $300 extra spent to make a PC "gaming worthy" versus an average desktop. this means even if the OnLive platform hardware is free, they'd still need to charge less than $8.34/month to make this a cheaper alternative to a real gaming computer.
on a technical note, this eliminates the client computer's high system specs but requires a good net connection which may not be available. also, the OnLive system may help push a customer over his allotted bandwidth caps. taking the 5mbps number as the high end, and assuming my math is correct, that would be roughly 1.6 TB/month if the service was running and gaming 24/7 at peek bandwidth usage. i know people wont be playing 24/7 (or i hope not) but even just 40 hrs/month (~10 hrs/week of gaming) of peek bandwidth OnLive service could be as high as 90 GBs. considering Comcast's cap is 250GB/month, this could potentially lead to problems. i believe other ISPs have caps as well, including like Time Warner or another cable operator with half of Comcast's cap.
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|Yeah, and in other PC news, all the bugs have been removed from Windows, Macs cost less than PCs and everyone can get terrestrial broadband no matter where they live. LOL! How is this supposed to work when MMOs are forced to use graphics from five years ago just to deal with the lag? I smell a scam.
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