Story by Mike

Thu, Mar 26, 2009 | 11:33 GMT

GDC: Why OnLive “can’t possibly work”

onlive1b

Eurogamer’s tech expert Richard Leadbetter has written an article on just why he thinks the newly-announced Cloud gaming service OnLive “can’t possibly work.”

The first reason is because:

To give the kind of performance OnLive is promising (720p at 60 frames-per-second) realistically its datacenters are going to require the processing equivalent of a high-end dual core PC running a very fast GPU – a 9800GT minimum, and maybe something a bit meatier depending on whether the 60fps gameplay claim works out, and which games will actually be running. That’s for every single connection OnLive is going to be handling.

Then there’s:

First of all, bear in mind that YouTube’s encoding farms take a long, long time to produce their current, offline 2MBps 30fps HD video. OnLive is going to be doing it all in real-time via a PC plug-in card, at 5MBps, and with surround sound too.

It sounds brilliant, but there’s one rather annoying fact to consider: the nature of video compression is such that the longer the CPU has to encode the video, the better the job it will do. Conversely, it’s a matter of fact that the lower the latency, the less efficient it can be.

OnLive overlord Steve Perlmen has said that the latency introduced by the encoder is 1ms. Think about that; he’s saying that the OnLive encoder runs at 1000fps. It’s one of the most astonishing claims I’ve ever heard. It’s like Ford saying that the new Fiesta’s cruising speed is in excess of the speed of sound.

There’s plenty more to get your teeth into through this link.

Whether it will or won’t work, only time will tell.

63 comments

Older Comments

#51

Psychotext
26/03/09, 2:14 pm

Gah… pay as you go internet. That takes me back to the bad old days of 14.4 modems and paying 5p a minute to go online.

#52

wz
26/03/09, 2:18 pm

Is it possible? Of course! Given a fujkload of processing machines, why not.

But reasonable? I doubt it. And btw, processing power is so incredibly cheap today, why would I want to relay it?

But then, seeing the development in the thin client sector for applications, it’ll definitively happen.

#53

Mike
26/03/09, 2:21 pm

Shat: Good point. They do argue however, that the cost to them would be so high that we’d all be paying shitloads. Also however what with the limitations of coax, are ISP willing to lay down fibre optic giga pipes?

Or will that not make a difference?

#54

Shatner
26/03/09, 2:31 pm

Dunno.

#55

deftangel
26/03/09, 2:33 pm

If everybody on Xbox Live moved over to OnLive the ISP’s would be screaming blue murder. They do not have oodles and oodles of cheap bandwidth to throw around. If they did, they wouldn’t be investing so much money in traffic shaping and the like.

In the UK, they’re buying it off of BT. I’m sure BT would be happy to flog it to them but I don’t see the ISP’s in this country being overjoyed if 1m people decide to sign up.

Not to mention the average broadband speed here is 2Mbits

#56

ecu
26/03/09, 2:52 pm

You’d need a lot of upstream bandwidth too, yes? That’s one area that is totally crippled over here in the UK. My 8mb internet is still capped at 512kb upstream.

#57

Shatner
26/03/09, 3:09 pm

No, upstream doesn’t need to be much. It just needs to poll your inputs and upload them for processing. That could be optimised to a few bytes or less.

#58

deftangel
26/03/09, 3:18 pm

Far more important than the actual bandwidth is the latency, (time taken from your “console” to reach the servers).

60fps only allows for a latency of 17ms or so, which is quite ambitious given it has to transmit & process your controller inputs, update the game, render it, then render that into video and send it back down the pipe all in that time.

I’m inclined to agree with the Eurogamer analysis that the best way of achieving that is going to be dedicated OnLive servers at the ISP. Did they announce any ISP’s as partners?

#59

Patrick Garratt
26/03/09, 3:36 pm

Rich just said this to me on MSN:

- I was doing some maths… really should have put it into the article
- but basically OnLive is suggesting that each frame of HD video along with 5.1 surround is being conveyed in 10.41K of data
- yup, 10K
- can you imagine a 720p screenshot that’s 10K in size?
- but that’s the maths… 5000kbps = 625K/s… divide by 60 frames and that’s 10.41K per frame

#60

G1GAHURTZ
26/03/09, 3:39 pm

Oh dear.

It just gets worse…

He should update the article and send it to OnLive for a response.

#61

Blerk
26/03/09, 3:42 pm

I managed to get this Ratchet and Clank 720p screenie down to 30k. And as you can see, it looks just fine.

#62

Patrick Garratt
26/03/09, 3:43 pm

lulz

#63