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Perry: Latency is the biggest challenge cloud gaming faces

Gaikai founder Dave Perry acknowledged latency as "the biggest elephant in the room," but also claimed that his company has left no stone unturned for trying to mitigate it.

Perry feels that it can tackle this issue by doing away completely with the necessity for hard storage, adding that his people are working round the clock for finding a way to accomplish that.

"A lot of programmers went on record straight away saying 'this'll never work'," he told Edge. "I am an engineer and I get it, I'm there with them, I understand the conceptual problem.

"The thing they don't think about is I have about 60 people coming to the office every day working on this problem. We found many, many ways to do it, and we're executing all of them."

He feels that setting up more data centres is one of the keys to getting there.

"The way the math works is that if I get two states closer to you, I actually get four states closer," he says. "Two states is four states in latency, we had that epiphany pretty early on. That's why we have so many data centres."

Perry also cited another interesting and rather surprising method as being a possible solution for this.

"Imagine your game's running at 30 fps on your console, but we run it at 60 fps [in the data centre], the amount of time that the game took while it was running," he explains. "The engine itself took less time because we're running it faster.

"So we take that time and use it for compression and sending, and you can suddenly see how the math starts to work in our favour. The faster we run the game, the more we overclock it, the lower the feel of the latency. This is one of many, many ways we've discovered to tighten up the feel of it."

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Debabrata Nath avatar

Debabrata Nath

Contributor

Debabrata Nath hails from Guwahati, India. A self-professed geek all of his life, Debabrata has wide-ranging experiences across the games media, and also is the co-founder of gaming website Fraghero.

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