The death of PC AND Console Gaming.

Throw out your graphics cards. Throw out your consoles. It seems there's a new service about to unvieled called OnLive that let's you play for example, something like Crysis on a netbook. AT MAX! Heh. Basically all you need is an internet connection and a computer, any computer. And if you prefer to play console style with a tv, you can buy a Micro Console for the TV that will run you between 50-100 dollars, cheaper than any console marketed to date.

It works by using cloud computing and some seriously powerful servers to bring you full fledged games at the highest graphical settings possible. Your hardware has no bearing in the details. The games are streamed to you youtube style, and you play them, and according to IGN there's no lag noticeable to a human being whatsoever. A number of big shot publishers have already signed on like, Eidos, TakeTwo, Epic, and EA and quite a few others. It will be subscription based of course, but the cost shouldn't be too high according to IGN.

Here's the link. People, read the WHOLE thing. Not just title please. http://pc.ign.com/articles/965/965535p1.html

I like this service because I won't need to keep upgrading my PC anymore to play the latest games, it would save me a lot of money in the long run. ANother thing I like is that you can WATCH your friend playing any game at anytime, like a youtube video except in real time.

Don't forget to watch the videos, and please post your comments so we can see eachother's opinions about this, pc gaming, and console gaming. Keep it civil, and MAKE SURE that you understand fully what OnLive is before posting about it.

There have been numerous threads on this. Chances are it's something that will not take off. I don't think the infrastructure is there yet. Plus one big problem we're all gonna have is monthly download caps. Can you imagine streaming a 720p image for a long period of time?

Sounds sorta like the phantom.

I don't like the sound of the whole streaming thing. I like to actually have the games I pay for.

We need better net connections for this to work im sorry but this is only really viable in Japan with Fibre Optics not stupid Copper wire we are using.

Sorry kids, this isn't going to catch on. Yes I am from the future, I know.

We need better net connections for this to work im sorry but this is only really viable in Japan with Fibre Optics not stupid Copper wire we are using.

jwsoul

I agree for the most part... however if you have a 5mb connection and up you should be good. If what they say is truly viable, then I have a 10mb connection that would be great, but in terms of streaming all that data, I just see it not kicking off.

1. This is totally reliant on an internet connection and I didn't see what the minimum connection speed is, for the thousands(millions?) who don't even use online they will disregard this product

2. My PC does more stuff than just play games

3. This is probably not going to be available to every country(especially mine)

4. Paid subscription service is epic fail. I already have one of those.

Great idea outside the US. Funny how we created the internet, but are one of the slowest countries. Fios should be country wide by now. America sucks.nmaharg

Hey, Canada is behind the States so think how we feel. We need to live in Europe... or for huge internet then Japan with fiber optics.

We need better net connections for this to work im sorry but this is only really viable in Japan with Fibre Optics not stupid Copper wire we are using.

jwsoul

As I said in another thread, if they ever did figure this out it would be a threat to console gaming; not PC gaming.

People like PC gaming because the perks it offers over console gaming, this has even less freedoms and choices than console gaming.

[QUOTE="jwsoul"]

We need better net connections for this to work im sorry but this is only really viable in Japan with Fibre Optics not stupid Copper wire we are using.

lundy86_4

I agree for the most part... however if you have a 5mb connection and up you should be good. If what they say is truly viable, then I have a 10mb connection that would be great, but in terms of streaming all that data, I just see it not kicking off.

[QUOTE="jwsoul"]

We need better net connections for this to work im sorry but this is only really viable in Japan with Fibre Optics not stupid Copper wire we are using.

Metalphor

It says you need a base of 1.5mb connection for 480p resolution, but for 720p you will need a 3mb connection, and this is just speculative I don't doubt, as until the service is actually running, we're not going to be 100%. Download caps will be a huge problem in terms of streaming that much data. The subscritpion fee will not be too expensive as you still have to buy or rent the games

I have a 10mb connection, and I still think this won't work... it's not a matter of all people jumping to faster internet, as it depends entirely on where you live, some places are only capable of a max of 2/3mb connections

Sorry kids, this isn't going to catch on. Yes I am from the future, I know.

flclempire

I agree. I think it IS the future... but right now is to early at the moment. I think once people actually see it in motion, and have heard good word form the early adaopters that's when the service is really gonna kick off.

This sounds amazing even if the resolution is low by PC standards, this would surely be an end for consoles. Lets see how much it costs and what games are available.

Edit: unless Nintendo is on board, maybe one console will still be around for Mario and Zelda.

720p for gaming is a joke, and 480p isn't even an option. OnLive will fail, at least until its refined.

720p for gaming is a joke, and 480p isn't even an option. OnLive will fail, at least until its refined.

nmaharg

Especially for PC gaming, very few people game at 720p anymore, so they will actually have to move backwards.

[QUOTE="Metalphor"][QUOTE="jwsoul"]

We need better net connections for this to work im sorry but this is only really viable in Japan with Fibre Optics not stupid Copper wire we are using.

lundy86_4

It says you need a base of 1.5mb connection for 480p resolution, but for 720p you will need a 3mb connection, and this is just speculative I don't doubt, as until the service is actually running, we're not going to be 100%. Download caps will be a huge problem in terms of streaming that much data. The subscritpion fee will not be too expensive as you still have to buy or rent the games

I have a 10mb connection, and I still think this won't work... it's not a matter of all people jumping to faster internet, as it depends entirely on where you live, some places are only capable of a max of 2/3mb connections

I'm used to gaming on my 1600x1050 PC Monitor, and by next year I'm going to get a 2560x1600 one. Resolution would be too big of a problem for me if 720p is the highest it can do now...

Most of the potential problems accociated with OnLive could be easily fixed given a little bit of time to refine itself. Once the whole internet speed and availability problem is over, there really won't be a reason not to atleast check it out. And I'm sure their compression techniques will only get better just like internet speed and availability are only going to get better.

I'm used to gaming on my 1600x1050 PC Monitor, and by next year I'm going to get a 2560x1600 one. Resolution would be too big of a problem for me if 720p is the highest it can do now...

MetroidPrimePwn

I'm used to gaming on my 1600x1050 PC Monitor, and by next year I'm going to get a 2560x1600 one. Resolution would be too big of a problem for me if 720p is the highest it can do now...

MetroidPrimePwn

Most of the potential problems accociated with OnLive could be easily fixed given a little bit of time to refine itself. Once the whole internet speed and availability problem is over, there really won't be a reason not to atleast check it out. And I'm sure their compression techniques will only get better just like internet speed and availability are only going to get better.

Metalphor

Most of the potential problems accociated with OnLive could be easily fixed given a little bit of time to refine itself. Once the whole internet speed and availability problem is over, there really won't be a reason not to atleast check it out. And I'm sure their compression techniques will only get better just like internet speed and availability are only going to get better.

Metalphor

In terms of internet spped and availability, this will take quite a while, as it is to do with infrastructure, and let's face it, no government is fast at getting off their backside. Eventually this could become commonplace, but i'm going to give it at least 5-10 years before it has the ability to.

Oh c'mon, it will never work. A screencap of Crysis can be as huge as 5Mb at higher resolutions. That means a slideshow of Crysis pics with one picture every second requires a connection speed of 5Mb/sec. Who the hell has connections that fast? And i'm only talking about a picture slideshow. Can you imagine a full in-game streaming? You would need something like 50Mb/sec connection speed.

When will these companies learn that total reliance on internet is an epic fail? This is one reason why i don't believe in digital downloads.

I have enough trouble with streaming Youtube videos without them buffering every minute.

No thanks.

Oh c'mon, it will never work. A screencap of Crysis can be as huge as 5Mb at higher resolutions. That means a slideshow of Crysis pics with one picture every second requires a connection speed of 5Mb/sec. Who the hell has connections that fast? And i'm only talking about a picture slideshow. Can you imagine a full in-game streaming? You would need something like 50Mb/sec connection speed.

When will these companies learn that total reliance on internet is an epic fail? This is one reason why i don't believe in digital downloads.

jhcho2

lol you're lack of knowledge on how bandwidth works is hilarious.5mb downloads don't require a 5mb connection, and it stands for megabit though for connection speed, not megabyte. 720p streaming will require a 5mb connection, upwards of that will require more, but as compression techniques inprove, the requirements will decrease.

DD is awesome by the way, and i use it for all my PC games. Not a single problem so far, with over $400 of games

Want to hear something freaking hilarious?

This was reported on the 23rd of March, 23rd of March was when I handed in a assignment for my business module with a product or service idea.

The idea was a cloud computing based laptop, then a cloud computing console gets announced 'on the very same day'.

I doubt my product idea would ever actually work in the real world, it was just something to write about, but I personally find this very amusing.

Technically it would mean the death of only console gaming as the service itself is basically setup to be played on a PC (as said the MicroConsole would be only an option). Not that i think that it will ever work but it is being targeted at PC's in general.

In all honesty, the chances of this working are very slim. Considering the cheap prices of PC hardware i don't really see the need. Though the idea of it is great they would need alot of help from publishers/developers in order for it to really work out and for it to be funded.

[QUOTE="Metalphor"]

Most of the potential problems accociated with OnLive could be easily fixed given a little bit of time to refine itself. Once the whole internet speed and availability problem is over, there really won't be a reason not to atleast check it out. And I'm sure their compression techniques will only get better just like internet speed and availability are only going to get better.

lundy86_4

In terms of internet spped and availability, this will take quite a while, as it is to do with infrastructure, and let's face it, no government is fast at getting off their backside. Eventually this could become commonplace, but i'm going to give it at least 5-10 years before it has the ability to.

Technically it would mean the death of only console gaming as the service itself is basically setup to be played on a PC. Not that i think that it will ever work but it is being targeted at PC's in general.

In all honesty, the chances of this working are very slim. Considering the cheap prices of PC hardware i don't really see the need. Though the idea of it is great they would need alot of help from publishers/developers in order for it to really work out and for it to be funded.

Puckhog04

[QUOTE="jhcho2"]

Oh c'mon, it will never work. A screencap of Crysis can be as huge as 5Mb at higher resolutions. That means a slideshow of Crysis pics with one picture every second requires a connection speed of 5Mb/sec. Who the hell has connections that fast? And i'm only talking about a picture slideshow. Can you imagine a full in-game streaming? You would need something like 50Mb/sec connection speed.

When will these companies learn that total reliance on internet is an epic fail? This is one reason why i don't believe in digital downloads.

lundy86_4

lol you're lack of knowledge on how bandwidth works is hilarious.5mb downloads don't require a 5mb connection, and it stands for megabit though for connection speed, not megabyte. 720p streaming will require a 5mb connection, upwards of that will require more, but as compression techniques inprove, the requirements will decrease.

DD is awesome by the way, and i use it for all my PC games. Not a single problem so far, with over $400 of games

You are not very alert are you? Did i say a 5Mb connection downloads at 5Mb/sec? That's why i specifically added the 'per sec' term. Obviously the download speed is equals to the bit rate divided by 8. To prove my point right, a 5Mb/sec download requires a 40Mb connection. How many people have a 40Mb connection? While a 50Mb/sec download requires a 400Mb connection. I dunno if it even exist or will exist for household use.

oh ya, and nobody plays at 720p on pc.

[QUOTE="lundy86_4"]

[QUOTE="jhcho2"]

Oh c'mon, it will never work. A screencap of Crysis can be as huge as 5Mb at higher resolutions. That means a slideshow of Crysis pics with one picture every second requires a connection speed of 5Mb/sec. Who the hell has connections that fast? And i'm only talking about a picture slideshow. Can you imagine a full in-game streaming? You would need something like 50Mb/sec connection speed.

When will these companies learn that total reliance on internet is an epic fail? This is one reason why i don't believe in digital downloads.

jhcho2

lol you're lack of knowledge on how bandwidth works is hilarious.5mb downloads don't require a 5mb connection, and it stands for megabit though for connection speed, not megabyte. 720p streaming will require a 5mb connection, upwards of that will require more, but as compression techniques inprove, the requirements will decrease.

DD is awesome by the way, and i use it for all my PC games. Not a single problem so far, with over $400 of games

You are not very alert are you? Did i say a 5Mb connection downloads at 5Mb/sec? That's why i specifically added the 'per sec' term. Obviously the download speed is equals to the bit rate divided by 8. To prove my point right, a 5Mb/sec download requires a 40Mb connection. How many people have a 40Mb connection? While a 50Mb/sec download requires a 400Mb connection. I dunno if it even exist or will exist fow household use.

[QUOTE="Puckhog04"]

Technically it would mean the death of only console gaming as the service itself is basically setup to be played on a PC. Not that i think that it will ever work but it is being targeted at PC's in general.

In all honesty, the chances of this working are very slim. Considering the cheap prices of PC hardware i don't really see the need. Though the idea of it is great they would need alot of help from publishers/developers in order for it to really work out and for it to be funded.

Metalphor

I have no doubt they're already looking into it. Blizzard is trying to make Blizzard.net somewhat like Steam as well (along with the already highly active Direct2Drive) so you can bet that all of these are looking at the possibilities of Cloud computing. We'll see if it works. I have my doubts but who knows.

[QUOTE="lundy86_4"]

[QUOTE="jhcho2"]

Oh c'mon, it will never work. A screencap of Crysis can be as huge as 5Mb at higher resolutions. That means a slideshow of Crysis pics with one picture every second requires a connection speed of 5Mb/sec. Who the hell has connections that fast? And i'm only talking about a picture slideshow. Can you imagine a full in-game streaming? You would need something like 50Mb/sec connection speed.

When will these companies learn that total reliance on internet is an epic fail? This is one reason why i don't believe in digital downloads.

jhcho2

lol you're lack of knowledge on how bandwidth works is hilarious.5mb downloads don't require a 5mb connection, and it stands for megabit though for connection speed, not megabyte. 720p streaming will require a 5mb connection, upwards of that will require more, but as compression techniques inprove, the requirements will decrease.

DD is awesome by the way, and i use it for all my PC games. Not a single problem so far, with over $400 of games

You are not very alert are you? Did i say a 5Mb connection downloads at 5Mb/sec? That's why i specifically added the 'per sec' term. Obviously the download speed is equals to the bit rate divided by 8. To prove my point right, a 5Mb/sec download requires a 40Mb connection. How many people have a 40Mb connection? While a 50Mb/sec download requires a 400Mb connection. I dunno if it even exist or will exist for household use.

oh ya, and nobody plays at 720p on pc.

Yes but this is streaming we are talking about, and just because a high res image is 5mb does not mean it's a 5mb download per frame. A minimum of 1.5mb connection for 480p and 3mb connection for 720p, why would a 40mb connection be needed? We don't even have those speeds in the majority of the world's home market.

lol this service will never go online in the near future it's not viable at all for HD gaming. They would need so much GPU power and bandwith it's not possible.. And anyway for those who are saying you have 15Mbps connections, do you think you're ISP will let you download 90gigabits for only 5 hours of gaming.. lol this startup will die soon

And what kind of internet connection is going to be required to stream all the data loaded into the RAM/VRAM cache every second you play? And what happens when you internet connection goes down?

[QUOTE="jhcho2"]

[QUOTE="lundy86_4"]

lol you're lack of knowledge on how bandwidth works is hilarious.5mb downloads don't require a 5mb connection, and it stands for megabit though for connection speed, not megabyte. 720p streaming will require a 5mb connection, upwards of that will require more, but as compression techniques inprove, the requirements will decrease.

DD is awesome by the way, and i use it for all my PC games. Not a single problem so far, with over $400 of games

big_orc

You are not very alert are you? Did i say a 5Mb connection downloads at 5Mb/sec? That's why i specifically added the 'per sec' term. Obviously the download speed is equals to the bit rate divided by 8. To prove my point right, a 5Mb/sec download requires a 40Mb connection. How many people have a 40Mb connection? While a 50Mb/sec download requires a 400Mb connection. I dunno if it even exist or will exist fow household use.

Of course you could. At what resolution? And with how much detail? The bigger question you should be asking is if the 5Mb connection sufficient to accomodate games with increasingly better graphics. I hope you are aware that a 5Mb connection has a maximum theoretical download speed of 400Kb/sec. At that speed, you can't even download an in-game screenshot of 1Mb size in 1 second, less play the game itself.

I think you were too quick to believe what they said without looking into the details. It's like saying you could download a file in less than 1 sec, but how big a file? Any file less than 400kb could be done in 1 sec, but anything above 400kb takes more than 1 sec. Did you look into this details? Or took the vague and uninformed statement for a universal fact?

Possible problems:
1. 720p is standard in this generation of consoles but its very below standards in the world of PC gaming. I don't see hermits abandoning the rigs they've built themselves for 720p anytime soon.

2. Modding- how can people mod content when its being streamed to them through a server? PC is all about modding and always has been.

3. No internet? NO GAMES - if your internet experiences downtime your game library will disappear...

4. Lag - yes, the demonstration didn't have lag because at the moment the amount of users is being controlled. But imagine what it'll be like when hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are using it. They say there will be no noticable lag... I'll believe it when I see it.

This would be successful if everyone had fiber-optic connections...:|

PC will never die.

[QUOTE="jhcho2"]

[QUOTE="lundy86_4"]

lol you're lack of knowledge on how bandwidth works is hilarious.5mb downloads don't require a 5mb connection, and it stands for megabit though for connection speed, not megabyte. 720p streaming will require a 5mb connection, upwards of that will require more, but as compression techniques inprove, the requirements will decrease.

DD is awesome by the way, and i use it for all my PC games. Not a single problem so far, with over $400 of games

lundy86_4

You are not very alert are you? Did i say a 5Mb connection downloads at 5Mb/sec? That's why i specifically added the 'per sec' term. Obviously the download speed is equals to the bit rate divided by 8. To prove my point right, a 5Mb/sec download requires a 40Mb connection. How many people have a 40Mb connection? While a 50Mb/sec download requires a 400Mb connection. I dunno if it even exist or will exist for household use.

oh ya, and nobody plays at 720p on pc.

Yes but this is streaming we are talking about, and just because a high res image is 5mb does not mean it's a 5mb download per frame. A minimum of 1.5mb connection for 480p and 3mb connection for 720p, why would a 40mb connection be needed? We don't even have those speeds in the majority of the world's home market.

If the game is running at 30fps, isn't it equivalent to having 30 pictures in 1 second? Isn't 1 frame equivalent to 1 picture? So if your connection can't even download 1 picture in 1 second, how is it supposed to download 30 pictures of the same size within a 1 second interval?

[QUOTE="lundy86_4"]

[QUOTE="jhcho2"]

You are not very alert are you? Did i say a 5Mb connection downloads at 5Mb/sec? That's why i specifically added the 'per sec' term. Obviously the download speed is equals to the bit rate divided by 8. To prove my point right, a 5Mb/sec download requires a 40Mb connection. How many people have a 40Mb connection? While a 50Mb/sec download requires a 400Mb connection. I dunno if it even exist or will exist for household use.

oh ya, and nobody plays at 720p on pc.

jhcho2

Yes but this is streaming we are talking about, and just because a high res image is 5mb does not mean it's a 5mb download per frame. A minimum of 1.5mb connection for 480p and 3mb connection for 720p, why would a 40mb connection be needed? We don't even have those speeds in the majority of the world's home market.

If the game is running at 30fps, isn't it equivalent to having 30 pictures in 1 second? Isn't 1 frame equivalent to 1 picture? So if your connection can't even download 1 picture in 1 second, how is it supposed to download 30 pictures of the same size within a 1 second interval?

I would somewhat agree if it wasn't going to be compressed and streamed. the compression on their end should cut down the size, and the decompression on our end will return it to the proper rez. However in terms of streaming, I don't know exactly how it works :P so I can't talk for that