Sony already does this with SharePlay, Remote Play, and PS Now. SharePlay let's your friend remotely play your PS4 or even local multiplayer. It's been around for 5 years now and hasn't ruined the industry.

Peak speed is the least reliable metric for measuring preparedness for game streaming. It will be about latency and consistency. Internet speeds are almost a non-factor with the standards speeds today.

I'm still waiting for details on costs but I've already got my estimates:

20 hours of gaming in 3 tiers.

$15/month 720P x 30fps - (A) games & free-to-play included

$25/month 1080P x 30fps (AA) games included

$40/month 4K x 60fps (AAA) games included

No, that's based on AMD's old 7601 Epyc server chip. Epyc Rome would be the equivalent and Google will upgrade whenever they are available. Consoles will be the 3.2Ghz variant and cloud servers will follow soon afterwards.

That's correct there would be a different type of interface and it wouldn't be networked GPU resources. The servers they are talking about would have 8 GPUs on a PCI bus. 2 per v340. It's still one physical server with theoretical performance of 448 cus due to quad v340s. These servers are at least 50K-80K each so they definitely wouldn't allot it to a single user. However they aren't doing networked GPUs for real-time performance gaming. That remains outside of possible at this point. There is a massive worlds of difference between distributing rendering over PCI buses on identical cards vs distributing over LAN on varying hardware.

I keep talking about the above server in my post because understanding how this is all working is better than speculating.

At VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas in the AMD booth, we demonstrated how A + A makes an astounding duet. For the first time, we showed a technology demonstration of a virtualized environment driven by an HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 from AMD’s Santa Clara, CA datacenter. Inside, the server we have two 32 core, 64 thread Epyc CPUs and a recently announced dual GPU solution based on the “Vega” architecture¹, the Radeon Pro V340. The result, an awesome system for virtualized workloads. And a GPU that delivers 33% greater user density than our competition³.

Also, in the booth was our A + A gorilla. It’s a dual Epyc server with 4 Radeon Pro V340s. 8 GPUs (2 per card), each with 56 compute units4 thumping graphics and supported by 2 Epyc 32 core CPUs.

Nah this is known. The full hardware was announced in October by AMD.

https://community.amd.com/community/radeon-pro-graphics/blog/2018/11/13/amd-server-cpus-gpus-the-ultimate-virtualization-solution

Anyone who is doing game streaming will be using these servers except for MS.

Footnote from the link.

Estimates based on SPECfp®_rate_base2017 using the GCC-02 v7.2 compiler. AMD- based system scored 201 in tests conducted in AMD labs using an “Ethanol” reference platform configured with 2 x AMD EPYC 7601 SOC’s ($4200 each at AMD 1 ku pricing), 512GB memory (16 x 32GB 2R DDR4 2666MHz), Ubuntu 17.04, BIOS 1002E. Intel- based Supermicro SYS-1029U-TRTP server scored 164 in tests conducted by AMD, configured with 2 x 8160 CPU’s (2 x $4702 each per ark.intel.com), 768GB memory (24 x 32GB 2R DDR4 2666MHz), SLES 12 SP3 4.4.92-6.18-default kernel, BIOS set to Extreme performance setting. NAP-77

CPU Specs: 7601 Epyc

# of CPU Cores32

# of Threads64

Base Clock2.2GHz

Max Boost Clock 3.2GHz

All Core Boost Speed 2.7Ghz

Socket Count1P/2P

PCI Express Versionx128

Default TDP / TDP180W

GPU Specs: v340

Memory Size 32 GB Memory Type (GPU) HBM2

@Grey_Eyed_Elf:

The cost of the service is a huge concern.

These streaming services are generally priced per hour of steaming. When Netflix streaming first launched users only got 20 hours of streaming per month.

PSnow when it first launched charged $2.99 for a 4 hour rental. Or $0.75 per hour.

Shadow charges $35 for 20 hours and Nvidia Shield is rumored to be priced at $25 for 20 hours of use.

Neither Shadow nor the consumer version of Shield includes game unless you own them already through a digital store. The betas include some games.

So the break down is PSNow at launch: $0.75

Nvidia Shield rumored: $1.25 per hour no games

Shadow: $1.75 per hour, no games.

PSNow can be gotten for $99 a year now or about $8 per month so like Netflix, after several years in the streaming industry they were able to offer an unlimited model for under $10 a month that includes the content itself.

Neither Google nor MS have said anything about their streaming prices but the going rate appears to be between $1.25-$1.75 and hour. Anything higher that $2 per hour may be a hard sell even though we pay $5 to rent 2 hour movies for 72 hours.... so new games will likely be out of the question unless it’s very high priced.

@BassMan:

PhysX is just a software API. It can still be used if a developer wants to. I’m sure they have their reasons but I’m assuming because they will be using AMD hardware and running PC games that they would have some tie into Microsoft who own Havok and likely make a lot of Xbox games.

Basically Google needs PC games which may already be cross developed for Xbox which MS owns so getting them running on AMD hardware is likely easier due to their experience with Xbox and MS. Remember they games would need to support using the API in the first place and few devs will have PhysX running on AMD GPUs since it just recently went open source.

@IMAHAPYHIPPO:

It’s the underlying servers that these run on and technically how much of those server resources they will allocate to a single user at any given time. It’s really for reference and marketing for consumers and devs to compare against current offerings.

@Grey_Eyed_Elf:

That’s correct and 60fps is ideal as it actually helps to mask the lag more believe it or not. I assume it’s because it’s slightly less noticeable if a single frame is skipped due to packet loss.

They will likely scale up more in the future as they get better server hardware and bandwidth costs go down.