[SOLVED] Explain The Difference Between Playing and Watching a Video!

[Kisuke42]

Hello all, I am sorry if this is the wrong sub to post this.

My question is how am I able to watch a video of a person playing a game on 1080/ultra settings on youtube yet my PC cant even run said game on minimum?

 

[USAFRet]

Hello all, I am sorry if this is the wrong sub to post this.

My question is how am I able to watch a video of a person playing a game on 1080/ultra settings on youtube yet my PC cant even run said game on minimum?

There is a large difference between displaying a prerendered series of images, vs rendering them on the fly at 60fps.

Your system can play the movie Toy Story, but not have the horsepower to render the thousands of frames it took to make it, in real time.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Because your system doesn't have to drive the complex game engine like the system that's actually doing the gaming. All your system has to do is play the video of the gameplay, which is easily done by even the least capable integrated graphics. Those same integrated graphics however will be unable, or barely able, to run the same game engine well though.

It takes far more CPU and GPU resources to game than it does to watch video.

 

[InvalidError]

Playing a video is just that, playing a video. It doesn't matter what the video is from, CODECs used to compress video do not discriminate between cats, dogs, foxes, an MCU movie, porn or whatever else, it is all h264, h265 or whatever other codec the pre-rendered content has been compressed with. Even my 13 years old Core2Duo can handle two simultaneous 1080p streams on YT. Compressing the video at the time of recording or during editing is the more CPU-intensive part of the process, not playing it back which is trivial on remotely decent hardware.

Playing games is more CPU and GPU intensive since it needs to run the actual games and render frames in real-time.

 

[hang-the-9]

Hello all, I am sorry if this is the wrong sub to post this.

My question is how am I able to watch a video of a person playing a game on 1080/ultra settings on youtube yet my PC cant even run said game on minimum?

About same difference as being able to watch pro soccer but not actually being able to play the game yourself. The computer is not actually doing any of the work of rendering the game. In both cases you are just getting the end result of the work not the actual work.

 

[werberman]

Quite simple: displaying an image may be the end result of both games and video, but the process of getting those images is totally different. Video games require the entire image (frame) to be generated from scratch using all sorts of player and game data. Your machine has to do all the work of figuring out how the light will hit every object, where the lights are, how bright they are, what the shapes and textures are of the various items, and so on, dozens of times per second in order to be considered playable. Video, on the other hand, is pre-rendered: that is, it had already been fully created before it came to your machine. All your computer has to do is load the images using the correct codex and display them.

Of course, it's actually quite complicated, but that's the general idea.

 

[InvalidError]

Another comparison would be to watching a movie: when you are merely watching the movie, you are looking at a finished product without the need to know anything about how it was made while playing a game is more like directing and filming all of the different takes and angles, creating all of the GFX and SFX, before compositing/editing all of that together so you can eventually produce the final cut. There are orders of magnitude more work under the hood.