OnLive Cloud-Based Gaming: Is This The End Of High-End PCs?

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The End Of High-End PCs?

I heard the same words when came out the XBOX 360 and PS3 and until today the PC is the big king of the performance and games.

IMO I would not buy a PS3 for $350 if with the same price I can get a Six core CPU. Can u OC a PS3 or 360? Can u use Crossfire or SLI?, yeah the console is much portable and don't need "system" requirements but who cares? A gamer don't use the same rig for more that 2 years and that is a long time.
 
it's funny but if I wanted to use this service the internet I would have to pay for would pay for the cost of a mid range tower in less than a year.
 
It supports mac. If the service actually works as advertised, mac pro users and even mac-book users could potentially play games without having to get a real PC! It'd be great for game devs too, since they wouldn't have to port games to mac in order to sell to that audience.
 
[citation][nom]braneman[/nom]it's funny but if I wanted to use this service the internet I would have to pay for would pay for the cost of a mid range tower in less than a year.[/citation]

For me, the cost for the internet required to use this service would be $120 per month 🙁
 
No offence but this article is kinda silly i mean do you actually think companies like intel, invidia, amd and others who have a serious stake in PC Gaming to sell their hardware are going to let some silly little start-up company like OnLive take their bread and butter. of course those companies are looking in other areas and doing some radical things that they've never done before but come on even microsoft who sells consoles depends on PC Gamers to buy their latest os's to an extent. it is going to be an up hill battle for that company don't forget sony who has their own PS3 i doubt their going to fade into the night.
 
I'm in the founding members program, I have a PC that can pretty much crank everything. The service is nice, but the real money for this company to make is in the tv adapter, sit it right next to your xbox or PS3, or hell a Wii, and you have your self a console. I'd say the games look about the same as you would see on a console, with a dip in sound quality. The best thing about it though, is the arena, you can watch anyone playing, in realtime, it's trippy, and a really nice way to relax.
 
Game developers and hardware manufacturers might actually like moving away from the fickle home gamer / enthusiast gamer and their ever changing loyalties. If a GPU manufacturer can win the heart of cloud computing complexes that render all these games for cloud based gaming then they may have a more secure client, even though they may start charging way more per GPU and only offer integrated GPU's for notebooks, netbooks, low end desktops, smart phones etc. Maybe PCoIP will be the norm in the next 5 to 10 years and we're all left at the mercy of the cloud and what "we're aloud eerrr.... a'cloud, to do".
 
[citation][nom]zuneguy[/nom]No offence but this article is kinda silly i mean do you actually think companies like intel, invidia, amd and others who have a serious stake in PC Gaming to sell their hardware are going to let some silly little start-up company like OnLive take their bread and butter...[/citation]

I am sure they have GPUs and CPUs in OnLive's servers, and tons of them. They are more like business partners.

---

Bandwidth isn't the only problem though, latency is another major concern. We can control what hardware we put in our computer and getting a predictable performance (even a console) for a given cost, but we can't control what others are doing on the Internet. And those with download cap, this high performance cloud service is probably not going to be very cost efficient.


 
[citation][nom]zuneguy[/nom]No offence but this article is kinda silly i mean do you actually think companies like intel, invidia, amd and others who have a serious stake in PC Gaming to sell their hardware are going to let some silly little start-up company like OnLive take their bread and butter. of course those companies are looking in other areas and doing some radical things that they've never done before but come on even microsoft who sells consoles depends on PC Gamers to buy their latest os's to an extent. it is going to be an up hill battle for that company don't forget sony who has their own PS3 i doubt their going to fade into the night.[/citation]

My first post, but I had to reply to this.

You realise that OnLive has to buy components for their pc's too. Which means Nvidia, Intel and AMD all will get paid for high-end parts, whether or not gamers buy parts from them. And despite this, Microsoft will be selling Windows 7 for some time. All this service looks to do is lower the hardware requirements.

However, I can't see this service being too popular. Too many people enjoy fiddling with their computers, and upgrading. I mess around with my Antec 1200 pretty much all the time, whether or not it's to add a new part.
 
[citation][nom]Badgerman[/nom]Steam updates, I start crashing.[/citation]

Did you start writing this post 6 years ago when Steam actually behaved like this when it was brand new?

:

As for the topic on-hand... If this actually becomes the normal practice, I mourn the loss of the modding community.
 
I figured, could have just cut to the point and said its crap, but journalism needs its fair and balanced observations to make such claims. Nice done Chris. Just like to point out that my 3 year old Toshiba laptop can play games with better quality then what I'm seeing in these videos lol.
 
The service offers poor video quality and lacks sharpness.

The service uses about 3GB of bandwidth per hour (hope you are not on comcast)

There is no way around the latency problem so you will be stuck with poor gaming experiences when it comes to FPS games and other fast paced games. (a review was done on twich that confirmed this problem)

The service doesn't work if you use wifi (if it detects wifi it will not run)


The service overall sucks for many things and will only frustrate a gamer especially when they die due to lag or other random problems.

Many sites report it using 700-800KB/s depending on the game

video has compression artifacts and lacks fine detail and sharpness
(720P video needs at least 2000KB/s in many cases to avoid distortions at high speeds (at least with h.264)
 
[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Well, let's do a little math. They require 5 Mb/s for an HD stream. Let's say they allow 20% for overhead, so you might be using 4 Mb/s, which is 500 KB/s (note the difference between bits and bytes). That's 30 MB/min or 1.8 GB/hr. That's by no means scientific, but a ballpark figure making a big assumption about what the service actually needs for fluid game play.[/citation]

i.e. it wouldn't take too long to waste thousands of dollars just on the internet bill. Pretty rare to get all the way up to 5Mb/s around here anyway.
 
I have an 80 ms ping to an Ookla server that's about 10 miles away from me.

I can notice when an LCD has a response time over 5 ms.

This isn't the end of high-end PCs.
 
this is good for tablets and low powered machines but high end will live strong. This could benefit pc gaming as a whole by widening the market but their will always be the high end market. Just look at some comparisons between Onlive picture quality vs a gaming pc. It's night and day. A 720p video that is heavily compressed and stretched to fill the screen vs a native 1080p with all the settings cranked up. This has a market but it doesn't take away from the market that has and prefers to play games at their highest ability. Plus you don't even own the games with onlive
 
It sounds like it is foolish to think you can manage a server capable of meeting the demands of every gamer without charging them enough money to actually buy a computer they can game on themselves. This is a guarantee to get mediocre gaming experience and have to pay for the privilege.

I was about to say this is perfect for phones and other portables but since the big boys in the phone business are about to place caps on their services it won't even work there.
 
[citation][nom]Sharft6[/nom]i.e. it wouldn't take too long to waste thousands of dollars just on the internet bill. Pretty rare to get all the way up to 5Mb/s around here anyway.[/citation]

If you have a cap, yeah. I don't, for now. Like most of you, I feel a lot more secure about the fate of high-end hardware after actually using OnLive. At the same time, it's cool as hell that my little notebook can play otherwise demanding games, too.
 
the only way I'd use this service is to "rent" a game to see if I might like it. I'd rather spend $4 on a game and play it for a few days and lose interest, than spend $45 on a game that looks sweet but has no content at all once you get 1/4 of the way through it.
 
This is a proof of concept more than anything else. They've shown us that it can be done. Now technology and network infrastructure has to catch up to make the concept a reality for everyone. Everything else is going cloud-based (and it's about time considering how long cloud computing has been "the next big thing") and eventually this will follow. We're slowly moving into the era of "smart" terminals accessing all resources remotely. Mobile computing is really what's pushing this trend though, not desktops.
 
This review is wrong on every count, your rigs absolutely are obsolete and so are consoles.

1. Cloud gaming enables game engines that require an arbitrary amount of ram and processing power and makes them not only possible but affordable. Can anything local handle an engine that requires 10 terabytes of ultra fast ram, the kind of ram that can't be had in a desktop? These services will soon be serving instances or view on these types of apps, and Onlive has been working on that for a while. Could you local PC host Google maps? Could it do anything that would have anything like the power and scope? The answer is NO, it would have to stream it!

2. This will quickly open up a situation where you pay $40 and get unlimited access to every app and piece of content in existence anywhere and anytime for a month without a contract or ads. This is the world we are moving to and its also a step closer to mobile phones without mobile carriers. Its a step closer to a world without the BS of puffing-sponsorhsip/ads-lobbying which enables political capture and makes our democracies into shams. And for the record no thinking person wants Blu-Ray or silly consoles because those or the most backwards and regressive models possible, people who think realize they want that kind of junk as much as they want DRM but then again think about the main culprit behind DRM it gave us both of those.


 
the reason that you are not getting such a good experience here for onlive might be the fact that you don't have such a good connection. I happen to have one and I have been dazzled by the quality of the games and how responsive it is. I just don't notice the lag. I think that the reason most people are giving onlive such a hard time is because they have to complain about every minor detail. I personally know that this is going to be an awesome thing in the years to come because I won't have to buy expensive hardware upgrades and I won't have to keep shelf room for all my disk and all of my games. I also don't have to re-install the games every time I feel like coming back to an older game that i uninstalled. I just don't want to do that. I would say that this is just the beginning and that once onlive gets underway that the frame rates will go up and the lag will only go down. I can't wait to see what happens then.
 
A couple of things. First of all, this will force people to learn how to use a router. That is, if the OnLine service requires a 5mb connection. So 5mb of it will be dedicated to your computer. Secondly, my computer is just barely good enough to run anything, maybe not in optimized settings, but I don't really care. My monitor isn't that great, so I'm not missing out. Thirdly, I think OnLive should offer ALL games with a 3 and 5 day pass. If you want to download the game, just use something like D2D. Fourth, you didn't show a test on a MAC, not that I care. I hate MACs but others would be curious. Fifth...um yeah...Crysis? :)
 
I think what everyone is missing, is you all are thinking too much about yourselves, and not the general public. This isn't aimed at people that throw down $1500+ a year on a computer.

This is aimed at the people who drop $400-$600 every 4-5 years on a computer. Who don't keep ontop of technology because they don't want to, or can't afford it.
 
I discovered a way around the "NO WIRELESS" limitation. Bridge the Ethernet & Wireless connections together. It works perfect, because most wireless connections are faster than your internet connection. I've tested onlive on my desktop and laptop and haven't noticed any difference in the connection when using my laptop.

I think it is ridiculous for them to have a wireless restriction.

The service is playable and 30 minute demos lets you know if the game is worth buying. I don't mean worth buying from onlive, because I want possession of my games and don't like the idea of losing everything I paid for if my membership expires.

It is entertaining, but doesn't come close to the experience of playing a game on a PC with the hardware to support it at high resolutions and frame rates.
 
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