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

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History repeating it self here....same statements ware about PC's and TS long ago. So we have ts and similar solution today, but as a solution for specific scenarios, and it will never be able to replace best hardware available at the time. But it is good to have the option.
 
[citation][nom]elkein[/nom]If they were to host elder scrolls, do you think they would toggle the "eye candy." A friend at work loved oblivion on his xbox, till he seen my pc version (that would mean non politically correct version.)[/citation]

Modern Warfare 3 has sold millions of copys...even if they all didnt pay full price thats still tens of millions in return if not more, I dont know exact numbers so dont quote me but I do know its over a million copys. Why do they need more money? I bought the game and it was great but im bored of it I should be able to sell it to who ever I want with out paying some sort of fee to the developer, nor should the content I pay for be controlled to the extent where they can force me to repay for the same content at a later date just so I cant keep using it. The only place where this is acceptable is in a online gaming network like xboxlive or gamespy etc where they provide the service of connecting you with other gamers and or running servers for those games, or MMORPGS like world of war craft. That said though I really think MMORPGS developers are exploitting the addictive nature of the games to make as much money as possible without scaring them away to another game, like a drug dealer trying to keep a client coming back for more. Very morally controversial, but the consumer is willing to pay so they will keep doing it. And I know the purpose of business is to make money but do you really need to make so much money you can wipe your butt with it?
 
bad quote for above post I ment to post[citation i don't know but ask the ceo's as to why?! they don't care about you but only their money!onlive will never change because they don't care about you but want their money. this is the game industry and all the hardcore are suckered into it.[/citation]
 
With all the bandwidth caps ISPs are implementing these days I don't see Onlive as a cheaper solution.

Sure you save the cost of a decent PC, but you'll end up paying for it streaming 5Mbps. That comes out to about 2GB/hour, with the amount of gaming I do I'd pay an arm and a leg in over-usage fees to my ISP...
 
This will be a problem when ISPs limit bandwidth. I am a beta tester for OnLive and the resolution sux!
 
I attempted this at my friends house. He received the free year of Onlive through ATT, and with his 24mb fiber connection we got games that had HORRIBLE quality and did in fact lag in the mouse movement. It was potentially the worst gaming experience that I have ever had. If this were the only way to play PC games, I would literally move over to consoles. Luckily...this is not the case. Good idea, bad timing.
 
If this is slow and choppy for some locals with ~20Mbps connections what is this service going to be like for people overseas? For example here in New Zealand I can often see ping times of up to 250ms contacting a US server and your average ADSL connection here is about 3mbit.
 
it's not about the bandwidth that is the problem. the problem is ownership of a product. $40 to play assassins creed 2 and you don't even own the item?! if you have a pc, you could buy assassins creed 2 at near that price and own it. even better, you can even sell that used copy when you no longer want it.

onlive is a concept of full drm control, you never own the product and you never sell the product. remember what many pc gamers say about drm products, that it isn't really an owned product but a rental product. onlive is the closest thing that the video game industry were hoping to adapt but we can now see that it will never occur because no one, not even the brainwashed hardcore gamers will buy into it.
 
Chris, I have a bit of a side-question here... You give a CPU-usage chart for the high-end system, but it begs a few more questions: was the video stream perhaps being accelerated by the (rather hefty) video cards? I'm wondering what the CPU load was on the notebook there, too.

I'd hypotheosized for a while that one of OnLive's main weaknesses is something people take for granted: the CPU power needed to decode a high-resolution movie. Most people buy a Blu-Ray player and imagine it as a magical "black box," where disc goes in slot A, and wonderful video signals magically come out of slot B, and they completely forget that a hefty CPU is built into the thing to handle the in-between.

Similarly, in the case of OnLive, the cost of decoding such video might be a CPU that, ironically, would play the game fine. In such a case, the cost of OnLive would not truly be justifiable, as at least for desktops, the more intelligent course of action would be to spend the difference on a video card upgrade, ($100US for a 4850 anyone? Would max @1280x720 easy) turning an OnLive-capable office PC into a nice inexpensive gaming rig.
 
Until ISP undo the whole bandwidth capping bullshit, this thing won't take off, else people are gonna rack up hundreds of dollars in bandwidth overusage. I know for sure it won't take off in Canada since all major ISP gives you bandwidth that you can barely scrape by as a hardcore gamer.

Also, it takes the fun away from computer gaming which is building and fine tuning your rig. It's like having a car enthusiast not being able to tweak his or her car and only allowed to drive it. What's the fun in that?

This thing is great for people who have low end PCs and unlimited bandwidth caps and don't care about high ping gaming.
 
No lag for me. The only thing is that they promised 1080p but it's only 720p for now. They'll prolly up it later. But yeah it's great, not many games yet either. It's free for a year so why complain...
 
I personally think cloud computing is going to be a downfall for computers. Leaving your data out to be touched by millions of hackers around the globe and relying on a corporation to not make a stupid decision and close it's doors due to bankruptcy.
 
[citation][nom]drwho1[/nom]no thanks, I like to play without strings or limitations.[/citation]

That's why I refuse to buy another Ubisoft game, where the string AND limitation is you have to have an Internet connection present at all times to play, even single player games. At least Steam has an off-line mode... Ubi does not.

Cloud computing for gaming? FUH-GET-AHBAHT-IT. The Garbage that is Activision, now claims they can't reset MW2 stats because it's in the Steam Cloud, and Steam says they can't reset it (for what reason, they don't really say.) What good is Cloud data if you have no control over your own data? What if the server gets hacked and your data Stolen? I won't buy any more Activision garbage either... all THEY want is our money, and nothing else. Why would I want MW2 stats reset? Hackers, that Activision is ultimately responsible for allowing to live on, hacking multi-player stats and raising them, OR hacking so if you kill them (the hacker) you lose serious XP in multiplayer mode.

I'll keep a console AND my High-End PC over any cloud solution. (But I won't buy any more Activision and Ubisoft games to find out if they're doing the same DRM, and horrible support.)
 
[citation][nom]makrish[/nom]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]

Onlive isn't using a PC for every user of their system, that's what you indicate when you allude to, as if Intel, AMD and Nvidia would be selling the difference of their hardware sales to Onlive for use when the PC end user no longer buys it when they use Onlive. That wouldn't at all be a profitable situation for Onlive. They are actually using a few high end servers of their in their locations, or leasing ISP space for their servers, or ISP servers, and going through their networks (the ISPs) for this to function.

I can say this, it doesn't touch a decent rig with the same resolution settings, not even close. And the my 360 puts out better graphics. It is almost as if you are watching a decent looking analog TV broadcast at 720 res. If you go full screen with Onlive, it looks weak, unlike if you did that with a PC or even the 360 or PS3.

I have Onlive and have been using it a great deal. It works OK, there is a little latency issue and some lag from time to time, but ti does respond fairly well. I have had two experiences where their network kicked me off stating that I was low on bandwidth. When I checked my stats, it turned out to be them as I couldn't ping them and I could still download at 30mbps, my normal speed. I pinged Google, and had an average of 43ms on 20 trip and no lost packets.
 
[citation][nom]thegreathuntingdolphin[/nom]Gurboura is right. Most of the people on this site are enthusiast. This service isn't aimed at them. It is aimed at the general gaming public that likes to spend a couple hundred dollars on a console every several years or the people that upgrade their stock PC's graphics card occasionally - ie people that want "good enough" and not excellent quality.[/citation]

Well, I want good enough too from Onlive, but it doesn't touch consoles either, to be honest, and I am talking just by looking at the visuals. The 360 puts out much better textures than Onlive, even at 720p. We all know the 360 can play games at 1080p. I am more an avid PC gamer though, and I would not dare even mention Onlive, let alone my 360, in the same breath as my PC. My PC: a 24" Samsung (1920x1200) monitor, 12g DDR3 1333mhz G-Skill RAM, Rampage II Extreme MOBO, i7 950 chip and dual Radeon 5870s in crossfire. I can play Crysis at its highest settings and easily maintain 50fps.
 
[citation][nom]LLJones[/nom]If I understand OnLive, there is no one time fee so you can play everything. So it becomes a case of if you want to play this, then give me a nickle, if you want to play that, then give me a dime if you want to play the other, I'll need another nickel. At the end of the year, I have absolutely nothing to show for it. No thanks, I work to hard for my money and I want tangibles. This would have been great years ago, although not feasible, when you were limited by hdd space, but now you can carry everything on your laptop and don't forget about the used game market. I can buy the game for at least half price have it always with no connection/crash worry,One fee, play all games and it's wireless, give me a call.[/citation]


This is the pay schedule; $4.95/m just to access the service, and that includes demos, watching other plays, etc. You buy a playpass, which is a rental in 3 or 5 day prices that vary from $3.99 to $8.99 or a full playpass from anywhere between $19.99 to $59.99 as long as the game resides on their servers, or you don't lose your subscription before that. The full playpass lets you play the game as much as you like. As it stands now, games bought (rented) at full playpass reside on their servers until June 2013. It could be longer depending on the popularity of the game.
 
Why do we try to go back to big blue were other people controlled what you did and when you did it? What will be the financial cost in the future for this? Remember Max Headroom? When I am away from home I am usually in no mood to be on a computer, time enough when I get home. I will keep my freedom and leave the Cloud to people who want to be slaves. 🙁
 
I think you all are missing the bigger picture. When AT&T goes live with there 98% national coverage with wifi/wimax, Bandwidth becomes “obsolete. There Fiber nodes are not only the biggest, but as of the advent of Uverse, there now the fastest too, covering a total of 70% CURRENTLY active internet connections in America, both Business and residential, showing us that they already have the capacity as far as pure computational power to Truly offer a 10+ Mb connection to the 98% they claim. FREE. To almost every human In America. Cloud computing hasn’t even scratched the surface of it potential yet. Oh and to all you nay Sayers out there, keep these FACTS in mind:

1) AT&T already handles over 80% of Americas Telecom network. Land lines, Cell phones, Txt messages, residential internet traffic from the hub on. (Guess what kiddies, even though your cell phone says Verizon or sprint, IT STILL MUST USE THE AT&T SYSTEMS TO COMMUNICATE WITH ANY OTER SYSTEM BESIDES ITS OWN!)

2) The free wifi will be Fiber based from the tower all the way to the source. Can you say “no more lag”?

3) We have this great company to thank for ALL our coolest teck. Fight it if you want to, but Good things come from a company run correctly. The transistor, the miniaturized circuit board, Txt messages, DSL, and many many more inventions were invented, panted, and given to the people Directly from Bell labs, AT&T, and its continuants. And now in 2015, Free internet for All Americans. Taken to the extreme, as we always do here, there will be cloud everything. Games is just the start
 
Speaking of the topic of cloud computing.... For cloud stuff, there's a great compromise to keeping things local with full control: Dropbox. It allows me to keep my own copy of documents/photos/videos, while also backing it up into the cloud (solves: backup). Having the same Dropbox account logged on both my desktop and laptop means that every time I save a new photo, rename or move or delete a file, the same thing also happens on the other computer. (solves: synchronization, keeps two computers in sync) And if Dropbox goes down or goes out of business, I still have local copies on both my desktop and laptop (solves: fear of putting things in cloud). Or if I lose both of my computers, I still have Dropbox as a remote backup. (solve: recovery from major disaster)
 
It's exciting to see this type of technology starting to brew. Although it won't replace my beasted home PC, it would be convenient to continue playing my favorite game on my laptop when I'm away or on my iPad etc...

The cost and performance of wireless and wired ISPs will definately determine the success of this company. With Google getting into communications and acquiring natural power resources we can only hope they will help drive down our inflated ISP costs.

So in the end it is definitely promising and it is a service I would use if it was perfected at this point in time, but for now I will keep an eye out on its progress.
 
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