Hardware and Technology

[BZGuy002]

This is to discuss my latest blog post "A New Direction For Gaming?"

When we first announced the HP Firebird, a few people were skeptical about the performance prowess of the system.  Could such a small and slim form factor really have what it takes to handle gaming?  Minus the super-demanding games, we knew that that the system was as capable as some of its more beefy counterparts at playing popular titles. Our friends over at CNET, Digital Trends and the Houston Chronicle seemed to agree.

It appears that we’re not the only ones flying against the face of conventional gaming. A lot of hype has been building around OnLive, a new gaming service that provides access to popular game titles without the necessity of owning a costly computer or console.  That’s right, with OnLive, there is no need to spend $5,000 gaming system.  The OnLive distribution model lets you play any title on any device, and it streams it over the home broadband network. Everything runs off their server and all you need is Internet access, and everything is subscription based. You can check out the official announcement at GDC here.

If services like OnLive catch on, could it mark the end of the road for the four foot high behemoths many of us have on – or under – our desks? I believe that some gamers will be reluctant to give up on their digital arms race. But the rest of us will start looking for a middle ground between performance, cost and even things like energy efficiency. New research from Jon Peddie seems to support the idea.

What do you guys think? Will you ever give up your big gaming rig for something more energy efficient?

- Brian (BZGuy002)

[Kellie tha Goddess]

OnLine sounds like the kind of service that should have been around. You get to capture more than just the "hard core I"ve got the bestest build" crowd

Makes you wonder what took so long.

[Frosty]

I just discovered this Onlive Forum - I'm not sure if it's official or not.

[-Travis-]

I say Onlive,  if it is a successful working service it is going to change a lot in the computer world. If the gaming service itself is not so sustainable,  at least they have proven amazing technology and blazed a trail for future services. Heck there is already about 5 other services that i heard of that are similar to this. Panda's new antivirus program is mainly ran and collected all server side on a cloud setup.

AS for Onlive itself being successful or not, i say if they can't do exactly what they say, they can easily do MMO's i think. This service would be perfect and secure for an MMO.If they can do what they say though, be prepared for the future number one gaming device amongst most people. It won't totally get rid of dedicated machines because of the bandwidth caps but it will move alot of the market. 

I do have a few questions about the mechanics of Onlive though, like how are they dealing with the latencies because its not just the bandwidth  of the connection that will affect the gaming performance. As well, what ranges do they have for the servers, is it one server per timezone? How much hardware do they have hooked up, really i just wanna know how they are getting the graphics hehe. I do believe they aren't using separate CPU's, but just a super computer, the graphics i think i heard was all still done on dedicated GPU's like the 4870x2. 

Idk i think this is a very interesting service, Onlive.

[SpiderFarmer]

Well, like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, it has a lot of potential, but I'm not sure existing technology can provide the implementation of the concept in such a way that it targets everyone the gushing magazine writers seem to think it will impact. 

Like cloud computing, it's going to have some serious limitations out of the gate: 

• Scalability problems with Sequential processing

• Data privacy issues because of the common resources

• Lack of high speed Internet connectivity in most US markets outside of large urban zones.

• Reliability problems related to SLAs. Alex Iskold wrote a great post on cloud computing which also mentions about the SLAs for cloud computing and what to expect. (also see google's cloud outage this week, which knocked out email access for thousands and thousands of people.) 
  
• Consumer resistance to repurchasing games they already own, or continuing franchis-type games in different media. (As ancient as the games are, consider the huge base of Sims users and the tons and tons of content they've already generated in fan universes.
  
• Consumer resistance to "checking in" to play a game.  For example, I purchased all of the Sam and Max games from Telltale Games, because they're funny, and I like supporting small game houses.  When they got the rights to do the Wallace and Grommit games, I ponied up for them.  But unlike my Sam and Max games, I chose to do my W&G games via Stream.  Now, if I want to play an episode of W&G, I have to have internet connectivity.  That's annoying, and I didn't think it through when I bought the entire season of games.  If I had, I would have opted for the download/CD option instead, so the code didn't need to be "activated" by logging into Steam.
  

On the upside, there's a hella team behind this project.  Steve Perlman has been trying to get the intarwebs into everyone's hand since he came up with WebTV.  Tom Paquin gave us Netscape and Mozilla. There's a couple of top guys from Eidos and Activision.  It's a braintrust, no doubt.  And people who have had a "Populist" take on technology for a very long time. 

Don't get me wrong, I think for the right games, and the right target demographic, this could be a really cool delivery system.  But I don't think Onlive has killed the computer star, just yet. 

[MaXKarnage]

That is some interesting information and I agree that a service like this can be a good thing but the hardware and system infrastructure needs to be dependable and redundant to alleviate down time.