OnLive Latency Tested 204
The Digital Foundry blog has done an analysis of recently launched cloud gaming service OnLive, measuring latency across several different games. Quoting:
"In a best-case scenario, we counted 10 frames delay between button and response on-screen, giving a 150ms latency once the display's contribution to the measurement was removed. Unreal Tournament III worked pretty well in sustaining that response during gameplay. However, other tests were not so consistent, with DiRT 2 weighing in at 167ms-200ms while Assassin's Creed II operated at a wide range of between 150ms-216ms. ... OnLive says that the system works within 1000 miles of its datacenters on any broadband connection and recommends 5mbps or better. We gave OnLive the best possible ISP service we could find: Verizon FiOS, offering a direct fiber optic connection to the home. Latency was also reduced still further simply due to the masses of bandwidth FiOS offers compared to bog standard ADSL: in our case, 25mbps."
Usage caps (Score:5, Interesting)
And with the bandwidth this service uses, you'll hit your ISPs "unlimited" cap in what, 6 hours? A day?
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And I want a flying car and a teleporter, but that doesn't meant I would go out and buy something that didn't work because I like the concept of what they claim they want to do.
Wishful thinking becomes dangerous to the point where you are tempted to sink money in to something that so obviously will not work.
We would all *love* the free energy pseudoscience crazies to actually make good on their claims, that doesn't mean it is a worthwile endeavour that we should waste money on.
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And I want a flying car and a teleporter, but that doesn't meant I would go out and buy something that didn't work because I like the concept of what they claim they want to do.
Wishful thinking becomes dangerous to the point where you are tempted to sink money in to something that so obviously will not work.
We would all *love* the free energy pseudoscience crazies to actually make good on their claims, that doesn't mean it is a worthwile endeavour that we should waste money on.
And I'd like people on Slashdo
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"masses of bandwidth"? (Score:2)
Maybe you want to look for a better ADSL provider. 25mbps is not much faster than a good ADSL2+ line.
Re:"masses of bandwidth"? (Score:5, Informative)
The statement is silly because latency isn't directly related to bandwidth. Switches, bridges, repeaters, modems, routers and other such devices all add latency. If FiOS reduces the number of these in the chain, the latency will be reduced. I'm not saying it necessarily does - just that it could provide better latency without having more bandwidth because of other factors.
Re:"masses of bandwidth"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's assume you have a hop where distance/c = 10ms and packet's length/bandwidth = 10ms. This means, the head of a packet arrives in 10ms, the tail in 20. No routers or bridges save for the most unaware repeaters will handle the packet until it arrives completely. Only then they will examine it and start sending it forward.
Thus, the final latency will be:
a) distance/c, plus
b) time spent in queues, plus
c) time needed for the bodies of packets to arrive.
To reduce a), you need to be closer to your destination. To reduce b), you need an ISP who oversells less. To reduce c), you need bandwidth on all hops.
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200 bytes? Here, we have a stream of full-MTU packets making frames of around megabit each.
Those "unaware repeaters" are indeed frequent on optical links, but they don't count as hops. Usually, you measure the number of hops as the number of machines capable of routing that reduce TTL by one and may return pings.
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Latency is DIRECTLY related to bandwidth (in the sense bandwidth is determined by latency). That's how TCP's rate control algorithm works. It has a "window" of outstanding packets that it's sent and for which it's awaiting a response. It won't send more until it's had a response from the earlier ones. Therefore, latency and window-size together determine bandwidth. And window-size is fixed...
Of course it's possible that rate-throttling happens along the way for other reasons (i.e. giving lower bandwidth tha
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And TCP is the only protocol in existence, right?
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The statement is silly because latency isn't directly related to bandwidth. Switches, bridges, repeaters, modems, routers and other such devices all add latency. If FiOS reduces the number of these in the chain, the latency will be reduced.
Verizon is one of the few Tier 1 networks [wikipedia.org] from which end users can buy direct ISP service. FiOS runs on the "business" network, as far as I can tell.
After the my router, and the Verizon router for my subnet, there are at most two hops inside Verizon for any traceroute (including to onlive.com). So, the fact that Verizon is so directly connected to all other networks does reduce latency as much as possible.
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Ya that actual statement in the article doesn't make sense at face value, but this AC brings up a semi-valid point that if the the OnLive user is banging into an ISP's over-sub limits, then the end user will perceive higher-latency as TCP does the whole 're transmit thing' or UDP packets get dropped at a rate-limiter.. or in the best case, the packets funnel through a QoS Queue or something.
I guess it's time Onlive hops subscribes to more use of NDT services (like the Google approved Measurement Lab [measurementlab.net])
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They certainly wouldn't use TCP for something so latency sensitive, and it seems logical that they'd have designed their system to tolerate packetloss.
In terms of QoS queues, they're already making peering arrangements with major ISPs (BT seems first) in order to get preferential treatment.
I'm not sure why everybody thinks the latency EuroGamer is reporting is so high; it's not much different from LOCAL latency that EuroGamer reported for console games:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-fa [eurogamer.net]
Re:"masses of bandwidth"? (Score:4, Informative)
In the UK there aren't many options at all. Eurogamer.net is UK-based, hence the mention of BT.
My company don't want the expense of using leased line and other specialist stuff, just an ordinary thing that can work like a home package over an ordinary phone line. The FASTEST damn thing we can have is a single or multiple ADSL2 lines. We have basically unlimited funds for such things and often specify overkill-measures (i.e. 3 or 4 ADSL2 lines from seperate suppliers rather than 1 leased line). We get 20Mbps sync and a little less real-world speed. We are approximately 10 metres from the exchange. We are in an affluent and well-populated area of London.
In terms of what the average home user can have, only Virgin media fibre really beats the other offerings but that's highly variable and although you are told "up to 50MBps", the infrastructure isn't there to give you that as usable bandwidth.
To be honest, I'm impressed they managed to get what they did considering the state of UK broadband. Of course, you can pay stupid money and get serious pipes put in but that's hardly a "real world" scenario for the average home user. It's not unimaginable, though, that a true gamer might have the best a home user can be offered - which in the UK is a 25/50Mbps fibre service.
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So, like I said, your ADSL line is a little bit slower than his "masses of bandwidth" FiOS line at 25mbps.
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Get a lot of Verizon FiOS installations in the UK?
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Nope. But some, obviously:
http://www.verizonbusiness.com/uk/products/internet/fios/ [verizonbusiness.com]
Were you trying to suggest that Verizon only do business in the US?
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Well, yes, I was.
Didn't know they were selling that in the UK.
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It won't be anything like residential FiOS connections in the US. It's the same kind of fibre leased line service you can get from any telco if you're a business in a city, based on SDH or metro ethernet, with a price tag to match. We're still some way off residential FTTH in the UK. Some areas have it but it's still very rare and very early days.
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The tests Eurogamer did were in the US, over Verizon FiOS (to give "OnLive the best possible ISP service we could find"). OnLive's not yet available in the UK.
It still sucked.
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I'd just like to add that I'm a Virgin Media customer with the 50meg connection he speaks of and I quite regularly max the hell out of it, at peak times. 6MB/s downloads are no problem.
However, he's right in that some areas have massive congestion problems and will suffer from issues, but unlike DSL, it wont have anything to do with how far away you are, if you're in a Virgin supplied area, you can get the 50meg.
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Sadly, there are very few ISPs who don't have some kind of "fair use" or "traffic management" policy. Generally, it's a tossup between monthly bandwidth restrictions (which don't often exceed 30 or 40GB per month) that incur additional charges if you hit them, or traffic management as Virgin does it.
Swings and roundabouts, really.
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My company don't want the expense of using leased line and other specialist stuff <snip> We have basically unlimited funds for such things and often specify overkill-measures
I don't follow.
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Yeah, me neither. :-)
But we end up with lots of mass-supported stuff like ADSL broadband and then perform juggling acts between them with our own equipment. They find them more reliable and easier to deal with than specialist hardware that only one company can play with. Hell, most companies that offer us "faster business" packages basically run two/three phones line and do ADSL2 over them, so it's just the same thing but more "independent". And when something goes wrong, it's easier to threaten to walk
Re:"masses of bandwidth"? - poster is inaccurate (Score:2)
ADSL maximum is 8mbit over copper and 12mbit over ISDN.
ADSL2+ is 24mbit maximum
So, 25mbps is not standard ADSL, *it does not even exist.* Moreover, reaching ADSL2+ maximum theoretical speed (24mbit) is extremely unlikely. Most of us have a speed between 1mbit and 20mbit in most cases (depending on line quality, modulation type, line distance to central, etc).
Disclaimer: that's sync speed (IP bandwidth is therefore LOWER)
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Like I said, 25mbps is not much faster than a good ADSL+ line.
25mbps is not much faster than 20mbps. It's only around twice as fast as 12mbps.
(What do you mean by ADSL over ISDN?)
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ISDN is some digital phone line, its very wide spread in some countries such as Germany. (Integrated Services Digital Network)
The ITU G.992.1 Annex B ADSL standard specify the ADSL modulation that works over ISDN. It's quite "recent", from 2005.
By poster I meant story poster ;) I realized later its also from TFA anyway. I just meant to bring more precision/information to what you wrote basically.
And that means...? (Score:2)
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Re:And that means...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anywhere from 60ms to over 100ms is common. Apparently gamers start to notice input lag at 166ms. Also, input lag and network lag shouldn't be confused with each other. The ping values you see in your game aren't 1-on-1 comparable to the input lag rates reported here.
To be honest, the 150ms input lag surprises me in a positive way. It's much lower than I had expected. For a game like UT3, 150ms is probably way too much and apparently that's one of the faster games, so OnLive's input latency is probably still too high for most games.
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Something else I noticed about OnLive: because all the game servers are at the same location, you don't get traditional multiplayer lag (you know, where the guy you're shooting suddenly appears behind you and beats you down.)
A recent article claims that OnLive actually works better for FPS games like UT3, where textures are not very high resolution. The latency is more noticeable for games like World of Goo, where the cartoon graphics are high resolution and there is not enough action to distract you from
Re:And that means...? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Older) PC games can be run at higher framerates because the hardware can handle it, so that might potentially decrease that 8ms average, but 5ms is only achieved with a 100fps framerate (when you assume 5ms as average, if you assume it's the slowest it'll ever be then you need 200fps).
Again, your LCD display has an inherent delay of 40 - 80 ms as well. The idea that 40ms input lag turns a game unplayable is a grave error. I mean, the article already points out that 60ms is basically as low as input lag on a non-LCD screen goes.
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Almost all games have at least 4 frames of controller response lag, some games much more. At 60 fps, that's at least 67 ms of essentially unavoidable latency before the image even gets to the display.
It breaks down like this: one frame to read the controller, one frame to process the control, one frame to draw the response, one frame to display the buffered image.
TFA largely glosses over that fact, but they do link to a previous article that address this phenomenon. Here are some other ones.
Programming Resp [cowboyprogramming.com]
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Again, your LCD display has an inherent delay of 40 - 80 ms as well.
Incorrect. Modern LCD display have delays of 20 ms or less, especially using game mode (minimal image processing). And they usually list 8ms or less latency on the box, which is a lie.
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You're assuming the input thread is tied to the display thread, I assure you in games where input matters, the input thread and display thread are not one and the same.
UT3 doesn't tie the two together, it is entirely possibly to provide UT3 with multiple inputs per frame and have it respond to all of them. The same is true on console games as well, a prime example is Forza.
WTF? Your might, I assure you mine doesn't. I have bought a new LC
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It's all quite besides the point though. Your sibling post already indicated that most games require at least 4 frames (at 60fps) before input is translated to the sc
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Your sibling post already indicated that most games require at least 4 frames (at 60fps) before input is translated to the screen.
But that is irrelevant to the subject of input lag. Thats input lag + display lag, which is different.
Between input and display is game mechanics, and it is all about game mechanics and initiating them before the other guy.
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Also, it doesn't matter which part of the lag comes from game code being processed and which part comes from your LCD crystals needing time to get updated. For the user, the lag he experiences is the combination of the t
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For the user, the lag he experiences is the combination of the two.
The fact is that people with lower input latency have an advantage even when the total round-trip latency remains unchanged. The latency-to-display is a red herring... humans compensate for latency-to-display by leading the target.
If players A and B both have latency-to-display of 200ms, but player A has a 0ms input latency and player B has a 200ms input latency, who the fuck do you think wins?
Re:And that means...? (Score:5, Insightful)
150-200 ms latency in a modern FPS is nearly unforgivable. I played TF2 a lot for a while and if I ever had more than 40-70 ms latency the hit detection would start to suffer and you'd get shot through walls or just not hit.
I expect a system like OnLive might work better with strategy games and other types of games that are not nearly as fast paced as most modern shooters are.
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Actually TF2 isn't bad compared to other games. Source has lag compensation that actually tries to adjust the game temporally based on a player's lag... in short, it figures out where everyone was from that player's POV at the moment they shot and uses that to figure out if the player hit with his shot, etc. I've played online games where even 70-100ms ping is unplayable (I'm looking at you, D.I.P.R.I.P.) but TF2 can remain smooth at 150, and playable at 200-300ms (though the lag becomes noticeable then a
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I think you're overstating the difference the lag compensation of tf2 makes. It kinda makes the 70-100ms interval playable, but anything above that is still very noticeable and extremely frustrating unless you're playing a camping engie.
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The latency from where the game is running to the multiplayer game server will be very low. So you won't get bugs that are normally attributed to that sort of thing. As far as the games concerned you'll have a terrific ping to nearby game servers.
The input and display lag isn't even knowable by the game for the remote desktop trickery they are doing. Instead you get a game running perfectly smoothly on the datacenters computer with your inputs being completely out of sync with the display.
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Keep in mind that there's a difference between input latency (which this story is talking about) and multiplayer network latency that you are talking about. In the case of multiplayer games, there is generally enough code on the client-side to predict what your screen will look like so that it feels snappy to you. Regarding getting hit through walls, that happens because the server doesn't think that you are behind the corner yet, so you are still a viable target to your opponent. The original quake didn
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Basically, a good LCD HDTV can add 40-80ms of input lag, and hardcore gamers such as myself complain about that (justifiably so). OnLive adds this same kind of latency. If it really is 150-200ms before multiplayer network latency, it is indeed useless for playing multiplayer games online.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if OnLive started putting servers for multiplayer games right in their datacenters, giving you very little network lag to compensate for the input lag.
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Indeed, I remember playing Quake 2 on dialup with 150-200 ping... This feels like the service has been built with the assurance that the associated technologies that it's going to be relying on will have caught up by then. This type of gaming service might just about be viable in 3-4 years, but only to the city dwellers. I can't see it ever working properly out in the rural areas where carriers just don't see enough return against upgrades due to sparse populations.
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Put it this way, 150 - 200ms is worse than I used to get playing Quake 1 on a 33.6kbps dialup modem.
I used to achieve around 120 - 140 on dialup to UK servers. ISDN was around 60 - 80ms, ADSL around 20 - 40ms.
So in other words it sounds terrible in this day and age. Almost certainly bad enough to make games like Guitar Hero or other games that need rapid responses completely unplayable on this kind of service if they ever tried to offer it.
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And while it might be OK for Joe the console player, but it is unacceptable for competitive PC players, who tweak every single input device in order to lover lag.
Isn't this service intended for 'Joe the console player', and not for competitive PC gamers? In other words, it's an entirely reasonable trade-off.
I think the issue here is all the 'hardcore' gamers who worry about this kind of stuff were never the target market, because they're 'hardcore' enough to put tons of money into their own rig. The recreational player just wants the cheapest method that's acceptable, and that's what the service is aimed for. Of course, it's mostly the hardcore gamer who posts o
A $100 graphics card will beat this... (Score:3, Informative)
No fast action game will work with that latency - the graphics might be smooth but the input response is like playing at five frames per second.
There'll be some games which work in this format but they won't be first person shooters or driving games - think flash games but multiplayer and in 3D.
Is it worth subscribing and being nickle-and-dimed for every minute you're on there instead of playing all the free flash games on the web? That's what they're betting the company on.
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200 ms is the kind of reaction time you can have at 5 fps. Of course their image goes at 30 or 60 fps, but if you want to see what a lag of 200 ms represent, witness how difficult it is to play at 5 fps.
Impressive (Score:2)
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1000 miles is nothing when you're traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. What matters more is the number of routers, switches, etc. etc. between endpoints.
Works Just Fine (Score:5, Interesting)
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The only thing i'm not sure I like at the moment is the some of the minor artifacting you'll see due to the video compression.
What would be cool is if they could track your eyes using a webcam and increase the quality at the part of the screen you are looking at. Won't help if your eyes are twitching all over the place, but if there is anything you want to see in full quality, just look at it during the latency of those 230 or so milliseconds and the artifacts will disappear where you are looking.
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Also an early adopter, and I've found it varies widely by game. DiRT 2 was unplayable with that lag.
Some of the games worked fine, and IMHO the best thing it's got going for it is the ability to instantly play 30 minute demos of any game they've got, no need to install/uninstall more stuff on the home machine just to see if a game is worth it.
I also got kicked out several times due to "network issues" one night that was very frustrating (despite being on a reliably 16mbps connection->gigabit LAN). I th
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Maybe (I won't get tempted in an OS debate), but the average end user doesn't care/know whose fault it is. All they know is they got the disconnected message that they won't get if they buy/pirate the game, so in the end, OnLive loses because users won't sign up.
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Why is Onlive such a dangerous thing for you to hate it so much? You prefer upgrading your PC every 6 months?
Head - Desk... (Score:3, Insightful)
Latency was also reduced still further simply due to the masses of bandwidth FiOS offers compared to bog standard ADSL: in our case, 25mbps.
Damn it, kids, Latency and bandwidth are not the same thing and anybody who makes that mistake should be forced to use a "1Gb/s" connection via fedex.
Yes, in the case of something like OnLive, which is basically streaming mouse/keyboard events one way and video the other, things will look substantially worse if frame N hasn't finished downloading by the time frame N+1 is ready for transfer(and then either has to be dropped, or delays frame N+1 even more than your connection's latency would); but having a fat pipe does not "reduce your latency". It is correct to say that 25mb/s FIOS is probably about the most generous test that is also remotely realistic for more than a tiny number of their potential customers; but the bandwidth thereof does not "reduce latency"...
Re:Head - Desk... (Score:5, Informative)
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Latency was also reduced still further simply due to the masses of bandwidth FiOS offers compared to bog standard ADSL: in our case, 25mbps.
Damn it, kids, Latency and bandwidth are not the same thing and anybody who makes that mistake should be forced to use a "1Gb/s" connection via fedex.
Its not just the kids. I had the corporate IT department tell me they would fix their latency issues by compressing the link, and if that didn't work they would put another compressor in series with the original one.
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Re:Head - Desk... (Score:4, Informative)
Damn it, kids, Latency and bandwidth are not the same thing and anybody who makes that mistake should be forced to use a "1Gb/s" connection via fedex.
A highly saturated connection will, in practice, have higher latency. Therefore, bandwidth and latency are related. HTH, HAND.
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Latency = transmit time + time to transverse the wire.
Throughput ("having a fat pipe") does affect the first factor. Of course, if the second factor is multiple orders of magnitude larger than the first (like with your Fedex example), reducing the first will be irrelevant, but that's always true with any optimization.
But that's not the usual case in a normal internet connection, and improving the first factor can and does improve the latency visibly.
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If that's the stance you take, one might suggest you be forced to use a 150bps connection with a 1us latency. No, latency and bandwidth aren't directly related, but one who believes that the other is completely irreleva
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Of course they're not the same.
That said, when your link is transmitting at full speed and you try to throw another packet down the pipe, you get queueing delays and/or packet drops resulting in delays.
Those delays add up to effective latency.
Sure, one device may still be exactly 24ms from another device on the wire, but if there's no room for that extra data, you have to wait longer for it to get there.
Latency doesn't just mean actual wire latency of a specific packet. It has a nice English definition tha
in practice... (Score:2)
Yes, latency and bandwidth are different concepts. But depending on the message sent, bandwidth can effect latency.
Latency is the time it takes for the message to start coming through. But you don't get the end of the message until a time later which is determined by message size divided by bandwidth. And you can't act upon the tail end of the message until you've received it.
So in the case of OnLive you're talking about a frame of video. They can't draw an entire frame until they've receive the entire fram
Not too shabby (Score:2)
Oh For Fuck Sake (Score:2)
How many people on this thread are going to confuse network latency with input latency... hint: you have no experience that prepares you to understand these numbers.. just play the god damn game and quit the service if you don't enjoy it.
That's why they're handing out 12 month trials.
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yeah... that's an essential problem.
Network latency: You aim, almost immediately crosshair covers enemy head, you shoot, with bad lag the server will inform you you have missed, the enemy was not there.
Input latency: You aim. It takes 150ms for the crosshair to start following your aim. You finally get to aim at the enemy's head and click. The enemy moves, you move to follow, but since your reaction is delayed by 150ms it's now that your shot (and miss) and you will start following the enemy in 150ms.
ARGH.
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Anoying yes, unplayable no.
When I started playing fps's online, UT classic mostly, 150ms latency was pretty much the norm. Anything lower was considered a extremely good connection.
Most players just compensated for the lag by aiming slightly off.
Predict / anticipate the direction your opponent is going and adjust you aim according to that direction and the latency. Problem fixed.
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Actually he is alittle.. given the input is via the network.
But looking at it.. the '150ms' was both the time it took for the input to go from the controller to the home box, be encoded, network out to the OnLive server, handle the input, render the scene, network the scene back to the users home, decode, and display on screen.
So assuming everything else takes 0ms, that'd be around 75ms of 'input lag'.. obviously this is greatly flawed and overly simplicist.. but during that 75ms: Your scene is still being
Stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
You had a good business model. A lot of people would be happy to play games that can be played with lag without noticing (I spent hours on Puzzler World, Max and the Magic Marker, Crayon Physics, World of Goo, Age of Booty, all sorts of games that aren't that affected by lag). You could easily have had a Wii-like console in every home that delivered as powerful a game as necessary, against as many players as necessary while needing no fancy installation, discs, etc. and most importantly NEVER needing an u
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I don't think you understand how capitalism works. It's the engineers who are trying to make this happen who are the incompetent dumbshits, and so stupid and uneducated compared to these CEOs. The CEOs are geniuses who are only hampered by how illiterate their engineers are.
Bandwidth != Latency (Score:2)
No, it wasn't (at least not significantly). The difference in latency between a 1 mbps link (ADSL upstream) and a 25 mbps link (which is due to serialization delay) is about 12 ms for large (1500 byte) packets. Since the vast majority of packets sent in this sort of application would be small ones (having only to convey simple info like "button 1 pressed"), it would act
Re:Bandwidth != Latency (Score:4, Informative)
Remember they don't just send the inputs there. They have to get the display back again.
If each frame is 100Kilobytes and they need 30fps to look smooth that's approaching the limit of 25Megabits/s (=3.125Megabytes/s).
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From Onlive's site [onlive.com]: "OnLive recommends a wired 5 Mbps connection to the Internet..." They haven't released any technical info on their proprietary video compressor, so it's not clear where your numbers come from.
In any case, even if the full difference in serialization delay is considered (~12 ms), that is minor in comparison to the measurements.
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12ms -- for every single hop. Sure, the routers upstream have a better link than you so it will be less than 12 for those hops, but you still suffer a separate delay for every routers on the way.
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No, it's not "12ms -- for every single hop." That just shows you don't understand how packet switched networks operate. Did you even try to think this through?
The comparison is between ADSL and FiOS. Those are "last mile" technologies. There's no reason to assume that the routers upstream would have any performance
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No, it's not "12ms -- for every single hop." That just shows you don't understand how packet switched networks operate. Did you even try to think this through?
And how exactly a packet switched network would introduce a hop? For that, you would have to inspect the packet, decide where to route it to, and decrease TTL.
The comparison is between ADSL and FiOS. Those are "last mile" technologies. There's no reason to assume that the routers upstream would have any performance differences
I don't expect a difference between ADSL and FiOS of the same bandwidth -- but it's not an insane assumption to guess that the ISP which sells 25 times as big pipes to every customer will also have bigger bandwidth on its upstream routers. The last mile accounts just for a single hop which, while indeed tends to have a significant effect on latency,
200ms input latency (Score:4, Insightful)
Wen you see "I am connected to a server, and I have 200 ping with this server", that is not input latency. You can have 10ms input latency with a server that give you 200 ping. Things are computed clientside. So this will be much less playable than your average 200ms server.
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> You can have 10ms input latency with a server that give you 200 ping.
I presume you meant those numbers the other way round? There is no way to get a lower input latency than the physical one the connection is running over, but it's easily possible the other way round.
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No, I exactly mean what is written.
You input is taken into account locally, so the screen can be updated after 10ms, heres your input latency.
But this change is "fictional", since the information is on the internet, traveling to the server, so the server don't know (yet) that you have rotated the camera/jumped/stuff.
Forget the strategy games. (Score:2)
Lag with any "mouse" cursor is horrible, so all strategy or table games that need a cursor will be painfull to play with this.
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150ms doesn't mean 150ms in this case (Score:3, Insightful)
What they should have done to get a meaningful comparison is to do the exact camera setup thing they did, but also do it for a game running locally and then over the net. Only then can you meaningfully compare the numbers and know that you got it right.
Can't see this taking off... (Score:2)
200ms input lag is huge. Really huge. The sort of amount that makes you feel like your computer is about to die. Bear in mind this isn't network lag, this is the amount of time it takes to react to your mouse moving, to change your direction with mouselook, etc.
Supposedly it might get better the bigger connection you have. However, if you have a 5-10M connection as they recommend, it's simpler and probably quicker to download the whole game off Steam, or a torrent or whatever.
The only way I can see this
A DRM pusher's wet dream (Score:3, Interesting)
OnLive seems to be a DRM pusher's wet dream:
1) You can't play without constant internet connection.
2) Can't trasnfer saved data to an offline version of the game.
3) You are renting the game and thus you own no physical copy of the game which you can resell or lend to others to use.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheap, dead-simple "Game rental", buffet-style. Pay per hour, not per game.
You can play any of hundreds games, now. No purchase, no download, no install, no cracking, no registering, easier than torrents. You just start a game and play it. And if you don't like it, switch it off and play another, you lost maybe half a dollar trying it out, not fifty bucks at a store, not thirty bucks and three hours downloading and installing from Steam, not three hours downloading and installing from piratebay. You just ha
Re: (Score:2)
With something like storage, or web hosting, there are fairly large and obvious gains to centralization and specialization. In the case of storage, the economics of not having a local copy are stupid, when a 1TB drive is $99; but unless your data are super extra secret, especially enormous, or you are atypically skilled, ge
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong. Latency is affected by the throughput, because it's the sum of the time it takes to be transmitted plus the time for that data to traverse the network equipment between the nodes.