NVIDIA GeForce GRID Cloud Gaming Acceleration 56
Vigile writes "NVIDIA today announced a new technology partnership with Gaikai, an on-demand gaming company that competes with OnLive, to bring GeForce GRID to the cloud gaming ecosystem. GRID aims to increase both the visual quality and user experience of cloud gaming by decreasing latencies involved in the process — the biggest hindrance to acceptance for consumers. NVIDIA claims to have decreased the time for game stream capture and decode by a factor of three by handling the process completely on the GPU, while also decreasing the 'game time' with the power of the Kepler GPU. NVIDIA hopes to help both gamers and cloud streaming companies by offering 4x the density currently available and at just 75 watts per game stream. The question remains — will mainstream users adopt the on-demand games market as they have the on-demand video market?"
I sincerely hope not (Score:5, Interesting)
Movies are not games. With movies, you often tend to watch once in a few hours and then not touch again, so services like Netflix are much more efficient. You also don't need powerful hardware to run movies in real time or stream them.
Games need hardware, they need good latency, but most of all games are fundamentally different from movies. You're interacting with the game, often for extremely long stretches of time. I can't seriously think for a second that services like Gaikai or OnLive would be cheaper than buying the game straight away, unless you're uncertain you'll be playing much. I can see them being good demo-like services, but not full-blown gaming services.
Finally, there's one critical element that makes PC gaming, which is what's targeted by these services primarily, unique: the games can be modified. Mods have breathed life into games that deserved it, fixed games that were broken, improved games to perfection, kept games alive for years. They're the one thing that PC gaming has as a crucial advantage over just about any other (closed) model. You can't mod Gaikai games. Say goodbye to those amazing Half-Life 2 or UT2004 mods.
Oh yeah, and say hello to gatekeepers getting to choose which games are available. Dominance of streaming game services would be bad news for indie developers, since hardware would slowly get deprecated and not replaced. With the current market, you don't have to be on Steam to be competitive; the Humbe Bundle more than proves that.
I really hope this won't happen. We don't need more centralization than we already have.