Nvidia's GeForce Now Windows App Transforms Your Cheap Laptop Into a Gaming PC (theverge.com) 100
The GeForce Now game streaming service that Nvidia announced for the Mac last year is finally coming to Windows PCs. According to their website, the service lets you stream high-resolution games from your PC to your Mac or Windows PC that may or may not have the power to run the games natively. Starting this week, beta users of the GeForce Now Mac client will be able to install and run the Windows app. Tom Warren reports via The Verge: I got a chance to play with an early beta of the GeForce Now service on a $400 Windows PC at CES today. My biggest concerns about game streaming services are latency and internet connections, but Nvidia had the service setup using a 50mbps connection on the Wynn hotel's Wi-Fi. I didn't notice a single issue, and it honestly felt like I was playing Player Unknown's Battlegrounds directly on the cheap laptop in front of me. If I actually tried to play the game locally, it would be impossible as the game was barely rendering at all or at 2fps. Nvidia is streaming these games from seven datacenters across the US, and some located in Europe. I was playing in a Las Vegas casino from a server located in Los Angeles, and Nvidia tells me it's aiming to keep latency under 30ms for most customers. There's obviously going to be some big exceptions here, especially if you don't live near a datacenter or your internet connectivity isn't reliable. The game streaming works by dedicating a GPU to each customer, so performance and frame rates should be pretty solid. Nvidia is also importing Steam game collections into the GeForce Now service for Windows, making it even more intriguing for PC gamers who are interested in playing their collection on the go on a laptop that wouldn't normally handle such games.
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When the input devices for tablets improve past the ability to play tap-like-crazy-to-win games.
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Bluetooth keyboards, mice, and headsets have been available for tablets for years.
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I played South Park the Fractured But Whole on it all day Saturday and it was great. I've played some platform games on it as well.
I'm not sure how it works for FPS games or Racing games, I'm guessing those are sort of shit (The Next Penelope was fine). On RPGs, slower platform games, Adventure games it works great. I've played Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams on it, it looked beautiful and performed well.
I'm not sure WHY but using a Steam Link works better than my Linux desktop. I've got Steam on my Linux
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nVidia's brand of Android tablet with game pad (been out for a few years now): https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/s... [nvidia.com]
I've been using the nVidia Shield Android TV to do in-house game and media streaming from my home office PC to my bedroom TV for a couple years now. I hear the new version even streams games in 4k now.
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VNC wouldn't stand a chance.
But this is basically what Steam Link / In-Home Streaming is.
OnLive literally went bust trying to make this kind of thing work.
It's not new, or surprising, but it's not really what people want. I really *don't* want to stream games from a computer that someone else has total control over. Everything from monthly subscriptions, to losing all your games if you cut it, to massive peak-period performance hits, to poorer quality gaming (30ms is "nice", but most people will never be
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Obviously "dedicated" means for the time you play not that it sits there idly waiting for you. So multiple (possibly many, many) customers could be using the same board at different times.
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Yep.
And if they have to have a dedicated card for each concurrent user, capable of playing the latest games, then you could easily buy a GPU for a home computer for the price that they'll need to pay + profit to do so.
Plus... what do you think is going to be required on, say, Christmas Day when everyone wants to play their new games and you've promise they all have a dedicated card? The capacity planning alone means you're basically into just-as-much as just buying a card per user anyway.
This is precisely
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The difference is, most gamers don't play more than 8 hours a day - probably 4 or so would be more like the average. The hardware in the datacenter could get much higher utilisation than that - up to 24 hours per day, so the amortised cost of hardware per user is much less for gamers playing on time shared hardware compared to owning their own.
In addition, when there isn't sufficient demand for gaming, it could be used for render farm work, protein folding, AI training or whatever.
So all in all, it should b
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I'm not an online gamer but I'd be willing to bet a nickle that most gamers playing co-opt or competitive online games play at the same time periods.
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The difference is, most gamers don't play more than 8 hours a day - probably 4 or so would be more like the average.
Most gamers will be pretty upset when they sit down on a holiday and can't play because the systems are only setup to scale to 57% concurrent users. How do you sell a service with the caveat like that?
The other thing is this needs a shit ton of bandwidth. I subscribed to Nvidia's Geoforce NOW service. It pulled ~57MBit for a 1080p, 60fps game. That's not for everyone, and it makes gaming on even the best networks susceptible to intermittent problems. Pretty cool seeing your 7 inch tablet driving a 1080/60 g
with an VM one card per use = pci/e passthrough (Score:2)
with an VM one card per use = pci/e passthrough.
Now with AMD EYPC maybe get 5-7 gpu per node with the rest of the PCI-e for network / disk / ipmi / etc.
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OnLive isn't NVIDIA. NVIDIA doesn't have to buy GPU's. It gets its chips at cost, and it doesn't need to have them installed in a good looking package produced by some OEM. It can put them in a rack with special cooling and special power supplies. I don't even fully trust NVIDIA that the GTX 1080 is what one would expect from a desktop PC (the Max-Q version is called that too, and has lower clocks and lower power), but regardless, NVIDIA's costs are much lower.
And although the Verge article claims that one
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So you're saying this won't work because EVERYONE is getting new games on Christmas Day and has nothing better to do than to play right then? This (assumption) is clearly false. Now how much they can save because not EVERYONE is online at the same time even at peaks plus doing it "in bulk" versus what overhead they're having (and what profit margin they want) is another discussion. And there's another
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Just because you don't want to stream, doesn't mean that others don't. I didn't want to stream movies and TV. Why would I have to pay a sub even when I don't watch that much or suffer downtimes, when I have a decent DVD/Blu-Ray library? But I tried Netflix recently, and it has quite a bit of content, that content is immediately available, things work well most of the time, and I carry on watching on different devices without having to load any content to the device or think about syncing. It's convenient. I
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Money-wise... If I could play on a $100 PC-stick or $200 laptop what I now need a $500 PC or $1000 laptop for, then if the subscription price is right, I could even save money in the long run.
Many people get laptops from their work (free) and use it as their personal/home computer too. If they can install this Nvidia client, they could stream games at only the cost of the Nvidia service without installing games on work laptop, which would probably be frowned upon by the employer.
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With a movie you can buffer. You will be buffering for the first 10 seconds of so of content at least, and then any latency is swallowed by the buffer.
With a game... you can't buffer. It's like watching live TV.
I don't know if you've ever tried it, but Live TV is even buffered (e.g. BBC iPlayer is often a second or so out of sync with the TV broadcast). Things like TVPlayer.com... they can be 5-10 seconds out of whack. And they cut out A LOT.
A 10-second delay on your movie is invisible. A 100ms delay o
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So you agree that it's desirable if it works? If you're just arguing implementation, let the implementation speak for itself. All I'm saying is that if it works decently well, then I think there's a market for it.
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And it CANNOT WORK DECENTLY WELL on what you know as a home broadband connection because you CANNOT buffer interactivity.
And of course there's a market. That's why Steam Link was sold for about 10GBP over Christmas - they were dumping stock of something that basically does exactly the same.
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I have actually tried running a Windows game via VNC, for controlling an observer player while actually playing the game myself, and it doesn't work. You can't send DirectX 3D rendered output over VNC. After some searching it seemed to be a practically universal problem with remote desktop systems.
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Why don't you try it. I think you'll answer your own question.
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I believe the word you're looking for is "Thare's"
Explains why (Score:5, Interesting)
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1. Find a country where such a license limitation is not legal.
2. Move your datacenter there.
3. Profit.
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They can always deny you from buying new GPUs at a discount price. You can still buy all those GPUs at market price though.
They can also deny you support and hardware replacements if you don't respect the agreement.
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haha, right, if their whole plan revolves around data centers not using GPUs for the competition then I think they are in trouble. If AMD can crush them by just undercutting them and selling to anyone for data centers then AMD get the larger cut without the risk and at the same time castrates nVidia. I don't see the game plan there.
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4. Massive latency
5. ???
6. Bankruptcy.
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You can't. By the very nature of this service, latency matters.
Whatever country doesn't respect said license will suffer high-latency sending data back to North America.
Input latency (Score:3)
I'm still not seeing anything about this that addresses the biggest problem that's hit previous gaming services such as OnLive and the like. That is to say; input latency.
30ms latency is indeed a generally acceptable figure for normal online gaming. But don't forget that what you're talking about under normal circumstances is the latency between the server and the client. So that latency is only relevant to the server-side game interactions. What we're talking about here is having an additional 30ms latency before you even get to that point. What that translates into is a far more distracting gap between the player's control inputs and a visible reaction on-screen (added on-top of the standard display-related latency, which even on a really good gaming monitor is likely to be at least 10ms).
This is really, really distracting, particularly in games which use mouse controls, where it is highly noticeable that there is a delay between mouse movements and in-game response. 30ms is roughly equivalent to what you'd get from a particularly horrid vsync implementation (e.g. what you see in the PC versions of Skyrim and Fallout 4), which can be distracting in regular gameplay and a real killer in any kind of competitive online action game.
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Around 8 years ago I got to test similar graphics streaming technology (from HP I believe). We wanted to be able to stream business-related 3D simulations and games to the typical shitty business laptops
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If they can keep latency at around 30ms, performance will probably be good enough for most gamers.
They can't. You failed to read and/or understand the parent post. The 30ms is additional lag, and it's a ridiculously low estimate as well. If you only have 30ms of internet lag, you are my own personal hero sir. In the best case, they are approximately doubling your input lag, which is unacceptable for anything but a strategy game.
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Well, With the recent rolling out of Gigabit internet in places around the country, this might be what we need to kick it into everywhere.. my brother has gigabit internet at his house, fiber into the garage.. he wont let me run fiber to the switch i gave him yet, guess i get to wait for the next round of drywall cutting.. Back to the point, When i play games at his house, even on eastcoast servers i get about a 10ms ping at most, so IF the customers have good internet, fiber obviously being the best scenar
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Well, With the recent rolling out of Gigabit internet in places around the country, this might be what we need to kick it into everywhere
Trump's Swamp Things are doing all they can to keep us from having faster internet. So no. It won't be. Enjoy paying more for less.
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Oh right, I forgot you cant look past the line your side is on without snark. Should have done like I was going to and not replied to you. Showing your true colors. Seems like a lot of you here must be related. Have a good life.
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Oh right, I forgot you cant look past the line your side is on without snark.
I'm entirely serious. Part of the Republican agenda is control of media. Like Trump, all Republicans depend on low-information voters for much of their support. Also like Trump, the bulk of the remainder is made up of people with money who feel that the Republicans will help them keep it. Most of the ne'er-do-wells in the KKK and the like don't bother to vote, like everyone else. That's why they had to have a voting drive for Trump [huffingtonpost.com]; it wasn't a given. Republicans consistently break more promises than Democr
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Democrats depend on getting the word out, Republicans depend on shutting the word down.
Think you may have drank a little too much, you're mixing your words up..
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As for network lag, my latency in BF4 is generally between 15-30ms.
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The delay between your input and visual feedback is indeed increased notably with a streaming solution. However in our emp
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However in our empirical tests have shown up to 50ms latency (one way) to be still acceptable for 1st person shooters.
If I wanted "acceptable", I'd be using a console and a gamepad.
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To be honest... their latency is going to be the least of your worries.
People are going to expect to play this on a device that isn't pushing input to the game directly, over their home wifi (still on 2.4GHz with loads of neighbours around), shared with the whole household, across their standard broadband, through the ISP and to the game servers.
From there, sure, the inter-gamer latency will basically be 0ms. But the latency from all that path will be horrible, variable, out of control of anybody by the us
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30ms is roughly equivalent to what you'd get from a particularly horrid vsync implementation (e.g. what you see in the PC versions of Skyrim and Fallout 4)
I've played both Skyrim and Fallout 4 on my PC and never noticed any kind of input lag. If that's what 30 ms input latency feels like (and nVidia can actually deliver it), I'd call it a success.
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I'm not too optimistic with this technology. But of course it's the wet dream of copy right fanatics - the perfect form of DRM for software - so they're going to continue to push it.
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Oddly enough I am currently streaming Fallout 4 from my desktop PC in the basement (on a wired Gigabit connection on my LAN) through a dedicated dual-band (2.5/5.0) wifi access point. I would quantify the result as "very playable" right up until someone hits the wifi node with a massive load (i.e. someone starts a streaming service, big download, etc.), at which point there is a noticeable lag that quickly recovers.
For "twitch" gaming with an FPS, that just wouldn't cut it. For playing Fallout 4, it seem
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I regularly stream games using Steam (including twitch FPS) and I rarely have any issues. I've even used it over a VPN from shitty hotel wifi and the latency isn't that bad. My Windows box is headless and only exists to host games.
Since you mentioned it, I played the entirety of Prey over a VPN from another continent. The ~160 ms latency may have slightly biased my play style, but it made playing it on my laptop possible.
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It's not as good as having the hardware, no. But it's better than suffering through abysmal performance at bottomed-out settings on something that was never meant for gaming.
Lag from streaming gameplay is much better than the midpoint of "can't run it at all on my hardware" and "running it maxed out at 144fps", by virtue of being playable and running at higher settings, so they can sell it to those who already have capable rigs as "Cheaper than the equivalent gaming laptop! (for the first however-many month
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It's not as good as having the hardware, no. But it's better than suffering through abysmal performance at bottomed-out settings on something that was never meant for gaming.
Lag from streaming gameplay is much better than the midpoint of "can't run it at all on my hardware" and "running it maxed out at 144fps", by virtue of being playable and running at higher settings, so they can sell it to those who already have capable rigs as "Cheaper than the equivalent gaming laptop! (for the first however-many months)", and they can potentially ALSO sell it to the netbook/prebuilt-home-office-computer crowd as "Cheaper than buying a prebuilt and easier than building your own!"
They can compare the cost of 13 months ("Over a YEAR!") of service with the cost of a PC build (and they're free to make that build as exorbitant as they want). You could argue that, by comparing the service favorably to buying your own PC, they might be competing with their own hardware sales. However, I'd imagine the profit margin will be better for them on this service than it is on prebuilts with Nvidia cards, and I find it likely that anyone who's in the market for buying a GPU on its own either 1.) isn't going to care about this service at all, because they're happy with their rig, or 2.) will react favourably to the "cheaper than a gaming laptop" bullet point. If Nvidia see that potential competition as an issue, they may still be able to compare favourably to the cost of a "pro" console and a year of XBL/PSN.
All they have to do is shoot for a "budget option" angle, and people will find ways to justify latency/occasional downtime because it's cheaper for them (for now).
That said, after seeing how they handled the Shield line, I'll be surprised to see ANY adverts for this.
My last gaming PC cost about $600 about 6 years ago; I still don't feel the absolute need to upgrade it, although it certainly is beginning to be a little stretched for some games. I see more than capable gaming laptops on sale for $800 frequently. I'd still need a cheapo computer to run their service.
So in order for it to be cost effective it would have to be under $80 a year... and even then that would be less than optimal because you don't own the hardware, can't use it if internet gets spotty... etc.
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I'm not expecting it to actually be cost-effective for consumers, I'm saying that their best advertising angle is CLAIMING that it is.
In order for it to look good next to buying a $1k+ Alienware monstrosity, it just needs to cost less than $500 per year, and they can say "Over 2 years of our service is cheaper than this PC! Plus, you'll never have to mess with hardware!"
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A few years back, John Carmack tweeted [twitter.com] that he could ping transatlantic faster than putting a pixel on screen. He then explained more fully at superuser [superuser.com].
Since I run smokeping from my home server, I can definitely say that most online services are reachable from my home internet connection in ~20 ms round-trip - or 10 ms one-way.
For contrast, one frame at 30 FPS is 33 ms. (Kind of slow by modern standards, but I'm old enough for 30 FPS to be the threshold of being acceptable).
While it certainly matters to t
Re: Suboptimal if you own a GPU at home (Score:2)
How do you install a desktop GPU in a laptop or any Apple computer?
Re: Suboptimal if you own a GPU at home (Score:2)
That costs a lot of money and means carrying around a bulky extra item. What happens if your laptop doesn't support TB?
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According to their website, the service lets you stream high-resolution games from your PC to your Mac or Windows PC that may or may not have the power to run the games natively.
This almost means I only need one capable PC (Score:2)
For me this means I will only need one or 2 high specced PCs (one for me and one for my son), then we can play from wherever we are. Now all I need is a good reliable and safe way to remotely switch on and off my pc. This must have been solved surely, any ideas?
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Sounds like a simple and cheap solution, I have a spare PI or 2 - so will give it a go, thanks for the suggestion.
Re: Mining (Score:2)
latency
How the fuck would latency affect mining crypto?! Do you have the foggiest idea how computers even work??
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Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just another chapter in the lately-skanky 'evolution' of computing. You know, the one that says you no longer control, (or really, even own), the device you paid for. It's all moving to 'the Cloud'; this means both that privacy is defunct, and that the proper functioning of the hardware you buy is subject to the whims of whoever is providing your 'Software As A Service'. And since so much gaming is already MMO, most gamers won't give it a second's thought beyond "Oooh! Shiny! Now I can play on cheap, small hardware!". Yet another erosion of self-determination and autonomy - hooray!
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Because if you're using MacOS or Windows then that would sort of undermine your point, wouldn't it?
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Didn't OnLive and Sony both try streamed games, to no real success? What happened?
I think someone else on the thread called it - this is different because neither OnLive nor Sony could overcome the cost/hardware investment. Both companies tried to sell gaming, and only gaming. It's possible to do this with AWS because other components more readily subdivide. As a simple example, an 8TB drive can be sold to 8 people in 1TB slices, all of whom can use it at the same time and be generally-okay with performance. GPUs don't subdivide nearly as well, meaning there basically needs to be a 1:1 r
Steam inhome streaming (Score:1)
Game Streaming (Score:2)
External GPUs are scary (Score:1)
"From reading things such as this, I conclude that the tech/drivers to get full speed Thunderbolt eGPUs are largely ready, but Intel and/or other vendors are refusing to licence it and make it available. The one company that defied them and sold it anyway appears to have been shut down by Intel and product recall notices issues to everyone that purchased it. Read the thread, check the sources and make your own conclusions."
That's Intel, but same difference.