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Games Entertainment Technology

'Hands-On With Amazon's Luna Game Streaming Service' (theverge.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the first-look dept.
Last month, Amazon announced a gaming platform called Luna that lets users play games via the cloud. The company is rolling out early access today, starting with a library of 50 games and support for Mac, PC, Fire TV, and iOS devices. The Verge's Chaim Gartenberg shares what it's like so far and how it compares to other streaming services out there like Microsoft xCloud and Google Stadia. Here's an excerpt from his report: The biggest question for Luna -- like any cloud gaming service -- is performance. For cloud gaming to work well, companies like Amazon need to rapidly deliver compressed video frames that respond to your button presses even if internet bandwidth dips and even if your house isn't located right next to an Amazon server farm. Amazon recommends a minimum connection speed of 10 Mbps for Luna, but your home's internal network also matters. We tested Luna on a variety of devices in two different Verge editors' homes across two different coasts with a variety of internet speeds and connection types. So far, 10 Mbps doesn't seem like nearly enough. We found that we needed a connection of at least 25 Mbps in order to have a consistently playable stream, with more bandwidth obviously being better. My colleague Sean Hollister limited his router to 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps, and 20 Mbps, but he'd still get stretches of choppy video.

The best performance (of course) came from a PC with a wired Ethernet connection and controller, with no other family members streaming video in the house. Playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night on that solid of a connection was virtually indistinguishable from the game running natively. (Switching back and forth, you can tell it takes oh-so-slightly longer to swing a sword, but it felt perfectly playable.) Admittedly, there are few benefits to actually using Luna to stream the game on a capable PC. On the other hand, Metro: Exodus, one of the most graphically intensive games available to stream, looked and played decidedly worse streamed to a web browser than it does on a capable gaming PC. Honestly, it doesn't look great in either Luna or Stadia, but at least Stadia could keep up with a mouse and keyboard. Luna's mouse was extremely laggy.

Using wireless connections introduces a lot more variables into Luna's performance. If you have a steady, strong Wi-Fi connection, Luna works pretty well, with little to no lag, smooth HD video, and responsive enough gameplay to enjoy even fast-paced platformers like Sonic Mania on an iPhone with a paired Bluetooth controller. But when Luna has a bad connection, it's rough. For some reason, Amazon doesn't seem to degrade the quality of video streaming when connection speeds are bad; it just tries to power on through by dropping frames until speeds pick up. I also ran into issues where audio started to lag behind what was otherwise smooth gameplay, presumably due to a sluggish connection. Right now, it seems that Luna's performance is almost entirely dependent on having good internet. Further reading: iOS Web App, Game Library, and App Functionality
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'Hands-On With Amazon's Luna Game Streaming Service' More

'Hands-On With Amazon's Luna Game Streaming Service'

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  • A streaming service depends on bandwidth (Score:3)

    by r1348 ( 2567295 ) on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @10:23PM (#60630104)

    More news at 11

    • One thing some people assume incorrectly though is that wifi is fine because it's your internet connection (not your lan) that's always the bottleneck. Since I'm teleworking so much lately I strung cat5 to my work desk and it actually is better, even just for ssh. Even though my wifi delivers many megabytes per second, there is some jitter.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        Try traffic shaping. On my Linux router, I use qdisc, I use qdisc-htb thus ssh and VOIP are fine since I have them on high priority. Other people or machines and devices streaming video or what not on your LAN while you're on ssh session might impact you without proper traffic shaping.

        On problematic and/or low bandwidth connection, you may also reduce packet size to 750 on top of that and I never had any problem with ssh and VOIP even on the worst connections using tc qdisc htb and a packet size of 750 to t

        • Traffic shaping does nothing for EM interference. UDP packets get dropped, TCP packets timeout and get retransmitted. The difference between wifi and wired has nothing to do with QoS.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ls671 ( 1122017 )

            Traffic shaping does nothing for EM interference. UDP packets get dropped, TCP packets timeout and get retransmitted. The difference between wifi and wired has nothing to do with QoS.

            hmm... I thought that was exactly what I wrote above... :

            unless your wifi networks has a lot of interference.

    • A streaming service depends on bandwidth

      And customers; unfortunately for the MBA's, there are largely two kinds of customers: those who can't pay for "streaming gaming services" and those who won't.

  • One thing I've not seen talked about in reviews for streaming game services is - are there particular WiFi routers that are good at handling this? Any advanced router configurations that help improve control or display latency?

    The review mentioned throttling his router to test various speeds, but didn't mention what kind of router he had...

    It just seems like all WiFi routers are not of the same quality, and some could handle the streaming better than others or be better at/for prioritizing traffic.

    Also wou

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      Nobody that I ever met has their wifi properly set up for this.

      Nobody ever has QoS enabled on the full path - a wifi card that supports it, enabled, to a router that supports it, enabled, managing the connection that goes up to the net and tagging packets appropriately en-route.

      It's really easy to do, and nobody does it.

      I used to rent game servers in Europe, when I live in the UK. I was ALWAYS being accused of having an advantage because "well, it's running on your machine, that's why your ping is so low".

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        I have had limited success with Qos so I use traffic shaping. (see my other posts above). I assume that you are talking about the Qos flag that you can set on packets. Qos might help prioritizing your game machine over you girlfriend machine if your router honors it but it usually stop at you ISP interface since ISPs don't care much about you setting a Qos flag on your packets since everybody could then prioritize their traffic at the expense of their neighbours. I even heard some ISPs make your packet slow

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ledow ( 319597 )

          I can only speak for my experience but QoS is generally honoured - not least because IP telephony is reliant on that. It's not guaranteed, but it's honoured where it's reasonable. Settings everything to low-latency won't help you, though, because then you fill the buckets too quick and everything then become normal traffic.

          That's why "just enabling QoS" is insufficient. You have to choose a select amount of traffic to prioritise. You also have to select a LOT of traffic to de-prioritise. You need not g

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ls671 ( 1122017 )

            As I said, I had limited success with QoS since it is generally the norm that ISP do not honour them on residential lines, just search for it. So you can't do torrent without affecting VOIP for example and this is my preferred test to show how traffic shaping solves VOIP issues. Just find a torrent with many peers and start downloading at max speed then make a VOIP call.

            I do VOIP and it works fine, just like ssh and I do traffic shaping only (No QoS) and that is what VOIP guys will recommend for a home net

          • IP telephony travels to or from standard ports, or is negotiated over such a connection, and as such it is not at all dependent on QoS flags to function. The calls can be detected via other means, and prioritized accordingly.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ledow ( 319597 )

              So you're presuming that your ISP intercepts and reads all your SIP traffic to establish which are related traffic-flows? And you think this is less-impact on them in terms of requiring Layer-7 inspection equipment than just expecting you to tag your traffic even vaguely correctly if you care about it?

              And you think that SIP and RTP doesn't have TLS nowadays?

              I grant you that they could, maybe, prioritise port 5060 but beyond that, no way are they Layer-7 inspecting all your traffic and breaking your TLS con

      • Nobody ever has QoS enabled on the full path [...] It's really easy to do, and nobody does it. [...] But it used to be that when my girlfriend was doing stuff on machine, you could watch my ping-spike. I prioritised the appropriate packets, applied QoS to the full chain and bam

        And BAM! You just did something that most people can't do, and most of the rest won't because it's a hassle. Why doesn't the hardware['s firmware] do it automagically? What year is it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      Although it's true that some wifi routers are better than others, I'd say preventing the wifi router to fill up its buffers and dump them at once can help a lot. Wifi routers and other routers use buffers they dump at once on high loads so they can pretend to support higher bandwidth speeds in their specs.
      See my reply to another user above on how to do this. You basically reduce by limiting the used bandwidth until buffers never fill up, it works great for VOIP as well.

    • I can't speak for all networking gear out there, but I have investigated this in the past and ended up with Ubiquiti gear. I have an EdgeRouter PoE 5 (https://www.ui.com/edgemax/edgerouter-poe/) and a Unifi AP AC Pro (https://www.ui.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-pro/) which I spent time configuring and tuning, and now I game online on Wireless with no problem.

  • It's like cloud-mad companies haven't heard of the speed of light limitation, nor of the PC revolution. They're just suffixing "...in the cloud" to every existing concept. (Sort of like "...on the Internet" was in 90s)

    Gaming is not Netflix.

    Why insist on totally controlling the gaming experience by "rapidly deliver[ing] compressed video frames"? Instead, why not work with game developers to 'split' the game -- keep graphics and rendering local, but use cloud servers to host calculations that are less sensitive to latency?

    There's plenty of work that can be done remotely: NPC AI and game progression, voice recognition, dialog synthesis, gesture recognition (whether controller or videocam-based)

    • Re:Another predictable cloud-gamestreaming failure (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @11:20PM (#60630198)
      Because then the game developer would have to cooperate.

      • You hit the nail on the head.

        And that's what they need to do. Even Netflix, with its much simpler model, has had to work with studios and content generators. Otherwise they'd still be mailing DVDs in and out.

        • And that's what they need to do.

          No, thats what services like this Luna thing wish they would do.

          The game developers dont seem to need to do anything, and if they ever do get it in their mind to do something like that, Luna still isnt going to be a middle man in that party.

    • Instead, why not work with game developers to 'split' the game -- keep graphics and rendering local, but use cloud servers to host calculations that are less sensitive to latency?

      There's plenty of work that can be done remotely: NPC AI and game progression, voice recognition, dialog synthesis, gesture recognition (whether controller or videocam-based)

      I'm pretty sure you just described an MMORPG.
      But to answer your question, it's because they don't want to. There's still a good amount of control that the companies will have to give up and a good amount of work the company will have to do in terms of getting the "local" part (AKA client) to the end user. Neither, I think, are things companies would like to do. On the other hand, they're willing to bank that if a technical limitation of the game causes you to do badly, that just means more incentives to pl

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Neither, I think, are things companies would like to do.

        It's something that AWS doesn't want to do because 1) gaming is not their specialty, cloud computing and storage is, and 2) every frelling game designer will want something different and there is no fracking way to manage 150 different custom configs adequately.

        • You're right. But hosting in the cloud is pointless for gaming (famous last words, but we'll see). As for Dev diversity, they should create an API. Those Devs who use it can build (say) a game that responds to voice commands like Alexa: "HAL, open pod bay doors". Or scenario-aware AI NPC that shoots the breeze with the player (dialog synthesis). "Looks like a Chevy" ... "Yeah, it's an 96 Camaro... The last good year".. // "Jake says we got halftracks approaching from the south west" "how many" "3, could be

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            Not a gamer myself, much less a game designer, but I can certainly see where there's a place for heavy back-side processing to support lightweight clients out in the field. Fat clients like laptops and desktops are definitely powerful enough now to run things like VR gaming fairly adequately, but people aren't content to be located in a single site to game any more. AWS has literally scores of small POP (point of presence) sites in most metropolitan areas of North America and Europe, a few years ago they

        • Neither, I think, are things companies would like to do.

          It's something that AWS doesn't want to do because 1) gaming is not their specialty, cloud computing and storage is, and 2) every frelling game designer will want something different and there is no fracking way to manage 150 different custom configs adequately.

          I think you fail to realize that amazon is only not specialized in something until they are. Just looking at AWS, they were only doing hosting and virtualized servers, now storage, but also log collecting and parsing (to fight splunk), and also gateway/proxy/firewall, and also automation (ala chef and/or kubernetes), etc. etc. That's not mentioning all the times that amazon pushed/forced/rockefeller'ed (someone once said it was closer to Carnegie, which I can't dispute.) people out of online marketplace lik

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            Interesting, you obviously have more insight into that aspect of the industry than I do. I work at Amazon Corporate, and formerly at AWS, as a physical security engineer (we do the key cards, cameras, alarm systems, that stuff), and from the inside you can see a pretty good divide between what the AWS side wants to do and what Corporate wants to do.

            AWS wants to provide services, tell them "I want A, B, C and Q" and they'll do their best to do so. They really **don't** want to get into the guts of what is

      • Thanks. Interesting.. never thought of it this way. To use a search term, game companies are stuck in a local minima, busy revenue maximising at the expense of user loyalty

        • Thanks. Interesting.. never thought of it this way. To use a search term, game companies are stuck in a local minima, busy revenue maximising at the expense of user loyalty

          No problem. Glad, I can give new info to someone. By the way, I think the correct term (half joking here) for local minima is "minimum viable product". Or, at least, that's what it seems like to me.

    • It's a sweet business model, because the original investment is just a cheap gamepad, and after that it's a subscription that most people will forget to cancel (or die, let's face it, dead subscribers are solid fucking gold), and then if you do cancel you don't own anything, so there's no second-hand market to cut into your numbers.

      All the big players will kill or die to get into this market if it ends up being feasible.

    • Instead, why not work with game developers to 'split' the game -- keep graphics and rendering local, but use cloud servers to host calculations that are less sensitive to latency?

      Because it makes no sense, sorry to be blunt.
      The point of cloud-based gaming is to expand the user base and allow people with potato PCs, tablets, mobile devices, TV only to play games they otherwise couldn't unless they invested hundreds or thousands of dollars in hardware.
      If my machine can render graphics in real time, locally, it's very likely my CPU would be able to handle those calculations as well. So the point of cloud gaming disappears. Also, the vast majority of online games do handle computations

      • Good exposition on their target market. But alll the more reasons to fail. Large but subprime catalog (a la Netflix) will trigger choice confusion (made worse by games being more engaging then video). It'll have worse latency (2x the round trip time for networked games). Every practical hardware device (except perhaps a RasPi) will probably offer a superior local experience (handling and decoding 10-20 Mbps video streams isn't easy)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      I've never used it, don't really intend to, so I don't have a horse in the race. But isn't the intent of game streaming that you have a "vast" gaming library available at your fingertips that's always kept up to date. No big initial downloads, no big game updates, no need for multi-TB hard drives, etc. The vast majority of the data in a game is the textures/models/etc, horsepower for the stuff you described isn't really that intensive, relatively. If you have a good enough rig to render video frames, t
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Right now, it seems that Luna's performance is almost entirely dependent on having good internet.

    Yes, and uh, it will always be that way, because it is delivered via the internet. What dumbshit put "Right now" on the beginning of that sentence? It's like saying "Right now we're held down to the planet with gravity" or "Right now Microsoft is up to their same old tricks"

  • I’m under your control. () Let’s have a great time together ==>> kutt.it/EkzekE
  • "Right now, it seems that Luna's performance is almost entirely dependent on having good internet." Could it possibly be otherwise? It's a remote service over the internet.
  • It's a sweet business model, because the original investment is just a cheap gamepad, and after that it's a subscription that most people will forget to cancel (or die, let's face it, dead subscribers are solid fucking gold), and then if you do cancel you don't own anything, so there's no second-hand market to cut into your numbers. All the big players will kill or like [manganelo.link] die to get into this market if it ends up being feasible. Don't forget to vote for Biden on Nov 3, or Trump on Nov 4.
  • Game developers are cooperating less these days. I submitted an app about the best basketball [outdoorballpro.com] on the Amazon store and had to hear a lot of criticism about its functions and all that, I had to do changes in the original app to get the final product.

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