OnLive demoed: lag, graphics are a problem. GASP!!!

[Xi]

The world is full of retards. Onlive will be a massive success because of it. When all is said and done, you will end up with visuals that are on par with consoles (maybe even worse) and with shitty input controls. Good enough for what it is as far as the masses are concerned, but people that are already on the edge of the market (the serious business competitive gamers and shit) will remain on their fringe market niche.

The visuals will be adequate. When the fuck did the Codex give a flying shit about graphics? 720P @ 30FPS is better than any of the oldies ever were. Why does it take me 2 seconds to make these simple arguments irrelevant?

Shit? You can say that. If this were deployed in a place where high speed access is widely and cheaply available, it could make for a cool "gaming on the go" service; much more practical than lugging your lan box and/or console around, and when traditional portable gaming devices aren't your thing.
All in all this is shit though. Full fledged consoles are cheap and practical. You can get a cheap, all-purpose PC that can be able to play most games comfortably (both visual and performance wise).

To each their own, you still haven't shown a better value proposition for me personally though. $20 bucks a month, that I can cancel when I want, is dirt cheap.

 

[Kraszu]

Edit: also, the q6600 is a 2007 CPU, which means your PC is less than 3 years old. The CPU at that time would have costed 250-300 by itself. Your results are FAR from typical moron.

Does not fucking matter becouse his old E6600 CPU is still god for games.

So lets say that he would not care about other uses then playing games, he would spend only 190$ then to upgrade it, any comments on that dumbfuck? We are talking about 4 year period starting from when he brought a PC to somewhere in the future where E6600+8800GT will do worse then onlive, it does not look like it will be soon so at least 5 years probably more. How exactly does this add up to 2.5k$? (500 a year)?

 

[Kraszu]

The world is full of retards. Onlive will be a massive success because of it. When all is said and done, you will end up with visuals that are on par with consoles (maybe even worse) and with shitty input controls. Good enough for what it is as far as the masses are concerned, but people that are already on the edge of the market (the serious business competitive gamers and shit) will remain on their fringe market niche.

The visuals will be adequate. When the fuck did the Codex give a flying shit about graphics? 720P @ 30FPS is better than any of the oldies ever were. Why does it take me 2 seconds to make these simple arguments irrelevant?

It is simple, you can't compare top of the line PC to onlive service (price wise).

 

[Xi]

Edit: also, the q6600 is a 2007 CPU, which means your PC is less than 3 years old. The CPU at that time would have costed 250-300 by itself. Your results are FAR from typical moron.

Does not fucking matter becouse his old E6600 CPU is still god for games.

So lets say that he would not care about other uses then playing games, he would spend only 190$ then to upgrade it, any comments on that dumbfuck? We are talking about 4 year period starting from when he brought a PC to somewhere in the future where E6600+8800GT will do worse then onlive, it does not look like it will be soon so at least 5 years probably more. How exactly does this add up to 2.5k$? (500 a year)?

Here is what happened. He stated that his computer was built for $500 + $150 Video Card + $40 Ram upgrade = $690.

---His E6600 CPU would have costed roughly $250-500 depending on when he purchased it. If he got it for less, his results are not typical.Wikipediaputs the price of the CPU at $316 Depending on when it was purchased, the cost could be higher or lower.

---Second point, he mentions that he upgraded to the quadcore version the q6600 by trading his E6600 to his friend and paying $125. What a lucky trade as this CPU was going for $500 plus at this time.

CPU cost = $441 (roughly)

Given that he has lied through his teeth about pricing up to this point, as a little investigative pricing shows, why should we believe his $500 dollar PC figure? This is why I called bullshit.

In fact, I bet the price was closer to 900-1000, and probably more if he upgraded his Monitor, Hard Drives(which are probably do for an upgrade - if they weren't already), etc.

Anyway, I was trying to show that Onlive has a better value proposition in terms of initial cost, hardware cost, and potential game prices, and it does. I don't see why people feel the need to defend their investment of a PC though. It's not like you can't keep spending lots of money building new PCs every few years. No one is denying you this, however, we do want you to acknowledge the fact that you will be spending more money for your PC than an Onlive customer will be, and the difference in performance will be marginally different.

Edit:

--One last point. His first CPU was released July 27, 2006, which means his current PC is roughly 3 1/2 years old. This also means that he spent top dollar for his CPU, which means he spent the highest possible amount on it. If he argues otherwise, he will have to accept the fact that his investment has needed upgrades sooner than he'd thought because it means he's had his system less than 3 1/2 years.

$1000 System for 3 years = $333 per year cost. This is being modest too. Based on the lies, it wouldn't surprise me to find out he upgraded his monitor, keyboard/mouse, Hard Drives, and optical drives since.

So lets inflate the onlive cost to $300 a year, or $25 a month for the service. It still out paces his PC in terms of Value Proposition for the consumer.

 

[Emotional Vampire]

You do know that you still need a PC to use OnLive, right?

 

[Xi]

You do know that you still need a PC to use OnLive, right?

Actually, no you don't, but I could use the one I'm typing from, but I have an old Desktop that would work just fine too. However, I would opt for the TV adapter + Keyboard/Mouse. Also, I'm willing to pay the initial purchase price for the adapter which would be less than $100 dollars. Still a better value proposition.

Everyone posting has the ability to use the service form the PC they are using while they read this.

The adapter has USB ports and can take a Keyboard/mouse combo. Some websites are saying $25 for the adapter too.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/24/gdc09 ... and-micro/

 

[Emotional Vampire]

Then you need a TV.

 

[Xi]

Then you need a TV.

Yep, everyone has different stuff. I have a television as stated in the other thread. I would be more interested in using it, but I also have a PC with an LCD monitor that is about 4-5 years old. It would work too.

What's your point?

 

[Kraszu]

---His E6600 CPU would have costed roughly $250-500 depending on when he purchased it. If he got it for less, his results are not typical.Wikipediaputs the price of the CPU at $316 Depending on when it was purchased, the cost could be higher or lower.

Even if it cost more then 500$ there is no way that it is 500$ a year. Better system last for little longer it is 4 years old with 190$ (of relevant to games upgrade).

---Second point, he mentions that he upgraded to the quadcore version the q6600 by trading his E6600 to his friend and paying $125. What a lucky trade as this CPU was going for $500 plus at this time.

DOES NOT FUCKING MATTER, E6600 is good for games till today if we would buy a new speakers then you would also add cost of that? He didn't change a CPU to run any game that he couldn't.

In fact, I bet the price was closer to 900-1000, and probably more if he upgraded his Monitor, Hard Drives(which are probably do for an upgrade - if they weren't already), etc.

Yeah lets count monitor lolz.

Anyway, I was trying to show that Onlive has a better value proposition in terms of initial cost, hardware cost, and potential game prices, and it does..

You fail at it, that is the problem.

$1000 System for 3 years = $333 per year cost. This is being modest too.

Looks more like you had overpriced it. Anyway lets assume that this is true add to that 190$ of gaming relevant upgrades=1190$ it will last a year at least =5 ~1200/5=240 just as much as onlive cost even if we overestimate, and we have much better grapchics quality lolz. Also we didn't have to buy top of the line PC, that is usually bad price wise so if we would care about being as cheap as possible he would pay much less then onlive cost.

Based on the lies, it wouldn't surprise me to find out he upgraded his monitor, keyboard/mouse, Hard Drives, and optical drives since.

Onlive don't need any upgrades of your monitor or TV they send best new ones every 6 months right?

So lets inflate the onlive cost to $300 a year, or $25 a month for the service. It still out paces his PC in terms of Value Proposition for the consumer.

No it does not, even it it would cost 20$/month.

 

[Kraszu]

Then you need a TV.

Yep, everyone has different stuff. I have a television as stated in the other thread. I would be more interested in using it, but I also have a PC with an LCD monitor that is about 4-5 years old. It would work too.

What's your point?

Your double standards at calculating the cost of monitor when you use PC to play games, but not calculating the cost of (monitor or TV) when you talk about onlive.

 

[Xi]

Your double standards at calculating the cost of monitor when you use PC to play games, but not calculating the cost of (monitor or TV) when you talk about onlive.

Fair enough, but a TV is a moot point because you don't exactly watch television, movies, etc on a monitor. The value prop is slightly different. Still, lets remove the monitor from the equation. The value proposition for Onlive is still better.

 

[Twinkle]

Where does "20$ per month" number comes from?

 

[Xi]

Where does "20$ per month" number comes from?

Pulled out of my ass. The service could cost more, but even at $30pm, it's still a good value prop. The ability to stop/start the service makes it far more valuable than purchasing hardware that has to be thrown away, ages in performance and graphical fidelity, and does not come with free tech support.

Pricing will determine how effective the service ends up being. If it's too expensive, the final cost could definitely be too high in comparison to a PC, if it's low, the proposition gets much better.

Edit:

$20 x 100,000 users = $2,000,000pm + Game Sales Profit = $2,000,000*12 + ((120/12)*100,000) = (24,000,000 + 1,000,000) - (Operation Costs + Upgrade costs)

I wonder what operation costs would be?

MMO Profit System + Game Sales Profit - Operation Costs - upgrade costs

 

[ChristofferC]

I have spent around 900 dollars over the last 3 years on my gaming PC (and hardware is significantly more expensive in Sweden than in the US, mind you). It can run almost all current games at max details with a 1920x1200 resolution, and I suffer negligible input lag. Not to mention that I own the disks with the game data on them. The PC can also do other stuff, and the only component of that PC I wouldn't own if I didn't play modern games is the graphics card that cost me $200 some 1.5 years ago.

The OnLive tech is impressive, but it's not something that most gamers would benefit from. But then again, people use Steam even though it's a trap. I wouldn't be surprised if people get lured into OnLive because it's "cool" and then they get trapped because they have all their games on there.

 

[Stoiv]

I have spent around 900 dollars over the last 3 years on my gaming PC (and hardware is significantly more expensive in Sweden than in the US, mind you). It can run almost all current games at max details with a 1920x1200 resolution, and I suffer negligible input lag. Not to mention that I own the disks with the game data on them. The PC can also do other stuff, and the only component of that PC I wouldn't own if I didn't play modern games is the graphics card that cost me $200 some 1.5 years ago.

The OnLive tech is impressive, but it's not something that most gamers would benefit from. But then again, people use Steam even though it's a trap. I wouldn't be surprised if people get lured into OnLive because it's "cool" and then they get trapped because they have all their games on there.

Atleast with steam you can still mod your games.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Because reading is hard. I had an E6600 originally. Durr. As I explained, quad core makes no difference in gaming performance, so consider me as using an E6600 now. I traded the E6600 + $125 for a friend's Q6600 march of last year.

Oh ok, so lets add another 125 bucks onto your fake cost. Haha you're fucking retarded. Go away you lying sack of shit.

Missed the part where I said it doesn't matter for gaming anyway, factor the cost out. If I was only running games I would have stuck with the E6600, I got the Q6600 because it handles other, non gaming related tasks better. It is not a factor in the cost if you only wanted to play games.

Even a fully working Onlive, against all odds, is not worth the cost simply because of the simple economic facts I stated before. You are buying your own computer, sitting at Onlive facilities, then paying for onlive personnel to fuck around 40 hours a week, paying for the extra compression/decompression hardware, paying for their bandwidth, ect.

 

[Grunker]

I have spent around 900 dollars over the last 3 years on my gaming PC (and hardware is significantly more expensive in Sweden than in the US, mind you). It can run almost all current games at max details with a 1920x1200 resolution, and I suffer negligible input lag. Not to mention that I own the disks with the game data on them. The PC can also do other stuff, and the only component of that PC I wouldn't own if I didn't play modern games is the graphics card that cost me $200 some 1.5 years ago.

The OnLive tech is impressive, but it's not something that most gamers would benefit from. But then again, people use Steam even though it's a trap. I wouldn't be surprised if people get lured into OnLive because it's "cool" and then they get trapped because they have all their games on there.

Atleast with steam you can still mod your games.

I thought you said modding was possible Xi?

 

[MetalCraze]

No but you sure do have to be an idiot to think anyone but the onlive company is risking their money with this venture.

You didn't get it do you? Nobody has money to run this for real, not mentioning the technology to break laws of physics.

The OnLive tech is impressive

Shitty YouTube quality with hugeass lags that render any game unplayable is impressive?

I wonder what operation costs would be?

50.000$ (maybe even more) a year per 1 techie * some 2000 (even more if we are to consider that servers will be in every city possible) of techies you'll need to keep to provide service for 100.000 of users = $100mln a year (much more in reality) not including upgrade/repair costs, manufacturing hoax-modems, paying developers and publishers a monthly fee for their games, renting shitton of gigabit fiber lines*, renting buildings to store servers in every single city in NA = money which will be counted in billions and billions

Fuck yeah $24 mln in profits per year will make OnHoax successful!


*and even that won't help and is unreal because 1920x1200x24(bit)x60=3 gigabits(!) a second (or somewhere around the fillrate of a modern videocard) to provide the image quality of the same level as you can see on your pc. Otherwise what's the point?

 

[rpgcodexusername]

What happened to the government recently complaining about too much bandwidth being used,
the 'series of tubes' incident
net neutrality
isnt this service going to make bandwidth use skyrocket?

 

[Melcar]

Xi will solve all those problems.

 

[Big Nose George]

No, he is the target group. I think there is actually a huge potential customer base depending on price ;P . But I am more interested in the technical side. The presentation provides almost nothing interesting. So I went to Slashdot.

I think the most interesting part was the (lack of) answer about how the compression works.

They claim 80ms round-trip latency from button push to image display. Running a game on a server and screen-scraping in ~20ms is fairly easy. With proper datacenter placement and peering agreements ~50ms round-trip ping times are reasonable (if somewhat optimistic). The issue is how do you compress the 720p image and send it back in 10ms with reasonable bandwidth.

They're claiming 1ms compression, 8ms decompression (125hz), and 5mbit 720p streams. The compression is using a custom ASIC, so that's completely believable. Decompressing at 120hz on any generic hardware (they specifically said no GPU help) means it has to be an extremely simple protocol. The biggest question is how do you reach "HD-quality" at only 5mbit when you are not doing group-of-pictures compression (keyframes and diffs from the keyframe). Mind you that a standard DVD is 10mbit, so they're claiming higher resolution with half the bitrate and no keyframing. Obviously H264 gets better quality/bit than DVDs, but it does so by using even more complex keyframing and diffs and is far too CPU intensive for their target platforms (it's hard to watch 30fps H264 trailers on many machines, let alone a 60fps stream). The only hint he gave was some mumbling about visual perception, and the statement that their compression only looks good in motion (if you paused the stream it would look terrible).

Any ideas as to how the compression works?

No info anywhere.

Heh... I say it can't be done because you have to figure your PEAK bandwidth requirements per customer. The moment you oversell something like this in the manner the ISP's have done their bandwidth you're done- you can get away with probably half again more that the math, if you're lucky. If you can't provide snappy service a good 95% of the time, you're not going to get takers. WoW works as well as it does because it's lower bandwidth than this. Ditto most of the other MMOGs.

If you apply the aforementioned guide to how many they can service, unless you get the ISPs to one and all sign up for this and put it fully on the edge (I can tell you that this will be heinously expensive- there's several reasons why epicRealm failed, one of which was being in 50 data centers worldwide to the tune of a $2mil/mo burn rate- and this was with sweetheart co-lo deals...if you don't have the deals, it'll be more painful than that...), the peak numbers without oversell for OnLive, with their stated maximum bandwidth requirements, would be:

30 subscribers on a T3.
103 subscribers on an OC-3.
414 subscribers on an OC-12.
1658 subscribers on an OC-48.

Now, to put the burn rate for this in perspective:

Average cost of an OC-3 is 20,000 USD/mo.
Average cost of an OC-12 is 200,000 USD/mo.
Average cost of an OC-48 is about $400,000 USD/mo.

This doesn't even get into latency issues- either in the framework itself or over the Internet. Most games do "online" because they compensate for lost traffic, delayed delivery of traffic and so forth. As you fill the pipe, packets will be dropped (UDP) or delayed (TCP) as part of the TCP/IP congestion avoidance algorithms when they kick in (they start doing things to you at about 30% or so of the capacity of the pipe...). With so much bandwidth being used compared to the games we've got today, it's going to be difficult for them to accomplish the return end compensation for these issues. Dropped frames won't cut it here- you'll end up with a jarring experience that's different from lag induced issues that we've all seen with online games.

It works in the low-end numbers tests they're running (and they couldn't be running large numbers tests because of the associated burn-rate supporting more than a couple hundred subscribers...) because they're not tripping over peak values overmuch in the local testing or even the remote testing they're doing with GaiKai and OnLive.

As you can see, my disbelief has less to do with the compression and more due to realities of how the Internet and TCP/IP actually work- and they're going to be broken upon the wheel with this stuff. As for claiming that they're lying- I don't think they're knowingly lying. I think they've missed a few tenets that I've laid out in simplistic terms and they are barking up the wrong tree with a neat "what if we..." line of thought that should have been scotched when they did the aforementioned napkin math I did here in this post.

I, for one, think they are lying/not telling everything to get more venture capital, especially from greedy jew publishers like Activision (which didnt even sign with Onlive, Kotick is such a jew that he even accepts piracy just to not be paying Onlive ^^ )

But I have trouble with his napkin math.

1500 kbits
187,5 kbyte per second appr. 200
200 * 60 *60 per hour = 720.000 kbyte per hour = 720 mbyte per hour

7 hours a week
30 hours a month

21,6 gig per month per dude per month

OC-3 with 103 subscribers equals 103*21,6=2224,8 gig per month for 20.000 USD?
Thats 9 bucks per gig. That is way to much. Or is it? At that point I was to tired to look for real gig pirces. Not those oversold ISP gig prices.

 

[Armacalypse]

Xi you are looking for a way of gaming that's limited in customization, controlls, graphics, resolution and framerate that doesn't need maintenence and expensive hardware upgrades. What you don't realize is that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have been providing that service for years far better than Onlive ever will.

 

[DraQ]

Xi you are looking for a way of gaming that's limited in customization

And he is a TES player...

 

[MetalCraze]

No, he is the target group. I think there is actually a huge potential customer base depending on price ;P . But I am more interested in the technical side. The presentation provides almost nothing interesting. So I went to Slashdot.

Yes and compression is also bullshit.
Compressed images will obviously lose much in quality which defeats the purprose (and decompressing them will cause additional lag, 50 ms is also very very bad - 20 fps at best with impossible controller lag). And 720p is outdated - who is playing their games in 1280x720 or less? (besides consoletards or people playing old games that is). Which also defeats the whole purpose of OnLive as a replacement for PC. You can buy 720p capable PC for some 400 bucks that will be able to run all modern games maxed out at that resolution and it will look better. A way better solution ( a good dual-core CPU and R4850 are like $100 each nowadays and everything else is dirt cheap)

Which btw leads to a new question - how would they render games for multiple users? There is no technology currently that will let them do that. SLI and Crossfire can't have multiple cards doing different things and have separate memory for every game. That means 1 server per user which is even more ridiculous. Add to that that you can't really use more than 2 videocards on one PC (and even then you spread PCI-E bandwidth between them) as 4 cards implementations are not much supported and/or still buggy. Add to that the need for a completely new motherboard architecture.

 

[Xi]

Which btw leads to a new question - how would they render games for multiple users? There is no technology currently that will let them do that. SLI and Crossfire can't have multiple cards doing different things and have separate memory for every game. That means 1 server per user which is even more ridiculous. Add to that that you can't really use more than 2 videocards on one PC (and even then you spread PCI-E bandwidth between them) as 4 cards implementations are not much supported and/or still buggy. Add to that the need for a completely new motherboard architecture.

Someone explained the tech on the arstechnica comments section pretty well. Basically CPU power is vitualized across a cluster. Games are not installed on a OS, they simply run and the system dedicates a certain amount of CPU power to them. They could easily, for instance, produce 2-3x the CPU power for a specific instance, nothing a modern day computer could do by itself, with ease. This also works in terms of RAM, and long term storage. However, they have a seperate cluster that is dedicated to compression alone. Basically a super ballzy system that can compress the information on the fly. The graphics card is a good point though. They will probably use dedicated GPU per customer. Certain games will be assigned certain tiers of GPU quality based on the game that is being played.

So they'll be buying video cards in bulk. Probably going to need a few million dollars in GPUs, but it's really a minor cost when you look at the margin from subscription revenue alone.