[...]No matter how fast your Internet connection is or how near you are to the server room actually rendering your game, Grid just won't be 100 percent as smooth as local rendering all of the time. There are too many variables in play—your own home network, your ISP's equipment and wiring, the load on your ISP's network, your distance from the server, and any number of other issues that could impact your experience negatively. Unlike something like Netflix, which can buffer video to mask these issues, cloud gaming needs to be streaming in real time all the time.[...]
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/cloud-gaming-has-a-future-just-maybe-not-in-the-cloud/
7 comments:
"Unlike something like Netflix, which can buffer video to mask these issues, cloud gaming needs to be streaming in real time all the time."
So what's the console doing when it makes me wait while it loads a level?
uh?
Please answer my question.
"So what's the console doing when it makes me wait while it loads a level?"
Its loading the level.
It's loading content from the disk (the shiny one you put in the system) into RAM.
Reads from optical disk are orders of magnitude slower than ram reads, so the game engine has to put stuff in RAM to have quick access to it.
Cloud gaming is actually streaming, frame by frame, whatever the system in the cloud is rendering.
What the article is saying is that with Netflix you know what needs to be streamed at the beginning because the video itself is a known quantity (the entiretey of what has to be streamed is available somewhere) so you can just pump it up as fast as possible and your pc/laptop/whatever will buffer it (i.e. keep it in memory).
With gaming you don't get the frame until it's been rendered by the system, meaning you can't buffer what you don't have (unless your system has a flux capacitor and 88 gigawatts).
Also, the console manufacturers have a deal with the beer makers. We force people to wait so they go get a beer, driving up consumption.
Ah-ha! I knew it!
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