Onlive remote gaming

GDC 09: Can remotely rendered, streaming gaming actually work? Onlive thinks so...

Onlive is making waves talking about streaming games, and some are falling over themselves wondering how the magic happens. It is not magic, has been done many times before, but this is by far the most accomplished version ever shown.

The concept is simple and it doesn't do anything more complex than render 720p rez games remotely. This isn't exactly an easy thing to do, but AMD's Fusion Render Cloud did the same thing at CES, and there are several LAN based ones like the Zotac boxes shown at CeBIT which do it more locally.

Basically, Onlive took several existing concepts, redid some of the parts for better performance, and put out the most polished package to date. It is something even a console gamer could potentially use, it could really be that simple.

The problem with running games remotely is always latency, if you are driving and turn your car, if the car doesn't react for three or four seconds, you will eat wall quickly. The generally-assumed latency that a human can perceive is 85ms. Anything less, you probably won't notice, so that is the bar Onlive has to hurdle.

First up, they made a proprietary compression algorithm that they won't talk much about yet. It compresses things sub-frame, and adds under 1ms of latency. Things are good so far. The lag between controller and computer, basically how long it takes for a button press to register, adds about 5ms more. The killer, ISP latency, it is between 20-50ms if you are on a good link.

That said, the worst 'official' case is under 60ms, 75 per cent or so of what you can perceive. So far, so good. Then again, with the Net, there is no such thing as 'worst' case, your mileage will vary, especially if you are on a shared connection or a cable modem. We won't talk about Comcast's packet shenanigans either, curse their black eyes.

On the cloud side, Onlive runs the game, and has a bunch of hooks into the system. The company won't be very specific about how they do this, it is their secret sauce, but the game itself is unmodified code. There are currently two US data centres, east and west coast.

The stream itself is then sent over standard TCP/IP to the user. A high rez 720p stream will need a 5Mbps connection, it maxes out at 4Mbps data rate plus ISP marketing safety margin. A standard def stream will only need a 2Mbps link, 1.5Mbps stream plus ISP exaggeration factor.