NVIDIA Launches GRID On-Demand Game Streaming Service

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Streaming movies. Streaming music. Instant popcorn. Gaming gratification should always be a moment away, too. That’s why we’re introducing our NVIDIA GRID on-demand gaming service. Available Nov. 18 in North America, next month in Europe and next year in Asia, GRID is free on our SHIELD tablet and SHIELD portable through June 30, 2015. While GRID makes gaming gratification immediate, it took us a decade to invent the technology behind the service that streams GeForce GTX-quality graphics to SHIELD devices.
 
The dead horse has not been beaten enough apparently.
 
ThisIsTheNewSound said:
So they are still trying to turn gaming into a subscription model?

Not gonna happen.
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If their customers supported $3,000 GPUs, then they will support this also. Nvidia knows their market well and this could take off and be the next Steam.
 
Grid makes this feasible
Latency, and image compression are the two bottlenecks with this model.
 
I know recently some company (nvidia?) showed off the ability to render basic geometry locally on a machine but handle advanced lighting calculations off-site by their cloud system. It seemed like a very smart idea which allowed some nicer looking effects on crappy hardware while allowing the system to be latency free since the general geometry calculations were done locally.

I'm curious if this system will have similar technology, some stuff rendered locally, some stuff rendered online.
 
This would ideally be the future - fuck everyone buying $600 GPUs, render it on a GPU farm! But, still a ton of basic physical limitations such as distance and latency I don't see it being feasible unfortunately.

Although, I will say some distribution of local/cloud is interesting. Think it would be even worse though for real-time multiplayer; particularly introducing hacking opportunities.
 
Once someone figures out quantum-networking where there is zero latency, I'll start to pay attention to subscription based games services.
 
serpretetsky said:
I know recently some company (nvidia?) showed off the ability to render basic geometry locally on a machine but handle advanced lighting calculations off-site by their cloud system. It seemed like a very smart idea which allowed some nicer looking effects on crappy hardware while allowing the system to be latency free since the general geometry calculations were done locally.

I'm curious if this system will have similar technology, some stuff rendered locally, some stuff rendered online.
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You lost me at latency free.
Have we somehow bypassed the laws of physics?
 
I have the Shield Portable, so I'll check it out when I'm remote, see if it's better than to my home.
 
Kalabalana said:
Grid makes this feasible
Latency, and image compression are the two bottlenecks with this model.
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Correct. I worked at RealNetworks supporting their Helix Server until our group went under last month. It could support live streaming to Android, iDevices, and embedded flash players. To get high speed 1080p 24fps content you would need a minimum of 4Mbps, and that would be for some slow movement. No, you did not need to install RealPlayer to view video unless you wanted to examine the quality of an RTSP stream in gross detail.

We briefly experimented with low latency live delivery using H.264 video with AAC audio in an MPEG-TS stream. From what I found the lowest latency we could get with a slightly modified internal only encoder was about 0.08 seconds or so using FFplay as the player because most latency happens on the player side. Standard Flash players have about four seconds of latency IIRC. I doubt that full 60fps streaming would be possible given latency and bandwidth. The formula for bitrate based live streaming and VOD creation is as follows:

Width of video * Height of Video * FPS of video /1024 == kilo pixels per second

kpps * .075 ~ .150 will usually give you acceptable quality however Blu-ray content is typically encoded at about a .445bpp density to achieve its 24Mbps stream.

Note that if you take busy 1080p content, like Transformers 4 Age of Extinction for example, and encode it at CRF 20 the bit per pixel density will be at about .210bpp which would be a bitrate target of about 7.5 Mbps after being cropped to 1920 x 800.

Yeah, there are going to be some hurdles for them.
 
TwistedAegis said:
This would ideally be the future - fuck everyone buying $600 GPUs, render it on a GPU farm!
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Its not going to happen.

1) Fuck 1080p @ 30fps. We are going higher and higher resolution with greater and greater textures and 3D and 120fps and so forth. Internet speeds however are pretty much damn stagnating, so how are you going to stream all of this data with no buffer whatsoever?

2) Sure, perhaps you could offload SOME of the work to a server, but you are never going to get around latency issues entirely. Physics, yo.

That said, I could see how this would be an option on some games, like say a turn based strategy game.
 
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