Take-Two CEO: Game Streaming’s Latency Problems Will Be Over in a Few Years

I sincerely hope this does not come to pass anytime soon.

Soon it will not be possible to own (in the true sense of the word) anything. You will pay $30 to ‘purchase’ a film from iTunes, then one day, Apple will argue with the rights holder, and your ‘purchase’ will be gone, and so will your money.

It makes me laugh ( I warned him at the time) when my friend sold all his dvd box sets, as “they were all on Netflix, so why have all those boxes taking up room”, a year later, the series disappeared from Netflix with no notice, and he couldn’t even re-buy the box set, as it was not made anymore...

There is a lesson here, for those intelligent enough to see it.
 
They will put a shed in your garden/container on your driveway with a server and make a Lan :p

Joking aside I work for an ISP in NOVA where they are building a many datacenters in Loudoun county. I mentioned that someday these large datacenters will go away as our homes networks will be used as the datacenters someday. I can just see the mega-ISPs, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc getting away with it too.
 
I sincerely hope this does not come to pass anytime soon.

Soon it will not be possible to own (in the true sense of the word) anything. You will pay $30 to ‘purchase’ a film from iTunes, then one day, Apple will argue with the rights holder, and your ‘purchase’ will be gone, and so will your money.

It makes me laugh ( I warned him at the time) when my friend sold all his dvd box sets, as “they were all on Netflix, so why have all those boxes taking up room”, a year later, the series disappeared from Netflix with no notice, and he couldn’t even re-buy the box set, as it was not made anymore...

There is a lesson here, for those intelligent enough to see it.
We're heading over a cliff. It's sad how many people don't understand that. At least with movies and music, you can back copies of them up. There are plenty of games there's no way to back up at all. That will be doubly true with streaming.
 
Yeah, if your connection is great. Most of the world has quite a bit of latency that really can't be avoided. I'm not even talking about developing economies, lots of people don't live in cities.
Im in Atlanta and have a solid connection and still dont think these services function that well.
 
No, it won't. Unless these companies can alter the speed of light somehow.

Even if you move the rendering closer to users (on ISP premises for example), last-mile latency to users on anything but FTTH is too great.
 
I live in the second biggest city in Bulgaria. Right now I am literally kicking the optic fibre cable with my feet. Every day I wonder if the dog won't fuck it up. So yeah...optic fibre is the answer.

The answer to what? What kind of latency and bandwidth to where, how much?
 
When they say streaming I don’t think they mean it the way we are thinking. I bet the console for it will run an app, that you pay a subscription for. Within the app will be the game titles, you choose which ones you want and it will download them to the system in an encrypted format containing some sort of registry locking it to your console so you can’t just copy the files around.
 
Folks calculating latency also need to factor in input lag. If I press a key it has to go all the way back to the remote server for processing where it will then be added to the frame buffer. This is where it will get extremely frustrating, something streaming video doesn't have to deal with.

John Carmack and the guys at Oculus were trying to solve these issues over a matter of feet to reduce motion sickness yet were saying in 2-3 years this will be possible over hundreds of miles of tangled fibre and routers..

When you tally up latency over fiber, display lag, input lag, latency from the remote pc processing, drawing, and sending out the frame and the local device receiving, most likely decoding, and sending the frame to the display, the result will be miserable for any 3d game or fast moving side scroller.

I bet their solution will be to load the game in chunks and still have us render locally.
 
Excellent! I'm happy to hear Fiber will be showing up in the farming communities in central America. :) Wonder where they got this inside information from.
 
Streaming games in a nutshell.

tenor.gif
 
Here we go again. Maybe when zero latency 10g networks are common in 10+ years. By then I'd also like a wireless VR headset that looks like a pair of sunglasses.
 
Gaming as a service, the dream of any publisher. The evolution of microtransactions and the death of consumer purchase rights.

At least some good comes from terrible internet infrastructure. Physical media would no longer exist if that weren't the case.

Much like how Apple removed the headphone jack, game publishers will eventually only offer their IP through such streaming services even when no one asked for it.
 
The answer to what? What kind of latency and bandwidth to where, how much?

The answer for proper streaming service, I am in the GeForce Now beta and have tried it, even when I go back to my hometown where is my 2nd machine (which is an old Phenom II with 8 gigs of ram and ATI x1600 pro) I use it to play games without the need to upgrade at this moment of time and it is not bad at all.

In regards of the latency from my PC Europe is on 5 to 20 ms US is from 10-30-50 depending on which of your wonderful and not throttling ISP's is the server for the latency check. Asia is also around 10-40ms.

The bandwith is 1 gbps, which is more than enough for every need that you will ever have.
 
LOL. Streaming live tv currently cant/does not carry 5.1 DD sound because of 'processing' and at best has a 30sec lag. But we are just around the corner from lag free gaming?
 
The answer for proper streaming service, I am in the GeForce Now beta and have tried it, even when I go back to my hometown where is my 2nd machine (which is an old Phenom II with 8 gigs of ram and ATI x1600 pro) I use it to play games without the need to upgrade at this moment of time and it is not bad at all.

In regards of the latency from my PC Europe is on 5 to 20 ms US is from 10-30-50 depending on which of your wonderful and not throttling ISP's is the server for the latency check. Asia is also around 10-40ms.

The bandwith is 1 gbps, which is more than enough for every need that you will ever have.

5-20 to all of Europe 10-50 to the US? Which provider are you using in Plovdiv, if that's where you live?
 
You need to know you have no idea how needy I am. And how much more needy me and my multi-cam 8k edit streams will be in future.

Needy indeed you can be with 8k editing streams. But it is managable.

LOL. Streaming live tv currently cant/does not carry 5.1 DD sound because of 'processing' and at best has a 30sec lag. But we are just around the corner from lag free gaming?

You sure about that? Cause it doesn't seem like this, especially when I stream football from SkySports for example, 5.1 sound is always on and purrrfect.

5-20 to all of Europe 10-50 to the US? Which provider are you using in Plovdiv, if that's where you live?

Yup, that's where I live and the company is called "Cooolbox".
 
It won't, because frankly if the FCC and shitpie get their way no one could afford the bandwidth needed to consistently do this, on top of that who said we were willing to always be online, because I'm pretty sure a single player game doesn't need it.

lets be real, how often these days are you NOT online....i am willing to bet less than 1% of the time your at your computer do you not actually have an internet connection.
 
Lol no it's not. Quantum entanglement works instantly, literally. It works beyond the speed of light and that's why scientists are baffled by it.
No, it does not. We have entangled pairs under laboratory conditions. It does not operate at greater than the speed of light.

I'm not going to go into the details on the grounds that Kyle would probably not like the 10+ page quote fully explaining the subject and why FTL communication via quantum entanglement is impossible. It frankly has never been possible. Some idiot reporter a long time ago misunderstood a report on the subject and now we have "common sense" knowledge that doesn't remotely approach factual science. Just so you know for the future if an object has mass the only probable method to accelerate that mass faster than the speed of light is the alcubierre drive.

TLDR: If you force a particles state you remove the entanglement. Additionally, observation of the particle destroys any reliability of forcing the state anyway. You cannot observe a particle and force its state while maintaining the entanglement and even if you did you only have a 50/50 chance of accurately reading the intended forced state.
 
5-20 to all of Europe 10-50 to the US? Which provider are you using in Plovdiv, if that's where you live?

He's full of shit. You don't get those kind of speeds with enterprise fiber, never mind consumer fiber. Let's just do the theoretical math here: Bulgaria (where that company is) is about 10,000km away from Dallas, TX a good middle of the US city that has a lot of hosting. Information propagates through single mode fiber at about 70% (the precise speed depends on the index of refraction of the fiber) of the speed of light so 210,000km/sec. That means a round trip time from there would be 95ms. However that is assuming a straight shot, as in a fiber cable from one to the other over the surface of the earth. That's not how fiber flows. It winds around, it drops down to the ocean floor, it goes through lots of routers, it takes indirect paths, etc.

In reality, the best case you'll probably see is 100ish ms to something on the east cost and 150-200ms is going to be the norm depending on where the server is, how good the connections are, and how direct the path is.

A quick test confirms this: From a server at work that is on a high speed enterprise fiber connection that's well peered on the west coast (with good routers on our side to back it up) I see about 183ms ping times to coolbox.bg.

Remember kids: 300,000,000m/s is not just a good idea, it's the law! :D
 
No, it does not. We have entangled pairs under laboratory conditions. It does not operate at greater than the speed of light.

I'm not going to go into the details on the grounds that Kyle would probably not like the 10+ page quote fully explaining the subject and why FTL communication via quantum entanglement is impossible. It frankly has never been possible. Some idiot reporter a long time ago misunderstood a report on the subject and now we have "common sense" knowledge that doesn't remotely approach factual science. Just so you know for the future if an object has mass the only probable method to accelerate that mass faster than the speed of light is the alcubierre drive.

TLDR: If you force a particles state you remove the entanglement. Additionally, observation of the particle destroys any reliability of forcing the state anyway. You cannot observe a particle and force its state while maintaining the entanglement and even if you did you only have a 50/50 chance of accurately reading the intended forced state.
Interesting, there's a lot of conflicting information on the internet. Many sources claim faster than light entanglement.
 
Interesting, there's a lot of conflicting information on the internet. Many sources claim faster than light entanglement.
Many internet sites also claim health benefits for apple cider based off a study on rats.
Many internet sites also claim bigfoot exists.
Many sites claim HardOCP is an nvidia shill.
Many sites claim HardOCP is an AMD shill.

The internet claims many things. When it comes to a complex topic such as quantum physics most of that information is wrong or so poorly understood as to be effectively wrong.
What you are seeing is poor explanations for the effect. By technicality, an entangled pair is entangled. Entanglement is not absolute.. meaning it is not perfectly mimicking. While they can react identically(regardless of distance) this does not mean they suddenly behave differently from other particles.
This means anything you do to the particle is subject to the same effects as any other particle. Additionally, anything you do to one particle in an entanglement cannot and does not cause an instant effect to the other particle in the entanglement. If it was possible you would effectively be creating energy for free across space.

Yes. Quantum Physics is that weird...
 
He's full of shit. You don't get those kind of speeds with enterprise fiber, never mind consumer fiber. Let's just do the theoretical math here: Bulgaria (where that company is) is about 10,000km away from Dallas, TX a good middle of the US city that has a lot of hosting. Information propagates through single mode fiber at about 70% (the precise speed depends on the index of refraction of the fiber) of the speed of light so 210,000km/sec. That means a round trip time from there would be 95ms. However that is assuming a straight shot, as in a fiber cable from one to the other over the surface of the earth. That's not how fiber flows. It winds around, it drops down to the ocean floor, it goes through lots of routers, it takes indirect paths, etc.

In reality, the best case you'll probably see is 100ish ms to something on the east cost and 150-200ms is going to be the norm depending on where the server is, how good the connections are, and how direct the path is.

A quick test confirms this: From a server at work that is on a high speed enterprise fiber connection that's well peered on the west coast (with good routers on our side to back it up) I see about 183ms ping times to coolbox.bg.

Remember kids: 300,000,000m/s is not just a good idea, it's the law! :D

Can confirm. I like to use this site to get a rough idea of real world best ping times you can get from various locations around the world. And to shove it in the face of people making stupid claims :)
 
Many internet sites also claim health benefits for apple cider based off a study on rats.
Many internet sites also claim bigfoot exists.
Many sites claim HardOCP is an nvidia shill.
Many sites claim HardOCP is an AMD shill.

The internet claims many things. When it comes to a complex topic such as quantum physics most of that information is wrong or so poorly understood as to be effectively wrong.
What you are seeing is poor explanations for the effect. By technicality, an entangled pair is entangled. Entanglement is not absolute.. meaning it is not perfectly mimicking. While they can react identically(regardless of distance) this does not mean they suddenly behave differently from other particles.
This means anything you do to the particle is subject to the same effects as any other particle. Additionally, anything you do to one particle in an entanglement cannot and does not cause an instant effect to the other particle in the entanglement. If it was possible you would effectively be creating energy for free across space.

Yes. Quantum Physics is that weird...
Even science sites seem to contradict you, talking about instant wave collapse over distance and exceeding the speed of light: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-violation-bell-inequality-frequency-bin-entangled.html#nRlv
 
He's full of shit. You don't get those kind of speeds with enterprise fiber, never mind consumer fiber. Let's just do the theoretical math here: Bulgaria (where that company is) is about 10,000km away from Dallas, TX a good middle of the US city that has a lot of hosting. Information propagates through single mode fiber at about 70% (the precise speed depends on the index of refraction of the fiber) of the speed of light so 210,000km/sec. That means a round trip time from there would be 95ms. However that is assuming a straight shot, as in a fiber cable from one to the other over the surface of the earth. That's not how fiber flows. It winds around, it drops down to the ocean floor, it goes through lots of routers, it takes indirect paths, etc.

In reality, the best case you'll probably see is 100ish ms to something on the east cost and 150-200ms is going to be the norm depending on where the server is, how good the connections are, and how direct the path is.

A quick test confirms this: From a server at work that is on a high speed enterprise fiber connection that's well peered on the west coast (with good routers on our side to back it up) I see about 183ms ping times to coolbox.bg.

Remember kids: 300,000,000m/s is not just a good idea, it's the law! :D

East coast to Bulgaria should be doable at ~70. No way he is getting 10-50 though. Still an amazing deal no matter how you look at it.
 
In regards of the latency from my PC Europe is on 5 to 20 ms US is from 10-30-50 depending on which of your wonderful and not throttling ISP's is the server for the latency check. Asia is also around 10-40ms.

LOL nope.
 
Even science sites seem to contradict you, talking about instant wave collapse over distance and exceeding the speed of light: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-violation-bell-inequality-frequency-bin-entangled.html#nRlv
No, actually that article does in no way contradict me. It basically states(simplified) that they found a method to use entangled pairs as a frequency timer for qubit processing. Nowhere in the article did they state they created information or destroyed information.
To "read" a particle you must observe it and influence it which will disrupt the particle in questions normal behaviour. This disruption is not carried over to the entangled twin.

This is an absolutely terrible analogy but it will serve for this case..
Think about two cars manufactured to be so perfectly identical as it would be impossible to measure. If driven normally when car A breaks down we known car B will also break down in a similar or identical way. If car B gets hit by a train car A does not suddenly fly off the road into a million pieces.

There is a stupendous amount of information and utility we can gain from the behaviours of many types of entanglement. Right now there is significant research in attempting to "read" or "influence" them without destroying them. A not insignificant task when dealing with Planck lengths as a base point.
In the future maybe we will find a way to enable FTL communication via entanglement(frequency most likely to be honest) but as of right now our physics states it is impossible.
 
Needy indeed you can be with 8k editing streams. But it is managable.



You sure about that? Cause it doesn't seem like this, especially when I stream football from SkySports for example, 5.1 sound is always on and purrrfect.



Yup, that's where I live and the company is called "Cooolbox".

Vue, Hulu, YouTubeTV, Sling, DirecTV. have very little if any 5.1 sound for live tv. almost all live tv is broadcast at 2.0
 
Right now it's pretty much a wet dream. I don't see Steam doing this unless it's optional.

That's part of the wet dream. Imagining that someone won't be taking a 30% cut of your never ending subscription fees. Never being on sale. Etc.

From a technical standpoint, it's idiocy, because most people don't have the latency or the bandwidth, or the bandwidth caps, or something else to make it work, and it is STILL at the point of craptastic quality vs local play.

It's complete idiocy to think it is a product, much less a viable one until all that is fixed or an EXTREMELY compelling argument to ingore one or more of those problems.
 
In regards of the latency from my PC Europe is on 5 to 20 ms US is from 10-30-50 depending on which of your wonderful and not throttling ISP's is the server for the latency check. Asia is also around 10-40ms.
... You sure that ain't cached?
 
I sincerely hope this does not come to pass anytime soon.

Soon it will not be possible to own (in the true sense of the word) anything. You will pay $30 to ‘purchase’ a film from iTunes, then one day, Apple will argue with the rights holder, and your ‘purchase’ will be gone, and so will your money. No one cares more about your property that you do - so keep it in your control. Period.

It makes me laugh ( I warned him at the time) when my friend sold all his dvd box sets, as “they were all on Netflix, so why have all those boxes taking up room”, a year later, the series disappeared from Netflix with no notice, and he couldn’t even re-buy the box set, as it was not made anymore...

There is a lesson here, for those intelligent enough to see it.

No lesson is needed, only common sense.

It's pretty obvious that if you foist control of your "purchases" to a third party that really doesn't give a crap about you then you don't really own your "purchases". Is there anyone that is remotely competent that doesn't see the massive potential for abuse.

On topic: They'll never collect a dime from me for this type of service. I'm not paying more to a subscription service to do what I can do on my own for less money. On top of that the concept of this service has reliability issues (network goes down, can't play even a single player game, increasing reliance on a non-interested party - the ISP who now needs to carry A/V data on top of game sync data) and performance concerns as well - If I have a 1080TI, I know the performance I will get.... online service *NEVER* have performance issues... right? I never had a GPU choke up my FPS due to network issues or "too many users online".

The CEO of this company can go pound sand.
 
Let's assume a bad case, you live around San Diego and the servers are located on Long Island:
Distance ~4'000 Km
Speed of light in fiber optics: around 70% light speed so ~210'000 Km/s

(4000 / 210000) = ~19ms one way pure transfer time

Obviously there's some more latency along the way inside repeaters, routers etc. so we might be looking at around 50-80ms round trip time for a pretty bad case actually, if this wants to take off the distance to the nearest data center might be less than 1'000 Km cutting the round trip down to maybe 15-25ms.
Also, it doesn't really matter if you got fiber or copper, both operate on around 70% c currently, although there are researchers working on better fiber optics.

You might not be able to go full on pro gamer on Fortnite but it will be playable, especially on games that aren't as twitchy as shooters or similar.
Also, sparsely populated areas will get the shaft of course.


No.... A 20ms input delays is noticeable, and was the reason it took a long time for LCDs to take off for gaming. They just could not compete with the refresh rate of a CRT. So even in your best case scenario of 80ms would be unbearable. Just the delay of using something steam link hard wired 20' away was unplayable to me, so if streaming gaming ever takes off, it's going to be a shitty experience. Especially when you consider ISPs aren't rolling out fiber anymore and betting on 5g. And I've never used wireless that didn't have a 2-3x higher latency than a wired connection.
 
... You sure that ain't cached?

Yup, if it is cached it would be a miracle that I can play online games with no more than 20-30ms delay. Even when trying to play online games with US servers which we all know that the American provides are throttling except if you don't cough up some money I am fine. Which is funny, the other day a friend of mine who actually lives in the US had bigger lag than me in an online session.
 
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