Nvidia rolls out game streaming on a GTX 1080 cloud for $2.50 an hour

[Bacon1]

I wonder how they verify what games you own and if they have them all installed on their machines or how that works exactly. Guessing it means no mod support since they'll be installed on their own machines and you'll just be doing a local input / display, but you'll still need it installed locally or will just proving ownership work?

That travel option with always-spotty hotel WiFi? ...I guess?

Which will then play bad because its slow wifi...

 

[Genx87]

Silly right now. But curious in say 10 years if this is a feasible business model.

 

[happy medium]

I wonder how they verify what games you own and if they have them all installed on their machines or how that works exactly. Guessing it means no mod support since they'll be installed on their own machines and you'll just be doing a local input / display, but you'll still need it installed locally or will just proving ownership work?



Which will then play bad because its slow wifi...

It runs through Steam or Origin or a service like that. I didn't see it supported any way else.

I wonder if every time they come out with a new card you get the quality of that card.
Last year I played through *finished* 3 games. It took me about 30 hours?
it might be good for single player games, not multiplayer.

If you played 100 hours a year that would be $250 a year. That seems a lot cheaper than a gtx1080, and then a gtx1180 and then a gtx1280 every 18 months.
Like I said I wonder if you get the quality of each new released high end card?

Good for a laptop user that plays a little Call of Duty, Bioshock, Battlefield, single player. Not everyone has 200 hours a year to play videogames.

 

[happy medium]

Silly right now. But curious in say 10 years if this is a feasible business model.

I think it will more popular than havin your own rig.

 

[Bacon1]

It runs through Steam or Origin or a service like that. I didn't see it supported any way else.

What I'm wondering though, is how it deals with installed games. I doubt they will have every single game installed on their servers since there are what, hundreds of thousands of games on steam alone? So will you have to wait for it to install first before you can play (assuming no play time is used for that though).

 

[happy medium]

What I'm wondering though, is how it deals with installed games. I doubt they will have every single game installed on their servers since there are what, hundreds of thousands of games on steam alone? So will you have to wait for it to install first before you can play (assuming no play time is used for that though).

Well I watched the CES 2017 thing and a game loaded in about a minute.
I don't think you can use it without some sort of steam client just to clarify you actually own the game..
But there was no installation, it was in the cloud. From desktop, to in game, in about a minute.

 

[Bacon1]

Well I watched the CES 2017 thing and a game loaded in about a minute.
I don't think you can use it without some sort of steam client.
But there was no installation, it was in the cloud. From desktop, to in game, in about a minute.

Sorry I mean I know they will have all the major games installed and be able to spin up a new VM or w/e for you to play off, but what about the other smaller games?

There is a reason that most of the cloud providers have a limited list of what games you can play from.

 

[happy medium]

Sorry I mean I know they will have all the major games installed and be able to spin up a new VM or w/e for you to play off, but what about the other smaller games?

There is a reason that most of the cloud providers have a limited list of what games you can play from.

They had every steam like client signed up, that's like 100,000 games.
Oh I see what your saying...............If I find the answer , I'll let you know.

 

[IEC]

If you travel for work with an IGP and only need 10-15 hours a month to access your steam/origin library or if you're a few months without a gaming PC it's a good stop gap alternative.

As an every day service it'd be very expensive.

No. This is a terrible idea if you travel for work. With platinum/elite perks at hotel chains and "upgraded" internet you'll get 480p youtube quality streaming, if that. 720p maybe if the hotel is low occupancy. If there's a conference or high occupancy at the hotel, you should fuggedaboutit, it will be a slideshow.

Sauce: I did this for a living traveling full-time as a consultant. My most recent laptop was a Dell Inspiron 15 - 7559 with i7-6700HQ and 4GB 960M. Which cost all of $620 refurbished. And got me my gaming fix in the evenings.

 

[Capt Caveman]

I would look into it. It would be a nice stop gap til the newer gpus come out in the near future.

 

[KompuKare]

Silly right now. But curious in say 10 years if this is a feasible business model.

Probably still not.
Rather think this aimed at the stock market/shareholders and business press as it will get them coverage about their 'cloud'iness even if it is unpractical.
Still, not uncommon with in the cloud stuff: with Office 365 Online you first think 'this is amazing running on browser' but if you actually want to use it, it's laggy, unresponsive and lacking keyboard shortcuts. Maybe the whole idea of the RibbonUI making keyboard shortcuts so awkward to use(not just for those used to the old ones) was to make Office Cloud similar (i.e. slow).

 

[VirtualLarry]

LAME! (Plus, didn't the demise of Onlive prove that this service doesn't make sense?)

Unless... NV is planning to increase the price of GPUs so much, that only 'cloud server' companies can afford them. Major thumbsdown, if that's their plan.

 

[JustMe21]

The problem with streaming 3-D is the amount of bandwidth it uses and the fact that people tend to want to run games at least 1920x1080 resolution. Sure, they can cap it at 25 Mbps, but then image quality will go down unless you're at a static background and standing still and input would be laggy as well. I know Grid computing is supposed to use less bandwidth than 3-D virtualization applications like Citrix HDX or HP RGS, but it seems like it would have to be able to use an extremely efficient, high compression algorithm and/or limit you to a resolution like 1366 x 768 to have a fluid experience.

 

[ConsoleLover]

Its ABSURDLY expensive! Not only do you have to actually own the game, so you have to spend $40 to $60 dollars depending on the game, but then you pay $25 for 20 hours of play to have a mediocre experience as playing with a GTX 1060, which of course over the internet thanks to ping, input delay, jitter, etc... would make the game terrible to play, so same at playing on 15fps.

If it was $1 for an hour of play and you didn't have to own the game, in very RARE cases it might be worth it, but even then, considering your average campaign lasts 12 hours, even if it was actually cheaper like 1$ an hour, you'd essentially still have to pay $10 for 10 hours worth of gameplay, hardly a valuable proposition.

This is nothing more than another Nvidia turd, just this time not in graphics segment, but in software segment, one of the many turds nvidia has been shitting out, considering they are spying on their users who use the nvidia drivers and geforce experience.

 

[casiofx]

So in order to play Witcher 3 with all DLC's side missions etc, you must pay the equivalent of three GTX 1080s, one GTX 1080ti, a Vega BD, one Ryzen, one Kaby and one week paid vacation in Dubai with three hookers per night.

Good deal.

You picked the wrong game, it took around 100 hours to play TW3+DLCs, so around $250 for gtx1080 plan. ahaha

 

[Vesku]

The price difference between this Nvidia service and console+game rental is starkly in the console's favor. I suppose there is the larger game library but who wants to pay $25+ on top of buying a $5-20 "indie" game?

 

[SPBHM]

the last time I tried steam in house streaming, the "input lag" made dirt 3 basically unplayable for me, Hitman (the one from 2010) was nice using a controller, I didn't test much more, but, the bitrate was like 20Mbs and I could easily see some artifacts,

to pay such a high amount to use this on some place without ideal internet, with not so great wireless connections, seems kind of crazy....

 

[Yakk]

Instead of people using GPUs to mine for money, this is nvidia using people to mine money for their GPUs.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

This is an embarrassingly bad value, at 2.50 an hour, assuming someone plays on average 4 hours a day, you'd surpass the cost of a $600 1080 in 2 months. Take that to 4 months with 2 hours a day. Nevermind the fact that the only way you'd have sufficient bandwidth to avoid compression artifacting (which nullifies the quality aspect of the 1080gtx) would be to run it @1080p, which a 1070 is more than enough to murder faces with. This is also completely disregarding input lag which is just generally miserable on anything other than wired-in-house (see onlive, or nvidia shield/steam link over wireless).

This is a stupid thing and someone should feel bad/be thwacked for it.

 

[Timmah!]

Its going to fail like Onlive or Gaikai and the rest. The internet connection speed and latency is not there yet for it to be useful IMO. And for that price, its granted.

 

[thilanliyan]

Instead of people using GPUs to mine for money, this is nvidia using people to mine money for their GPUs.

Hahaha, so true

 

[TheELF]

Sorry I mean I know they will have all the major games installed and be able to spin up a new VM or w/e for you to play off, but what about the other smaller games?

There is a reason that most of the cloud providers have a limited list of what games you can play from.

All guess work,I have no real idea.But.

Games send orders to the driver and the driver sends them to the gpu,this gpu could be anywhere even in the cloud, the game doesn't care and the driver doesn't care as long as it knows where to send the orders.
So you are only sending the data required for the gpu to create the picture and maybe they send you the data in some form that is not a picture (like a jpeg) but a set of commands for your local gpu to display the picture,but also maybe they do send you the video.

Anyway for someone with a older setup who wonders how his collection of games would run with a 1060 or a 1080 this is awesome,gpu benchmarks only tell you so much by using the scripted in build benches.
10 hours is plenty to load up all your games at specific saves and see how your system would be doing.

 

[KompuKare]

Maybe we are all looking at this wrong.
If you're streaming to multiple people at once this looks totally different.
Youtube is now full of gameplay footage so they could combine that with this service.
Obviously you might have to restrict people's choices so that they don't wander off from the main plot.
But you'd still want to allow some interaction.

Oh, wait...I think I've just invented Dragon's Lair!

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Maybe we are all looking at this wrong.
If you're streaming to multiple people at once this looks totally different.
Youtube is now full of gameplay footage so they could combine that with this service.
Obviously you might have to restrict people's choices so that they don't wander off from the main plot.
But you'd still want to allow some interaction.

Oh, wait...I think I've just invented Dragon's Lair!

What on earth are you talking about? This product doesn't change the gameplay, it's literally just streaming commands to a cloud system and streaming the video data back to your pc.

 

[Bacon1]

All guess work,I have no real idea.But.

Games send orders to the driver and the driver sends them to the gpu,this gpu could be anywhere even in the cloud, the game doesn't care and the driver doesn't care as long as it knows where to send the orders.
So you are only sending the data required for the gpu to create the picture and maybe they send you the data in some form that is not a picture (like a jpeg) but a set of commands for your local gpu to display the picture,but also maybe they do send you the video.

Anyway for someone with a older setup who wonders how his collection of games would run with a 1060 or a 1080 this is awesome,gpu benchmarks only tell you so much by using the scripted in build benches.
10 hours is plenty to load up all your games at specific saves and see how your system would be doing.

Yeah I was wondering if you'd do some kind of local work as well to get around having the games installed on their servers, but that would still require you to have a good CPU (so no laptop usage really except already gaming ones). Plus it would get rid of the work laptop usage, since you'd need steam / games installed locally. Plus I'm sure the input lag would be terrible with the game rendering on your machine, then remotely and then local again. Seems like there would be massive stuttering.

Dunno though, but it seems like the 1060 would be the only way to do this, as the quality would be lacking on the 1080 version anyway, might as well save a few bucks / session.