it was funny to see Metro 2033 running fine on my single core Atom netbook. graphics looked good too because it was such a low res screen that 720 was actually a higher res than native. still the lag can be too much for me. I bought Deus Ex HR for a buck and could only take about 30 minutes of it. and that night there was a lot of that artifacting and audio popping too which really ruined the experience. in fact a couple of times I could not even connect but I guess they were overloaded with people taking advantage of the $1 game promotion. as it is now, OnLive will be nothing more than a place I go for demos.I like the service. Works great on my netbook. I like the social atmosphere to it too. Sometimes I'll watch people play amnesia or see how they tackle missions in batman.
Depends on my connection but at worst it feels like playing a QW game on old 33.6. I played that shit for years and loved it. If my connection's really bad then it definitely turns to shit. You get artifacts and audio stutters real bad.
Great way to demo games w/out downloading like it was mentioned above. I played NBA2K11 and it worked great.
I recommend you try it out. I'm not even playing it optimally -- on a macbook air over wifi.
I cannot tell that it is streamed video over the internet. It feels as good as any local game I've played.
Only downside is some shitty video compression, most noticeable in 2d/3d games like Trine
You guys comparing OnLive to your dedicated gaming desktops don't seem to understand its purpose. I can play games like Crysis on my Intel Atom netbook thanks to OnLive. Now for me, it's not desirable because I love to mod my games to death, and that's not an option with OnLive games. But for people who want to game but either don't have or can't afford spending money on a desktop rig, OnLive works great. I haven't tried their "micro console" yet but I like the idea. I don't think it's the future of games (perhaps the future of console gaming), but I do think it's a new alternative method to gaming that was thought by many to be impossible.
would you please stop talking out of your butt about how a cpu is not all that important. your statement about cpus not mattering since Pentium dual cores and that even a 1ghz Athlon is able to run many modern games was beyond foolish. its clear you have been living under rock for 5-7 years and have no idea about what modern games actually need to perform adequately.On a technical level I think it is highly impressive that they've managed to make an entire game remote playable over the internet, without requiring a native download. Even flash games require you to download.
And yeah, I can't quite justify to myself the cost of spending on a gaming computer.
Also, the main bottleneck in games has been the GPU. That's how it has been for years now. Game AI and complexity honestly haven't really advanced that much since the original half life, but the graphics capabilities have gone up. And CPU only increases the upper threshold of gaming, while GPU's prevent a slowdown, which is far more noticeable.