[Persistantthug]

Well, I do believe this officially solves that "how is the PS4 going to do BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY without a CELL PROCESSOR" problem.


Who says Sony's broke?


http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaud...r-380-million/

[Arwin]

Very interesting indeed. On the short term, I wonder if they'll use the same technology for hooking up the Vita to the PS3 for remote control. Then I reckon they'll start doing PS2 games as a test-bed, and will be interesting to see where they take it from there.

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

A good move on Sony's part. I can see great use for demos, casual games, remote play, etc.

But BC? I look forward to playing my PS3 games with horrid amounts of input lag, saturating my internet connection and driving ever closer to my ISP's bandwidth cap, all with mediocre IQ. And of course I can look forward to losing my connection to the games when my internet has a hiccup.

Besides, how will this BC be accomplished? If it's hardware, Sony might be maintaining quite a bank of PS3 hardware for the first year or so as the PS4 launch window slowly fills out and the PS3's significant portfolio continues to grow with late-gen titles. If it could be done with software, and yet the PS4 is incapable of the performance necessary, then the hardware costs would likely be even more significant. So Cell will be involved.

Of course the advantage through this all is that there won't be a fixed cost per-console as with hardware BC. Maintaining the full PS3 core hardware for enough users, plus bandwidth costs, versus the cost of Cell in every PS4 (assuming the PS4 GPU and RAM take on the necessary roles in BC). The demand for BC will also drop off over time, as more users transition to PS4 titles.

[Rangers]

Originally Posted by TurnDragoZeroV2G

Besides, how will this BC be accomplished? If it's hardware, Sony might be maintaining quite a bank of PS3 hardware for the first year or so as the PS4 launch window slowly fills out and the PS3's significant portfolio continues to grow with late-gen titles. If it could be done with software, and yet the PS4 is incapable of the performance necessary, then the hardware costs would likely be even more significant. So Cell will be involved.

Dont forget more than likely they'll roll it behind PS Plus anyway, so they'll be earning revenue for it.

Also, I bet the amount of PS3's they'd have to maintain for BC would actually be quite smaller than you think. One of the big advantages of cloud gaming.

[Shifty Geezer]

Good move by Sony. They were talking about this prior to this gen. PSN can offer more than just content now, if Sony do something useful with Gaikai! But BC will suck. Ps3 games could be pretty laggy as it is. Add network lag, and they'll be unplayable!

[Rangers]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Good move by Sony. !

From the guy steadily downplayed the potential of Onlive in that thread due to not good enough connections

Must say I feel a little vindicated as if I spotted the potential of cloud gaming early on, with the legions of Sony fans now it'll suddenly have a whole lot more backers. And now no doubt everybody saw the potential

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by Rangers

From the guy steadily downplayed the potential of Onlive in that thread due to not good enough connections

Cloud gaming was always on the cards, like streaming movies. The infrastructure just isn't there to have a cloud-only box yet. It will be in future, even if in 5+ years time (and it was 3 years ago we were talking about OnLive), and Sony are securing that now.

A quick search of that thread throws up this post by me:

OnLive is gaming for the SD, YouTube generation. Great for mobile phones, but it's not a replacement for local hardware yet. However, the future of cloud computing, server-side gaming, has been kicked off.

[upnorthsox]

Originally Posted by Rangers

From the guy steadily downplayed the potential of Onlive in that thread due to not good enough connections

Must say I feel a little vindicated as if I spotted the potential of cloud gaming early on, with the legions of Sony fans now it'll suddenly have a whole lot more backers. And now no doubt everybody saw the potential

Not really, if its an integral design component of the PS4 then I think Sony is making a huge mistake. If it's however an augementation to PSN/PSSuite then it has the potential to be successful. The real value would lie with the Vita, Experia, a Sony Tablet, Sony TV's, HT receivers, or an STB. But if it provides a BC option for the PS4 then it has some value there too.

[Arwin]

When I first thought of a deal with Gaikai, all I thought initially was to get the technology so they could use it for remote play algorithms for the Vita, because currently that doesn't hold a candle to what the Wii U does with its tablet controller (which seems to have extremely low latency).

[antwan]

Originally Posted by Arwin

When I first thought of a deal with Gaikai, all I thought initially was to get the technology so they could use it for remote play algorithms for the Vita, because currently that doesn't hold a candle to what the Wii U does with its tablet controller (which seems to have extremely low latency).

wii U I think is more comparable with wireless HDMI, instead of onlive/gaikai (if I'm not mistaken).

Also I don't think the Vita remote play component would be worth $ 380.000.000, but who am I

[antwan]

I really don't like this decision and I hope they bought them for their server capacity
I want my PS4 to render the game with minimal input lag
edit:
http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/bull...nput-lag-video
hmm is this real?

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by antwan

I want my PS4 to render the game with minimal input lag

There's no reason to think PS4 will be an online only streaming box. The infrastructure isn't there. This will be a parnet service, allowing some games (think small PSN games) that can be played on all devices, while PS4 will still be playing PS4 native games. It'll be intersting where this places PSMobile.

[Brad Grenz]

Cloud is going to be a big part of the industry down the line. Acquisitions like this are strategically important in terms of building up a patent portfolio, boxing out competitors, etc. It makes a lot of sense to do it while an OnLive or Gaikai are still affordable. 5 years from now this would be a multibillion dollar deal.

[rekator]

And think about connected TV and blu-ray player more potential than console.

[babybumb]

I wonder if they sell PS5 as a marginal purist product for $999. Not confirmed to run new games after a few years when cloud specs are upgraded. You can buy PS5.1 then

But yeah this HUGE. Selling hardware boxes will only make nice profits for company called Apple. Now they can make money on any hardware because they own the platform even if they let 3rd parties like Samsung have their own cloud in the cloud

[pc999]

This means that future consoles will be client uniforming input (output) methods, IMO.

ie, it will garante (unlike the PC) that everybody does have a x controler, and a y camera and a z move system,interesting, very IMO.

But I really dislike the idea of a fee and of needing a permanent internet connection..

[antwan]

Again,
is this real???

http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/bull...nput-lag-video

This is not as bad as most 'technical' people predicted. I thought the input lag would suck because of those (as it turns out: uninformed, FUD spreading) people.
If they can have the same input lag as a 360, which is often haled by eurogamer as the best console with regards to input lag, then I see no problem.
Unless the user is on dialup of course..

[BoardBonobo]

Forget the PS4, does this mean we'll get cloud gaming support on the Vita? That would be quite exciting, and I presume it could be the same deal with movies and music and other such media rich entities.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by antwan

This is not as bad as most 'technical' people predicted. I thought the input lag would suck because of those (as it turns out: uninformed, FUD spreading) people.

One of those 'uninformed, FUD spreading' people was Richard Leadbetter, grandmaster and head of Eurogamer's Digital Foundry, with many years of video capture and encoding under his belt. That these online services have managed to get as good as they have shows amazing technical achievements by them, and not a lack of understanding or experience or general FUD-spreading by ignorant people. Experts can be wrong too, you know, like all people, and it's not a crime, and a mistake should never be held against someone. If they aren't big enough to admit they were wrong, then they can be the target of criticism, but fallability needs to be accepted with a degree of respect.

[antwan]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

One of those 'uninformed, FUD spreading' people was Richard Leadbetter, grandmaster and head of Eurogamer's Digital Foundry, with many years of video capture and encoding under his belt. That these online services have managed to get as good as they have shows amazing technical achievements by them, and not a lack of understanding or experience or general FUD-spreading by ignorant people. Experts can be wrong too, you know, like all people, and it's not a crime, and a mistake should never be held against someone. If they aren't big enough to admit they were wrong, then they can be the target of criticism, but fallability needs to be accepted with a degree of respect.

Richard Leadbetter is an expert indeed. Not only video capturing, also videogames: for years I read a magazine which he wrote for: PSW. Never has there been a better magazine (IMO).

But this really shows that he is a true expert: he made a video testing the latency, proving his previous hypothesis wrong. And that is what a real scientist can hope to achieve; prove his own research wrong and building, improving on it.

I was talking about people in my direct environment; who are in game-development. I just mailed one of them the video and he is claiming it's fake :S
So sorry if my post seemed disrespectful towards Richard; I have utmost respect for him.

edit:
this is the full article, for those interested:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...ikai-vs-onlive

[french toast]

I told you cloud was the future..whether we like it or not :/

[JPT]

And this is ups the stakes quite a bit to.

http://mobile.theverge.com/2012/6/30...-native-client

In regards to the latency/lag, there was some discussion on the x264 list some time back about this. And they said they did some modification to x264 for a client that was not OnLive, but did the same thing.
They also claimed that what they did for this client, was a much better solution than OnLive was doing.

Could be this client was Gaikai, just pure speculation on my part.

[Arwin]

I just tried The Witcher 2 on GaiKai (fresh try, only tested OnLive so far) and it does indeed feel great. Of course it doubt this looks better than the 360, but it may well have better framerates (don't have 360 version) and there is no real noticeable lag. So this is definitely getting somewhere.

[JPT]

Originally Posted by JPT

And this is ups the stakes quite a bit to.

http://mobile.theverge.com/2012/6/30...-native-client

In regards to the latency/lag, there was some discussion on the x264 list some time back about this. And they said they did some modification to x264 for a client that was not OnLive, but did the same thing.
They also claimed that what they did for this client, was a much better solution than OnLive was doing.

Could be this client was Gaikai, just pure speculation on my part.

Just to followup

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/249

It talks about reducing latency encoding for x264 (main post) and that it was done for a startup that was not OnLive (look in the comments).

[crabbz]

If they use this for backward compatibility on ps4 I wonder if you'll be able to play the ps3 games you already own at no extra cost? Put the disc in to verify you have it and then stream the game?