Play Windows games on linux and thus PS3

[DJ12]

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/a78532/ps3-to-allow-pc-games-to-run-on-it.html

Seems like an interesting concept, like playing PS3 games on the PSP.

Has anyone tried it with Lair, was it enjoyable?

It would only run through Linux (unless Sony buy into the idea) so won't be even on the radar for most PS3 users.

 

[pjbliverpool]

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/a78532/ps3-to-allow-pc-games-to-run-on-it.html

Seems like an interesting concept, like playing PS3 games on the PSP.

Has anyone tried it with Lair, was it enjoyable?

It would only run through Linux (unless Sony buy into the idea) so won't be even on the radar for most PS3 users.

Interesting concept but you still need the PC to run the game in the first place. It basically sounds a like a media extender for games. I guess it could help bring PC gaming into the living room though which would be good.

Personally I would rather have my PC connected directly to the TV but thats not practical for everyone.

 

[SPM]

I think playing Windows games running on a remote PC and displaying them on a PS2 or other console is a waste of time.

However what would be much more interesting would be to play the games on a remote supercomputing cluster (say a Cell cluster) and have them displayed on remote consoles or PCs, or perhaps do part of the games processing (the multiplayer interaction) in the remote super computing cluster, and part (the image rendering) in the console or PC. This would allow a degree of multi-player interaction eg. collision detection, huge worlds, persistent damage and alteration of the world environment, and other forms of multi-user interaction impossible before.

The other possibility would be to play games on an Internet connected TV using a suitable remote controller - maybe one of Toshiba's SPE powered HD TVs.

 

[MJP]

Ummm...pardon me if I'm missing something, but wouldn't you need at least 1.2 Gb of bandwidth just to send a 720p video stream over a network?

 

[tuna]

Not if you compress it first.....

 

[Mintmaster]

Ummm...pardon me if I'm missing something, but wouldn't you need at least 1.2 Gb of bandwidth just to send a 720p video stream over a network?

I assume there's lossy compression and maybe lower resolution too.

It shouldn't be too bad, though. 10MBit will get you decent detail, even when compressed in realtime.

 

[dlm]

Which works great as long as you have a reasonably short network path to the data center...

Then what?

 

[cthellis42]

This sounds frighteningly unwieldy. Wake me if they actually manage to deliver it without sucking.

 

[SPM]

You could get lower bandwidth with high quality rendering if rather than send the display over the Internet, you sent high level display parameters over the Internet and got the rendering done locally on the console. With a game you should also be able to use compression more aggressively and effectively than with an algorithm like mpeg4 because you have a program that knows how the screen is being put together.

Lossy compression may not mean you necessarily get bad graphics, considering that a movie played at SDTV resolution is generally better quality than any game in terms of realism. If you had a really high image quality generated on a remote computer cluster which was sent over at SDTV resolution, it could look pretty good.

Also, don't forget that Internet bandwidth is forever increasing, and eventually we will have HD movies streamed over the Internet as a standard from of movie distribution. At some stage, it will become viable to stream HD games output as a unicast stream as well.

 

[BRiT]

Latency will keep this from being usable.

 

[archangelmorph]

Latency will keep this from being usable.

Agreed..

 

[Techno+]

Nice idea. Allow me to go off topic, but an idea which I would die just to see implemented is the ability to combine the processing power of several networked PCs to play games one of them.

 

[SPM]

If you network together several PCs with a decent network (gigabit ethernet) and stick Linux to create a beowulf cluster, you basically have a smaller version of the top supercomputing clusters various research organisations around the world run.

This is an example of PS3s being used in a supercomputing cluster.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=220

Latency is an issue especially where the Internet is used, but depending on the type of game, I believe that that problem can be overcome by running the stuff that is very critical for latency locally (eg. rendering and stuff requiring quick response to input) and the stuff not so critical over the network/Internet (eg. AI, shared environment stuff etc.).

 

[Techno+]

If you network together several PCs with a decent network (gigabit ethernet) and stick Linux to create a beowulf cluster, you basically have a smaller version of the top supercomputing clusters various research organisations around the world run..

Too bad it cant be used for games.

 

[SPM]

Too bad it cant be used for games.

I don't see why not. You can use a cluster as a kind of headless back end games server nodes to do the shared stuff, and use other consoles on the same network as a user front end/display.

Alternatively you can use part of the resources on each console as a back end for the shared stuff, and part for the user front end/display. You don't even need to use Beowulf Linux, the main purpose of which is to provide nodes capable of network autobooting the same OS image on every node with communications, control and monitoring tools all set up automatically. You could just boot the same game off the BD drive on every console and use game code or PS3 OS to handle the network communications.

Networking together consoles with gigabit ethernet or even WiFi would be a great way of doing a multi-player mode in certain types of games.

 

[Strange]

Well, something like a chess game or RPG would be doable.
It's not hard imagining something that is pure turn based to do this.
I've actually seen something like this done over a combination of TV+Phone.

However, anything that requires split second inputs, no.
That would just suck.

 

[Techno+]

Thanx SPM but wat i actually meant that i havent heard of any implementation of this.

 

[Cyan]

crazy concept, but a true reality nowadays.

 

[Davros]

Is this just an updated version of this ?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think Cyan's necrobump was about Windows games directly playable on Linux, thanks in large part to Valve's Proton and interest in Steam Deck. That's me guessing though because Cyan didn't explain anything at all.