Remote game services (OnLive, Gaikai, etc.)

Onlive is 720p. And badly compressed 720p. With your current setup onlive is of no use to you. In a couple of years if you dont upgrade your rig things may change.

EDIT: just saw your edit. i dont think its the 720p, people are saying onlive at 720p looks much worse than native 720p. Think of it like video, the same video could look good or terrible depending on the bitrate/compression regardless if the resolution is the same.

 

No, it's just a matter of being compressed. You won't get the crystal clarity of direct video out over a heavily compressed video stream. Even if you had a reliable 5 Mbps connection, the nature of having to compress the video on the fly means they can't particularly optimise the compression to maximise what you'd get out of your internet BW anyway so you wouldn't get the same quality as a 5 Mbps 2-pass optimised encode for a download film or DVD or suchlike. 720p shouldn't ever looky muddy when upscaled - only soft or blurry.

 

Major OnLive Pre-E3 News

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...For_Strong_E3_With_Multiple_Announcements.php

TLDR:

Full Facebook Integration (brag clips posting, other automatic post, game invites, launch within fb, etc)

UK official Launch in Fall (onlive.co.uk)

Playable with Intel® Atom™ Processor CE4100-powered Devices, which will be 25 million connected TVs & 50 million Blu-ray players by the end of this year
Universal Controller to work with console, PC, tablets, and Tvs

Disney Interactive will bring games to the service

Also, Homefront multiplayer will be in Playpack ($9.99 a month with 51 other games)

OnLive exclusive game will be revealed at E3. I'm thinking this will show true next-gen graphics capabilities of their server farm (they upgrade every 6 months, btw).

Also, there will be more major announcements during E3 according to Steve Perlman on the OnLive blog (http://blog.onlive.com/2011/06/02/happy-1st-birthday-onlive/). This was just a preview. I personally hope it will be more major publishers joining and more AAA games coming to the service.

They have geatly improved the video quality in the past months, espcially when you are playing the game versus spectating. Some games like Assasins Creed still look slightly muddy, but games like Bioshock look really good.

 

Entirely dependent on bit rate, both in 720p and 1080p mode.

 

And compression scheme. But as colour information tends to be encoded in low resolution that luminance, you'll get colour bleed of some sort on many compressed video feeds even if the luminance is pin sharp.

 

Apparently they demo'd an iPad app, which could use touch controls or use an optional bluetooth controller.

Does the service actually use PC and console games or Onlive-specific games?

 

Should be PC games.

 

Also: Apple iThings and Gewgel Android phones.

Universal controller syncs via bluetooth to these "smart"devices.

Onlive isn't for me, but it's exciting to see them growing and maybe even prospering, I dunno. Are they making a profit? Kind of reminds me of the good ol' Phantom/infinium labs...except this one's real, of course!

 

They are real. I have a friend who's been fooling around with the service. He subscribes to the top tier Internet service from Comcast, and showed the service to me. You can spectate any game.

It's a good start. The final experience can be very compelling for hardcore gamers who don't look too deeply into image quality.

I think the other interesting development is the rise of hardcore gaming amongst facebook crowd. Over there the use case is very different, which makes it interesting. The hardcore gamers are too busy to play full length packaged games, so they game while studying/working on their PC/Mac. Basically, leave the web browser game running whole day, and play in short breaks. Spend $$$ on tokens to catch up.

 

Technically it's not much more than "good old" EA download manager with some added lipstick

 

http://onliveinformer.com/onlive-announces-games-coming-soon/

They are getting Wicther 2, but they haven't announced a release date yet. Plus they are getting the following games in the near future:
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine
DiRT 3
Batman: Arkham City
Might and Magic: Heroes VI
Dead Island
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Lord of the Rings: War in the North
F3AR
Dungeon Siege 3
Call of Juarez The Cartel
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
Duke Nukem Forever
Saints Row: The Third
Tropico 4
From Dust


The Ipad and Android tablet OnLive player app is huge because it greatly widens the field and they also require much less bandwidth to stream. It's about 1/10th the recommended bandwidth for tv/pc. The minimal requirement for tablets is .5mbps (i would recommend at least twice that due to real world conditions).

http://www.onlive.com/corporate/pre...roid-tablet-that-far-outperforms-new-consoles

 

I watched a friend play Just Cause 2 on his netbook with the Onlive trial. While the actual graphics quality was well below that of the PC version maxed out, the feed seemed clean enough, and the controls seemed decently responsive. I live just outside of Dallas, and I think Online has a server center there, so that could explain the good quality. What I really wonder is how can such a service do well if all the ISPs start to introduce hardline data caps or pay as you use type models? That also threatens other streaming platforms like Netflix. At least with something like Steam or D2D, you know how much data you're going to download to get the game, so you can plan ahead.

Thank god my roommates and I are not stuck on any data cap!

 

Are the bandwidth requirements for tablets lower because they're streaming lower resolutions?

Well tablets are starting to be connected to HDTVs so they may have to support 1080p.

 

Well... Probably have to consider battery life and BC for older tablets too.

 

Well if a lot of those video out adapters are sold, Apple at least might be able to start enabling different performance characteristics between battery and power adaptor mode, just as they do with their laptops in Mac OS X.

 

Absolutely. This is fabulous stuff, for those who are interested in Onlive. Also, so convenient! Get a dose of PC gaming ANYWHERE! No need to drag a huge tower case around, or even an anemic notebook...

They do? I haven't found a way yet to see what clocks my macbook runs at depending on wether it's on mains or battery power, but judging just from fan noise it seems to be the same regardless. It hits top speed in both situations when under load...

 

theres free trials for most games there, i tried it out for the hell of it, and its really not all that bad.

just cause and dirt 2 were fairly playable, the fps's not so much.

i used it connected to both a monitor and a tv, and the lag really compounded when on the tv. normally i can feel a slight bit of lag on it, but in combination it was pretty unplayable. i could imagine a multiplayer game being similar, because it has to go to the onlive server, out to the game host server, back to onlive and then finally to you. seems ugly, havent tried it yet.

picture quality was acceptable, there were some dropped frames here and there that really interfered with the gameplay, but other than that it looked ok, visible compression artifacts but nothing really distracting. occasionally i got a network problem thingy displayed, some macroblocking and that kind of stuff.

the closest server to me is virginia so i assume thats where my stream is coming from, to long island, it seems pretty close, but i guess ideally you would want to be in the same state.

i tried it with a download in the background and it really got ugly fast, so you would probably want to throttle dl's and stuff running on your network if you used it.

im going to try streaming a netflix movie on another device and see what happens.

overall pretty decent, not $15 a month worth though

 

Hmm maybe they just don't throttle the CPU when it's plugged in. They called the setting "Better Performance."

But the current MacBook Pros have dual GPUs, one integrated and one discrete and they switched between the two depending on the application. So in the Energy Saver mode, it's probably the integrated and in Better Performance, maybe they stay on the discrete GPU.

Maybe there are some power saving features in ARM cores or SOCs which can be disabled when it's plugged in.