Thin clients for remote gaming?
On the train again, and again 3G connection to feed my Web addiction ( all together, all hail to 3G... come on!!)
Anyway, I found the following post on Ars Technica:
AMD's next-gen GPU powers Crysis on an iPhone
Besides all the considerations about the power of nowadays' GPU, what hit me was the following passage:
...the game (Crysis) is rendered like normal on the server machine, where frames from it are grabbed by the OTOY server-side software. Next, these frames are compressed and sent out over the network to the client, which decompresses them using a very small chunk of code (about 780K, hence the iPhone demo) and displays them in a window. User input is sent back to the server over UDP because it's tolerant of packet loss, so you don't add to latency by resending dropped packets...
So, basically, they have huge servers on the back-end to actually run the game and a sophisticated screen (or GPU buffer) capture sends back the rendered frames to the client. Definitively neat... but I wonder if it is a good solution given that the trend is to push back power to the client... I understand that the rendering of games such as Crysis wouldn't be feasible on devices like the iPhone, but then I don't get the following statement:
...The main problem with these demos was that I could easily see a ton of compression artifacts on the large monitors that AMD was using, to the point where text wasn't very readable...
So, since it is practically impossible to get high rendering quality (which is the main reason why people buy high-end computers to game) they say that small devices can be the ultimate targets for their application.... mhhh, quite like killing a mosquito with a cannon, isn't it? Especially if you compare this solution to the cost of downloading a game on your device, where the power of recent CPUs, provide a game experience comparable to the one that we had on high-end PC 3-4 years ago...
