Something is coming
…And there’s some kind of hardware for it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
It’ll be interesting if they detail their cloud platform. Based on the quality settings used in the Project Stream test with Assassin’s Creed I think it’s likely they are using AMD’s virtual GPU tech to run multiple instances of the game on a single card. I’m also alway curious as to the storage solution employed. In theory they could have the entire game in a RAM disk somewhere on the network.
Looks like the future is definitely streaming. I’ll be curious to see how all the players push each other, hopefully forward.
Until it can do 1080p @ 60fps, I am still buying games and rocking a decent video card. I wasn’t super impressed with AC:Ody streaming.
I, on the other hand, was really impressed by Odyssey being streamed. Especially because my PC does not have the horsepower to run something like that at those settings and speed locally.
The GDC page for the keynote is under VRDC, which has people wondering if VR is involved.
Who knows.
So how long until Google abandons this for the next hot tech idea?
I think its gonna be around a long time.
Project Fi eventually turned into Google Fi and its great!
I thought in practice it played pretty well, but going for 30fps was an interesting choice.
Jade Raymond, formerly of Ubisoft and EA, just announced she is now a VP at Google, presumably as part of this initiative.
I moved on from this 4 months ago and now I can never go back.
Maybe I’ll be interested once streaming can reach the maximum resolution and frame rate the eye can discern. There’s a built-in upper limit there.
I had a dream about Project Stream the other night, and it worked great! Hopefully I’ll get a chance to try it out IRL…
Intriguing. I wonder if they will reveal it’s streaming or they have something else planned.
All I know is that if I have to wear it, I want nothing to do with it.
Streaming depends on reliable, high-speed internet access, right? I’d be very curious to see if anyone pushing streaming as the future has actually left their Silicon Valley/major urban area bubble long enough to realize that much of the nation still doesn’t have anything better than crappy satellite speeds, if that. Rural areas, poor areas (which often have bubbles of affluence embedded in them, but with the same limitations on access), etc. still are not economically viable for the cable mafia to hook up, so streaming right now seems to be very classist at the very least.
I don’t think cell phone connections are good enough either, for reasons of cost and again, coverage/access. Driving around where I live you often go through vast swaths of territory with limited to zero cell coverage.
Literally yesterday Playstation Now expanded to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway in addition to their existing countries UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg.
Nvidia Geforce Now has support across the US and Europe (though I can’t find a direct list).
Both of these services have been around for many years with presumably a decent user base (otherwise they would have shuttered it long ago, especially NVidia’s service).
I would bet a lot that Silicon Valley is not the only actual audience for these. Yes not 100% of the population will be able to use it but that doesn’t mean a lot won’t be able to.
Looks like Microsoft is trying to get ahead of the Google streaming hype: https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-shows-off-project-xcloud-by-playing-forza-horizon-4-on-phone/
Admittedly, I was thinking mostly about the USA. It’s a sad fact that, for a variety of reasons ranging from foresight, social democracy, common sense, WWII, and other things, much of the rest of the world has a better internet infrastructure than the USA. And yes, a lot of folks can certainly use streaming services quite well. But that “lot” is still far from what it should be, and I’m not comfortable wholeheartedly endorsing trends that are built on ignoring large groups of people who just happen to not be lucky enough to have access to the connectivity that many take for granted.
Things are getting interesting.
