[HN Gopher] A network analysis on cloud gaming: Stadia, GeForce ...
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A network analysis on cloud gaming: Stadia, GeForce Now and PSNow
Author : jsnell
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-01-30 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| laurentdc wrote:
| My bet is that the improvement in integrated graphics (think
| Apple M1 or Vega 11) will solve the "gaming on a low end laptop"
| problem far before game streaming.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Games will simply use more power as the average user's rig
| becomes more powerful. Do you really think we'll solve low
| power ray tracing before we solve streaming? Streaming also
| scales better. Rendering double the frames requires double the
| power but streaming double the frames does not because frames
| are mostly similar and compression helps a great deal.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I'm working on building a game streaming cloud service at the
| moment.
|
| In the long term, I believe running your own servers is going to
| be the future, because otherwise there'll always be license
| issues, e.g. when you want to play your gog.com games on GeForce
| Now. Or indie games or business apps in general.
|
| Also, all those services prevent you from sharing with friends
| for their business reasons, meaning absolutely no coop or
| splitscreen.
|
| Anyway, the key for making such services work is custom ultra low
| latency udp protocols. I'm going with nvenc hardware encoding,
| cuda for data wrangling, and a boost::asio based c++ core for the
| network layer. That, and controlling packet loss, for example by
| self-throttling and spacing to avoid overflows at intermediate
| relays.
|
| BTW, I'm surprised by the bandwidth numbers in the article. Even
| fast explosion heavy games like BroForce work reasonably well
| with 5mbit/s if you use h265.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I'll lead with my peak cynical take, apologies in advance, but I
| think Google just wanted to entice people with cheap centralized
| streaming games while it was viable to get them married to a
| platform they will ultimately have to buy a local console to
| render games with anyways.
|
| Can they even get close to DisplayPort 2.0 performance in the
| next couple years? I don't see how this is ever going to scale as
| bit depth, resolution and frame rates continue to increase. This
| is a losing strategy because a lossy, slow connection between
| your display and your controller will only get worse
| (quadratically so) as those three factors (bit depth, resolution
| and frame rate) increase.
|
| They are going to have to beef up the client hardware and do more
| of the game engine and rendering compute locally, which will
| undermine the cost savings they offered being centralized.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| My guess is that they're testing the waters for enterprise
| software. Think Google Docs but for CAD. There's a lot of money
| in that market and people are used to paying $1000+ monthly
| subscriptions anyway. So if you can move that onto a remote
| desktop server, you'll have amazing performance and healthy
| profit margins.
|
| And if it works well for games, it'll surely work well enough
| for regular software.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I agree that is a good fit for a use case, but I'm speaking
| about Stadia in particular. They are going to disappoint a
| lot of consumers.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why would you get better performance from CAD in the cloud?
| Doesn't a cloud server have essentially the opposite
| performance profile from a CAD workstation, with many more
| cores but much slower clock rates? CAD vendors want your
| workstation to have a few fast cores and several GPUs.
| llukas wrote:
| > CAD vendors want your workstation to have a few fast
| cores and several GPUs.
|
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/quadro-virtual-
| work...
|
| I think premise is either "floating workstation" or that if
| you please you can use laptop instead of being tied to
| workstation.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Clouds are starting to focus on HPC machine types which can
| crank out CAD renders
| jeffbee wrote:
| I see. I guess it's technically possible for a cloud
| vendor to temporarily attach several GPUs to your CAD
| render, and afterward reassign them to someone else,
| therefore bringing the utilization up and the price down,
| it just doesn't seem like such a big market opportunity
| when a $20k workstation isn't that important next to the
| cost of the software and its operator.
| cecida wrote:
| I purchased a Nvidia Shield Pro before Christmas (an unbelievably
| slick piece of tech btw) and signed up for GeForce Now. I'm based
| in Ireland, as are the local Geforce Now servers (presume it's
| running on Azure). A surprisingly decent gaming experience - The
| Witcher 3 looks amazing, and performance is extremely decent with
| only slight delays.
| justicezyx wrote:
| Cloud gaming is actually far worse than the idea sounds like.
|
| From the surface, cloud gaming is absolutely a fantastic idea,
| I.e., it removes a series of barriers of playing high end games:
| cost of hardware, convenience, subscription bases consumption to
| remove upfront cost.
|
| However, in close examination, it becomes clear that high end
| game is costly not because these above mentioned barriers. On the
| contrary, these barriers are part of the structure to support the
| high end games.
|
| Additionally, the modern high end gaming experience entirely
| depends on the exclusive ownership of costly computing power. The
| hidden foundation that supports that comouting power is the low
| cost local communication networks. And we all know that wide area
| communication is always more expensive than computing. So for any
| large scale cloud gaming, the underlying economy is that it's
| always more cost-effective of having local hardware.
| nateberkopec wrote:
| I did a good amount of gaming via Parsec and AWS this summer.
|
| When it works, it's great. I can absolutely see this being the
| future of gaming as home bandwidth continues to improve, and more
| datacenters get built near major population centers.
|
| It is _very_ sensitive to the connection, though. This summer, I
| was about 11 milliseconds away from an AWS datacenter with a 500
| megabit connection. Buttery smooth perfection. No video
| compression artifacts. Now, I am about 60 milliseconds away with
| a 50 megabit connection and it is unplayable. 50 megabits/60
| milliseconds is a good connection by US broadband standards these
| days!
| vmception wrote:
| That is surprising for me to hear. I did cloud gaming a decade
| ago with OnLive and some Playstation Now a little later and it
| was never as bad as the gaming gatekeepers suggested. 60ms
| latency on a 50mbit connection should be good, sad it isnt.
|
| With racing games I learned to compensate and anticipate. And
| there are pleeeeenty of slower games to play.
| thrownblown wrote:
| I used OnLive till the bitter end. It was awesome. A little
| sad the way it ended, also some tears in the rain for the
| game library I had purchased and the friends I had made in
| Space Marine multiplayer.
|
| I was an early adopter of gforce now and I really enjoyed it
| while it was in beta. As soon as it was released to the
| public all the publishers pulled their games.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| That's the thing with these services.
|
| It's not a 'normal' scale of quality like having different
| levels of PC hardware.
|
| It either works perfectly, or is completely unplayable.
|
| There's a low cap on the maximum market size based on peoples
| internet quality.
| [deleted]
| vvanders wrote:
| Pretty much.
|
| Anyone who's written game netcode(either as a hobby or
| professionally) knows that you build the game design and game
| engine from the ground up to tolerate latency.
|
| For action games most of the time it's all about building a
| game design where you're predicting(either via physical
| location or other player's actions), except in the few rare
| cases that do time-rewinding(most fighting games, some FPSes
| that combine both, most notably Counter-Strike). This is
| usually handled by dead-reckoning[1]
|
| For large scale, low bandwidth games(AKA RTSes and the like
| where gamestate is deterministic) that's handled via lock-
| step[2]. The gamestate is 100% deterministic and all clients
| move together with a shared set of inputs in "lock step".
|
| Both of these approaches can be tolerant to latencies up to
| ~600ms(back in the ole 28.8/56k days of '97 SubSpace[3] was
| doing ~300 players in one zone with a high skill curve and a
| robust netcode). They usually mask it with client side
| reactions that are then reconciled with the server in a
| robust way. If you're just dropping video frames over a
| network stack none of that is available to you no matter how
| fancy your FEC or other tricks are.
|
| Somehow I've now got the urge to go dust off the Continuum
| client again and boot up SubSpace.
|
| [1] https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131638/dead_reckon
| ing...
|
| [2] https://meseta.medium.com/netcode-concepts-
| part-3-lockstep-a...
|
| [3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Contin
| uum...
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Latency is the most important thing. There's a reason high
| refresh monitors are loved by serious gamers.
|
| I can deal with 1080p playing old ps2/3 games through an
| online service, or modern with the same resolution but high
| settings with snappy controls.
|
| I cannot play a game with noticeable input lag whatsoever,
| even if it was at 4k HDR 144hz.
| vvanders wrote:
| We're not talking about input or rendering latency here,
| networked games are designed to work such that even when
| you have 100-300ms of round-trip latency the objective of
| the game is setup in such a way that your success is
| based on "predicting" events _or_ the server keeps all
| disparate time domains in memory and can time-rewind to
| resolve authoritative game state.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| While you are absolutely correct, I believe the target
| market for Stadia is more people like my parents, who used
| to play casual games 10 years ago and then got too busy.
| They cannot justify owning a console and purchasing $60
| games. But they'd be easy to sell on a $5 monthly games on
| demand subscription.
|
| They will be playing with bluetooth gamepads (5ms latency)
| on their TV (10-20ms latency) using Wifi (5-10ms latency),
| so the internet streaming delay of <10ms from an edge
| server will be barely noticeable.
|
| For example, Stadia is featuring "Lara Croft and the Temple
| of Osiris" which is a perfect game for high-latency
| unskilled casual play.
| harikb wrote:
| I thought one has to still buy/rent games on top of the
| $5/month. $5 is only the fee for renting "cloud hardware"
| - May be some games are included, but definitely not
| comparable to a Netflix for games. I guess it more like a
| Disney- ?
| vvanders wrote:
| Oh yeah, I don't doubt there's _a_ market for this but I
| don 't think you see it take over the same way that say
| Netflix did for VoD.
|
| (FWIW I heavily use Steam's streaming client so I'm
| pretty familiar with most of the failure modes, it
| doesn't work great for everything but is convenient when
| the game style and network performance overlap)
| birdyrooster wrote:
| All of you people that are bullish on Stadia, explain to me why
| DisplayPort 2.0 provides up to 77Gbps of bandwidth? Google cannot
| possibly encode/decode that stream with high fidelity using an
| internet connection available from any residential ISP in the
| next couple years. Maybe within this decade you could accomplish
| that. However by that point, local compute will have already
| exceeded this standard.
|
| The fine folks at Google know their computer science well so this
| isn't news to them, but it kinda lays bare that eventually they
| will be selling consoles to execute games locally since it's
| clear they do not have the appetite to get 10Gbps+ fiber to the
| country. Steaming-only Stadia made sense paired with a mature
| Google Fiber deployment, but alas that is not the universe we
| reside in.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I dont care much in either direction about Stadia but, I think
| there is certainly a big market for people who just want to
| play some games now and then without having to own a gaming rig
| or even a console. High fidelity will not matter so much.
| Simply being able to play some AAA games that you otherwise
| might not have been able to play will matter.
| echelon wrote:
| I still have fun playing N64.
|
| How many people play Minecraft?
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I agree that people will settle for less, but I am arguing
| Google has always been aiming for AAA titles and markets it
| that way.
|
| Also DisplayPort 2.0 bandwidth is mostly for supporting VR
| where visual artifacts and low fidelity lead to motion
| sickness for a huge demographic.
| indiandennis wrote:
| The simple answer is that you don't need the full bitrate video
| to have a decent experience. I use Nvidia gamestream locally at
| 30 to 50 Mbps and it's basically indistinguishable from the
| real thing. For most people, it doesn't matter if they can't
| tell the difference.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Im sure you or I can tell a huge difference between 240hz and
| 60hz. How can other people not notice? Or 10-bit or higher
| color? Maybe people don't yet know what they are missing, but
| when they do, Stadia won't be competitive.
| spijdar wrote:
| > explain to me why DisplayPort 2.0 provides up to 77Gbps of
| bandwidth?
|
| At the risk of being called a ludite or a peasant, may I
| suggest most people don't actually care _that_ much about
| reaching the height of visual fidelity, at least in this
| aspect?
|
| The reality is this same argument could be made against any
| kind of video streaming. But the reality is that people are
| pretty satisfied with the fidelity that video encoders can
| produce. Yes, it will always be inferior in several respects to
| the uncompressed, ~33Gbps 3840x2160@60hz your local rig can
| push out, but will it be a deal breaker for everyone, or even
| most people? I don't think so, personally.
| _alxk wrote:
| I honestly just don't care, and I suspect most don't either.
|
| I live in London, so probably not far from the GCP data centre,
| I have a 50mb connection (pretty average and affordable for
| London) and I don't see myself ever investing in a console or
| gaming PC again.
|
| My gaming experience with Stadia is better than "good enough",
| and that's all that matters.
| antiterra wrote:
| They wrote a whole paper to say that PSNow doesn't use WebRTC or
| RDP and is (currently) capped at 13Mbit/s while the others use up
| to 45Mbit/s with WebRTC/RDP?
|
| Am I missing something?
| cyberlurker wrote:
| RTP, and yea.
|
| "However, these companies released so far little information
| about their cloud gaming operation and how they utilize the
| network. In this work, we study these new cloud gaming services
| from the network point of view."
|
| They're early too, so this paper will get a lot of citations in
| the future.
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