| Dark_Feanor said: I don´t know why any one would pay to play 3 or 4 years old games with no performance/IQ improvements and with risk of latency, pkg dropping and compression artfacts. |
It's for smartphones, Vita, tablets, TVs and other devices that can't emulate/run those games. PS4 will run PS1/PS2 via emulation, but it couldn't run PS3 games so it will get that using the cloud. Besides that, is a tech made thinking about the future, with better broadband. Actually, it's not much different than playing online against someone since in both cases you have to send your input and wait for an answer (enemy hit, somebody shot you, etc).
The tricky part is that they have to render the frame after getting your input and send it to you. They are using custom Cell servers to that, so they are probably cutting things like HDMI output delay, controller delay and getting some ms there. Latency is just a matter of distributing your servers in better geographic locations to mantain the machines closer to the users.
Dark_Feanor said:
Why spend so much money in infrastruct and maintenance to surport old ass games? I basic smartphone right now can run PS1/PS2 games and a top end can run PS3 graphics close enougth. Imagine that in 2 or 3 years then. |
Smartphones aren't even close to emulate PS2. Basic? A S4 or iPhone 5S isn't even close to the raw power needed. Don't think that all that 4-core CPUs can help, ARM clock-to-clock performance against x86 is a joke, an Atom can beat the crap out of high-end ARM CPUs. Even good PCs struggle to emulate some PS2 games. To emulate a device you have to be substantially more powerfull than it was.
PS3? Mobile GPUs do't even have all the graphics resources to do all effects by its own, emulating it is a complete dream. Even on PCs, PS3/360 emulations is a good 5 years away, specially because of the programmable GPUs instead of the older fixed-function (PS2, XB, GC, Wii) ones that are way less complex. And 2 or 3 years won't help phones in nothing. Mobile GPUs are basically stripped down versions of PC GPUs of several years ago, at least for their capabilities and graphical resources. So if today PC GPUs can't do that, mobile ones don't have a change for probably a decade.
