Why streaming and cloud computing will be NINTENDOs winner in the end

[kirby007]

fatslob-:O said:

torok said:

fatslob-:O said:
Another problem with cloud computing is whether or not customers are going to demand HIGHER RESOLUTIONS for cloud gaming. Streaming a game @ 4K 60FPS even with the newest video codecs such as H 265 or VP9 takes a very fast connection speeds and the current average internet speeds won't get the job done and it will be a very long time until the average internet speeds increase dramatically to support that endeavor.

Biggest problem isn't download/upload speeds. It's latency. 4K video streaming at 60 fps only demands a connection, let's say, 8 times faster than the minimum connection for a decent 1080p streaming (I'm assuming that codecs compression rate would be linear for the number of pixels. It could even be less if it isn't the case), because we would receive 4X more pixels and double the regular 30 fps of normal video streaming (it's actually 24, but it's a aceptable error). With a 5Mbps connection, 1080p streaming isn't impossible, so 40Mbps would be enough. Way possible even by today's standards.

Problem is latency. You receive a frame and take an action (press a button, etc). The console/PC/mobile needs to upload that action to the server, that will get it, update the game's state and render a new frame considering that modification and send it to you. All these data exchanges takes some miliseconds and the rendering on the server takes it too. The hard part is reduce latency so the sum of the time to send the input and the time to download the frame is less than 33 ms (at 30fps) and that isn't an easy task. The biggest chalenge in PS Now is that most PS3 games are at 30fps, so with that in mind the wouldn't be able to make the client play at a good framerate (if the original game was 60, maybe the cloud one would be at 30 and everything would be fine). I'm curious to see how they will fix this issue and probably the answer will be in their custom Cell servers.

5Mbps assumes that the game is 720p 30fps so if we assume scaling to be linear it would actually require around 80Mbps. Another issue is image quality. If we used a less lossy video codec it would dramatically increase the required connection speeds. 

The latency issue can be solved by distributing the servers LOCALLY per each city and that would increase the maintence costs too. Instead of just having ONE BIG server in one remote place you can just distribute a small segment of these servers around the city. 

or just rent microsofts azure servers, which are already spread quite well, would solve latency
bandwidth is gonna be nothing with newer codec reducing bandwidth usage and globally increasing speeds anyway