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SvennoJ on 04 April 2014
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Machiavellian said:
SvennoJ said:

At the end of the demo the cloud is doing the physics for 37,000 chunks, position, velocity, rotation. Updating all those independently moving chunks at 32fps plus the geometry changes for new chunks, broken up chunks and left behind gaps is a lot more data than a h.265 compressed video stream.
And the client still needs to be able to render all that extra geometry. You're taking the physics calculation away, not the strain of rendering 37k objects.

It's a good example of how a Gaika/Onlive server can deal with high stress situations by utilizing a server farm to spread peak demand. As long as not everybody is blowing up everything at the same time, it will be a more economic solution instead of having the peak power available for each client separately. It's a tech demo of how slow down can be eliminated in a server type situation. I don't see it being practical as helping out a local machine with physics.

The data from those calculations can be heavyly compressed.  Its position data and I am sure that the data is less than a H.265 video stream.  No way to know right now since none of that info was made available but I am sure a simple demo coudl easily be done where only the input parameters need is the calculated data.  As for the Geometry, even current gen consoles could perform those calculations.   The Demo is a stress test demo more real world type of games would be no where close to those types of calculations.  Also you can limit the data based on what the view the user can see at any one time.

From my understanding Gaikia does not leverage spreading a game over multiple servers, instead, Gaikai spins up an instance of that game for each user that is playing the game.  What Gaikai could do is take the rendered output from the game and spread that out to multiple servers for processing which is pretty easy with video output.  The difference with MS solution and Gaikai is that MS solution does not need an instance of the game running for each user.  Instead one main hosted instance can be used to support multiple users as the hosted instance just neeeds to sync the streams and send the data off to be process by mutliple servers.

Another advantage of MS solution is that its not dependant on the hardware.  For Gaikai to work, the game is actually rendered on PS3 hardware.  I am sure for PS4 games, those games might need PS4 hardware as well.  MS solution can use any combination of hardware and software making the cost lower to support.

I didn't mean that Gaika/Onlive currently use load balancing for existing games. The game will have to be specifically developed with that goal in mind, just as how the code has to change to utilize multiple cpu cores instead of 1. It is however much more efficient in a streamed situation. I've done a lot with compression and know the limitations. Sending intermediate data to be rendered quickly exceeds sending a fixed final image stream. It's not practical in the end either, you're taking away some work from the cpu, yet nothing from the gpu.