Onlive: Cloud Gaming!?

Onlive, a new service launched recently, claims the ability to render game consoles (and pc games ..) obsolete. How? Server farms in the cloud running doing all the hard work and returning rendered video back to your PC or TV.

Crude definition of Lag/Latency:  It is a measure of how much delay you see between performing an action (mouse click) and seeing the response (innards of your enemy) on the monitor. Depending on who you ask and the type of the game in question (FPS, strategy) the “playable” lag is less than 10ms to less than 100ms.

Three sources of latency can be easily identified in the Onlive service:

1. Video compression: Onlive says that they can perform this in less than 1 ms.
2. Hardware:  To live up to the promises they will need some serious number crunching capabilities in what I can only imagine to be huge server farms with super duper GPUs. However, since it is possible to buy this with money we accept that Onlive can do this.
3. Network latency: Assuming a normal broadband connection, this issue is potentially a deal breaker. There is no ISP that will guarantee that kind of QoS over sustained periods of time.

During the following video of their inaugural press conference/demo, a lot of time has been dedicated to the video compression and hardware problems but not so much on latency (except briefly in answer to a question from audience at 35:25).

So, is Onlive promising something they cannot deliver? If you live in the US, you can sign up for the beta program this summer and find out. Me, I’ll believe it when I see it.