OnLive, a first impression...

if you have not heard about it yet, onlive is a cloud computing service that allows everyone to play the latest and greatest games for a cheap monthly fee, no matter how crappy your computer is. it streams the video from its supercomputers to your screen and, in theory, is "the future of modern computer gaming". i signed up for the beta subscription, here is what i found:

my setup:

• i am running a 1.5 ghz dual core laptop with a 128 mb video card and windows 7, my internet connection (at my grandparents' place is as follows
  
  video was streamed at standard high-def resolution (1280x720)

the software:

• the initial onlive client download was very small, only 500kb. i believe it downloaded more, but it took less than a minute for the entire thing to set up. once it started up it was VERY FAST. it ran perfectly smooth, a wonderful piece of software engineering.

the games

• the game library is small at the moment, consisting of roughly 10 games so far: assasin's creed 2, dirt 2, f.e.a.r. 2, ect... most all of the games are graphics intensive and a metascore is provided along side it. i have yet to buy any, but a 30 minute demo of the full game is available for each. the game i chose to play first was borderlands.
  
  when i clicked "play demo" guess what happened. i played the demo. no load times, no system configurations, nothing. it's as easy as watching a youtube video. a youtube video in which i completely control.

the eye-candy

• HOLY CRAP, every game runs at highest possible graphics settings. it makes my computer look like a $2,000 system. "dirt 2" was running at full DX11 capability and borderlands was running at 45 FPS the entire time on "eye-orgasm" quality mode. throughout this, my computer was running at 30% CPU usage and 60% RAM usage.
  
  holy crap, that's all i've got to say.

the controls

• this is my only complaint, but it is a large enough of one to make me hesitant about the whole thing. we all hate lag, but lag is 20 times worse when it applies to your controls as well. with my connection i had about a fifth of a second delay between me moving my mouse and the game reacting to it. it sucked so much i had to stop playing boarderlands because i couldn't hit a stationary bandit.
  
  it's like onlive created a sparkling diamond to encase a turd.

all in all it is a great service, but only to those living eight next to a game server. once i get back to school i'll have to try it again with my mega-internet, but until then it's a no-go for me.

Oh very nice, I've been hearing a lot about this. I'd imagine that they'd be improving the response time in the future, because with that problem, they could lose a lot of revenue.

I signed up early for OnLive and received some promotional bonus. But since I have to BUY the games before I can use their service for free, I am gonna let it go to waste.

Yeah I already thought the ping would be a problem and since new servers are quite expensive I wont think there will be a lot. Also, wondering how it would run with my 130 ping every time I connect to a US server...

I heard about this. It sounded kewl... I didn't know they were doing it for PCs, though; I'd only heard of their intentions to make a console-thing of it.

No the whole thing Zurkov is that you use your shitty PC to play demanding games at very high resolutions with beautiful graphics.

Correction Greezy; they tend to ship a console version as well, one you hook up straight to your TV and has Bluetooth, USB and extra virtual GPU and CPU's for running multiple games/apps at the same time.

To me it sounds like a good idea, but first they need to fix the whole lag part. Also, the lack of being able to actually mod the games is a major downer to me :/

sounds like a buffed up steam with lag issues

vladmirbsl69 wrote:sounds like a buffed up steam with lag issues

then you do not understand what it is.

LOOK IT'S ADAM!!! wrote:

vladmirbsl69 wrote:sounds like a buffed up steam with lag issues

then you do not understand what it is.

You are absolutley right. Im just saying what it sounds like. It is probally a totally different thing.

What it is vlad is a piece of hardware that streams a live video of you playing a game on servers far away. Basically, to sum it up, the company has server bases that have lots of computer stuff with which to play the games adequately. They are located around America. You, as the user, buy an onlive device which streams video of you playing remotely on the server base, and then the server base sends video of you playing back and displays it on your tv so it's like you're playing it right there.

In even simpler terms, it's like having a computer really far away that you play games on, but instead of having to be there at the computer, you can play the games right on your living room couch and the onlive device you buy puts the image and sound on your tv.

onlive is not just a console-like device, you can run the software on your home computer as well.

Never heard of that one... I'd have to check this out.

This seems awesome.

ohhhh i get it now. thanks greezy

LOOK IT'S ADAM!!! wrote: i had about a fifth of a second delay between me moving my mouse and the game reacting to it. it sucked so much i had to stop playing boarderlands because i couldn't hit a stationary bandit.

Thats 200ms delay wow. Impossible to play i would say. And if you have a 40ms latency to the server i think it still is a lot more then a normal mouse. I don't know but i assume the response time of a wired mouse is <1ms? How will they ever solve this problem. Bandwith has nothing to do with it.

Also what i don't understand on the hardware part is that this thin client concept would result in a immense server requirements. If normally 10 people would play a game with a $2000 system you would now need a server that will have 10 x this performance. It must be very expensive hardware.