(UPDATE) To make this clear because some people are confused Your computer isnt playing the game, your watching an instantaneous HD Video stream of the game your playing on On Lives Supercomputer. Your controller responses upload instantaneously to the game and the compression rate sends you an HD stream of the game back to your computer in under a millisecond. They are able to do this with a new form of compression they created called Interactive HD Video Compression. This allows you to play the HIGHEST end games on a basic computer because your just getting an HD video stream ------ LIVE DEMONSTRATION VIDEO GDC 2009: OnLive Press Conference - Movies at GameSpot(RECOMMENDED) G4TV Interview GDC 09: OnLive Video Game Service Videos - G4tv.com Gametrailors Interview Gametrailers.com - Onlive - GDC 09: Debut Tech Interview Part 1 This platform will support titles by publishers currently on Xbox 360, PS3 and possibly Wii And future titles that the current gen consoles cant handle graphically wise. OnLive will make upgrading your computer for new games or buying a new generation console obsolete. OnLive is a new revolutionary gaming platform that uses a plugin into your browser & full screen display to play games on a super cloud-computing server farm while streaming the hi-def video back to you in under a millisecond (reaction times beyond human perception) with their new video compression technology. (there will be NO response lag. It will perform like LAN) Consoles will simply never be able to compete with this processing power because everything is run on a SUPER SERVER FARM beyond anything you can buy for home. So now computers with a GPU from 1995 can play CRISIS on its highest settings as long as you have a: 1.5 M/bit connection (STANDARD DEF) 5 M/bit connection (HIGH-DEF) OFFICIAL WEBSITE OnLive: The Future of Video Games The OnLive service will be a monthly subscription much like Xbox Live, but you get so much more. - Movies - Games (Rent a game, Buy a game) - Brag Clips (Record your games and clip them) - Full Profile - Webcam support! (Use your existing computer webcam) - View other players playing games (Millions of people can watch 1 person) - Try before you buy (Demo games or watch top players) - High-performance games (No high-end hardware required) - Any game, instantly (No downloads or installs) - State-of-the-art gaming (Always the latest titles running smooth as silk) - LAN equivalent online multi-player OnLive Why is this so amazing? Any computer is turned into a console reguardless of its hardware All games are played on a sever farm so its LAN gaming online. The moment a new game is released its already available OnLive to be played. No waiting to get a game, no need for preorders. And the games never have to be downloaded. One click and your playing. OnLive can be played with mouse and keyboard OR a controller (and you can designate your game to restrict one or the other) The OnLive Controller Whats the best part? Its been in development for 7 years. ..And.. Its available WINTER 2009!!! The current publishers that are providing games are More publishers will be added/announced in summer.
I think this looks really awesome. Something i would love to get for my lap top. Its a shame you cant actually "download" a game, because you have to have internet to play it. I will be looking it no this more.
Protip: IT WON'T WORK. - Will chew through bandwidth - Technology is not there - No offline They said they will eliminate lag by skipping a few frames forward, they're trying to tell the future. IT WILL NOT WORK.
Ooh, this sounds great. Too bad I CANT USE THIS BECAUSE HAWAII-MAINLAND LAG IS SO HORRIBLE. "It will perform like LAN." LAN stands for Local Area Network. Local. Did you know that copper wiring, commonly used in ethernet cables, power cords, and other electrical appliances, has quite a bit of electrical resistance? The maximum range for TCP/IP connections is about 100 meters before the signal can't reach the other end of the cable. You'd need tons of little servers to boost the signal, and when these servers boost the signal, the take time to process it to make sure the data is correct. Also known as the VLAN, or as we use this today, the World Wide Web. The bigger the data, the longer it'll take. Unless they're going to tell me that they invented a new protocool that's more effecient than TCP and faster. UDP might have been used, but it's somewhat sketchy considering that there's no guarantee that the data actually arrives. You can't compress anything that much without corrupting the file and adding artifacts. Just taking an HD stream from your cable box a few feet away and converting it in and out of a relatively good quality format, you're going to add tons of corruption factors. Sound will degrade, picture will have multicolored squares littering the screen. There's a reason why we can't compress a movie file over and over again and email the file to people. Corruption, sucks. If they invented a method that "new form of compression they created called Interactive HD Video Compression", perhaps they should ****ING SPREAD THAT? Because that would be a major breakthrough. I was on this other forums before, where this one user was asking why there's no way to remote play Halo on his PSP, redirecting screen output and controller input to his PSP. Well, has anyone ever used RDP? Cool, yeah? I love to play around with it at home for my computer when I'm in bed on my iPod Touch. That works because I'm on my WLAN. Wireless LAN. Yay, not much resistance to get past, not much signal boosting, not much servers processing all the information. Plus, since it's MY WLAN, it's not like I have a hundred people all using my network, using up the bandwidth, forcing TCP to slow itself down to avoid data collisions. However, what the kid on the forum wanted to do was to play his Halo PSP at school. At my school, the network outpipe is a T3 connection. That's high end stuff, around 45 MBps. I get about, what, 5 MBps, on my home network? So logically it should be faster? Nope. First, the Xbox would have to get out of the 5 MBps network. That effectively slows the entire process down to 5 MBps, tops. But that's not the big problem. The problem is at my school network, we have hundreds of computers, printers servers, and hell-knows how many wi-fi users all using the same network outpipe. I've done some measurements on our speeds, and it ranges from around 3 MBps to 250 KBps. 250 KB isn't even fast enough to stream music decently (not having to wait 10 minutes for the media to be able to buffer enough to play). Have fun trying to load a game off a network. Even if the game was processed and rendered on thick clients, that speed made the LAN and Internet 2D games of Soldat and 3D games of Half-Life noticeably slow due to lag. That illustrates the problem of the amount of users that OnLive claims to be serving. Granted, the idea of licensing out these superservers out to the ISPs might partially solve that problem, but since when have ISPs and other Incidentally, they're claiming that they're compressing the video stream and decompressing each frame as they come to your screen. Yeah. Even if their supercomputer can compute those individual frames and compress them to your OnLive client, which then decompresses it (not even talking about sound or anything, this is just hypothetically if we had a perfect 5 MBps connection with no fluctuations), and these frames all come at you within milliseconds of each other, that's impossible. There are typically 60 frames per second. 30 can be done, but they claim 60 per second for the HD. How much is a standard 720p video frame? 720p is in a 16:9 ratio, 1280 by 720 pixels (hence the name). On a sample image that I took of my desktop and resized to exactly 1280x700 pixels, it measured out to 293.8 KB in JPEG format. If I have a 5 MBps bandwidth, and there's 60 FPS, at the maximum I can have 85.3 KB in any given frame (compressed eh?). So I stuck my 293.8 KB file into GIMP, compressed it in JPEG format to 85.3 KB or less (less would be better, if we're considering sound and player controls. A ratio of about 3.4:1. Compressing my file to that limit, 85.3 KB, made me have to use a compression of 85% quality. Not bad, actually. However, my desktop picture is pretty much a black screen with little color on it, not sure if that had any effect on the file size. And what about sound? Surround sound? I'm not going to try to do any measurements for that, but that's not exactly small, either. My crappy, lossily-compressed MP3 track of Clint Eastwood - Gorillaz is 10.4 MB. Well, that'll be fun if I ever do attempt to test it. Right now, this sounds like an old 50's fad where you'd call a TV station and they'd play Space Invaders for you by pressing the shoot button everytime you said "BANG!" Stupidity arises.