Potential solution for slow computer gaming?

News & General Discussion
1

Hey everyone

This may sound like a load of garbage but I was thinking, would it be possible to run an online game off a super powerful server that actually renders the game for every player, then sends a live video to the client.

So say I’m playing a battlefield style game, rendering all the particles and destruction is just something many computers can’t handle. So what if the server actually rendered my viewpoint and just sent me a live stream video of that. That way it would be like watching a YouTube clip, but still controlling my character.

This would also mean the client would only have to download a game that’s a few mb as all the textures and animations are rendered by the server and therefore wouldn’t need to be on the clients hard drive.

Think it could work?

2

Unless your connection is amazing, you’re gonna have loads of latency.

1 Like
3

Yeah, OnLive is a thing and has been around for quite a while.

–Eric

4

Things like Skype get basically no latency though. And that’s a live video stream? How do they manage?

5

Oh sweet aha didn’t know about that :stuck_out_tongue:

6

Well, I haven’t used skype in ages but they used to have a tonne of latency. It depends on your connection really, with a good connection the latency to the other side of the world can be like lower than the time it takes your graphics card to send a picture your screen. Then you have stuff like rusty wires and pre historic networking gear and suddenly you latency is through the roof.