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[Carl]

When the entire country is on gigabit fiber, then we can talk about this kind of technology.

In other words I expect to be playing on consoles for the rest of my life.

I have around 50 down 20 up and it works great, so you don't really need "gigabit fibre"

 

[Killer]

this whole endeavour is a waste of time.

and money.

 

[dresi]

So what will happen when they add, for example, Fallout 3 to PS Now? Will it still run like shit or better?

 

[Natureboy99]

That all sounds horrible.

(and there will always be input lag when streaming a game over the Internet.)

Internet speeds increase all the time. In time the lag will be imperceptible to the human eye.

Would a $50 PS5 really sound bad? At that price many would bite. Also with graphics being rendered remotely, you no longer have proc/ram limitations and could do amazing stuff. PS5 games could look better than high end PC settings.

 

[digitalrelic]

I've been really happy with the performance of PS Now on my 60mb down/5mb up internet. There is certainly a bit of lag, but it's completely playable from my experience. I've been playing through the God of War games, as well as the original Uncharted and it's been very nice.

 

[Eolz]

So what will happen when they add, for example, Fallout 3 to PS Now? Will it still run like shit or better?

This won't change the performance of the game, no. Not positively anyway.

 

[Metalmarc]

The other week, virgin media Internet went down for a few hours for nearly the whole of the UK

Yeah, i'll stick to local gaming.

 

[Pathfinder]

Internet speeds increase all the time. In time the lag will be imperceptible to the human eye.

Would a $50 PS5 really sound bad? At that price many would bite. Also with graphics being rendered remotely, you no longer have proc/ram limitations and could do amazing stuff. PS5 games could look better than high end PC settings.

Internet speed and latency are not the same thing.

There will ALWAYS be added input lag when a command has to travel over the Internet and back to you. Always.

 

[BigDug13]

It would be nice if they would release a PS3 with the streaming hardware inside it to facilitate remote play. Even better if they went ahead and put the emotion engine back in and had streaming hardware. Bring back the capabilities of the PS3 phat with the physical footprint and hardware streaming of a PS4

 

[TalonJH]

I enjoyed my time with PS Now during the 1st closed beta and it worked well most of the time. I just rather play games locally. I'm not closed to the idea of streaming games though because as I said, it worked well for me. (50 Down/5 Up)

 

[VariantX]

What a cynical opinion to have. The tech won't improve if they don't actually try.

I've played a couple games on PS Now. I played Final Fantasy 13 a bit on it, a game I've already played, and Alpha Protocol, a game I've never played. FF13 worked great, really nothing to complain about there, was able to play the first couple chapters with no noticeable issues. Alpha Protocol was a bit janky control wise, I'm not sure if that was just the game, or if it came down to the network. Totally playable still, but definitely a detractor.

I probably won't use Now because I already have a PS3 and playing natively will always beat streaming, but it's a pretty nice option for people who don't own a PS3.

I don't think there is much they can do on Sony's end at the moment, it's totally dependent on things Sony can't control like what internet providers you have and the options they provide for your service. The service will improve over time but the question is really what incentives do your isps have to improve their services.

 

[Suzzopher]

I've found it to be perfectly enjoyable on my 80mb connection. I even played some VF5 and had no issues. If they price it correctly I'm in

 

[Duxxy3]

I have around 50 down 20 up and it works great, so you don't really need "gigabit fibre"

It's more about latency than down and up. There's not much that cable companies can do about latencies. It's a limitation of the equipment.

 

[cyberheater]

I'm not surprised about the latency issues. I'm surprised it works as well as it does.

 

[Concept17]

Tried it for the first time the other day, and really liked it, for the most part. I tried out GoW:A because I hadn't played it. In about 30 minutes of playing I got 2-3 "lag spikes" that interrupted what I was doing, 1 of which caused my death.

I guess I'm used to playing old school shooters online where frequent lag spikes would get you killed, so it really doesn't bother me much in SP.

I would probably subscribe to the service if I had time to justify doing so, or if PS plus were bundled into the cost. Overall, it's a nice option to going back to playing old games, especially those I missed out on.

 

[omonimo]

The pshome of this generation. Considering WW the internet connection it's not like per like in different country, I'm not sure how the hell sony think will turn out in something of playable. And with the ps3 performance?Lol What a waste of money.

 

[Natureboy99]

Internet speed and latency are not the same thing.

There will ALWAYS be added input lag when a command has to travel over the Internet and back to you. Always.

Never said there wouldn't be lag. I said it would become imperceptible in time.

 

[Pathfinder]

Never said there wouldn't be lag. I said it would become imperceptible in time.

You did, actually. But no matter.

Speaking as someone with some knowledge of networking and physics, you will never be able to decrease input lag over the Internet as it stands now to anywhere near the low level input lag that you experience with a hardware console that is sitting in front of you.

The Internet and networking infrastructure is simply not capable of that kind of experience right now. There is no way PS5 will be a streaming service.

Maybe by the time PS7 or PS8 arrives. Maybe.

 

[NastyBook]

I think this tech has potential, but now's not the time for it.

Yeah, it's cool that Sony's getting out ahead of this, but fuck their pricing structure.

 

[Malitik Sabu]

This wont really work until 2020 or so, and even then quality may still be an issue.

 

[Haint]

150+ ms latency isn't relaly acceptable in a lot of games though. Maybe turned based games, but even then, delay could become annoying.

I guess if you've got a Sony data center in your backyard it might work out!

Don't know if/where Sony has the data center for UK, but it's possible their findings are basically that scenario given the miniscule size of the landmass over there.

 

[feint_ruled]

The other week, virgin media Internet went down for a few hours for nearly the whole of the UK

Yeah, i'll stick to local gaming.

Not a good argument against this service, a good argument for getting a better ISP. Or more likely, deciding the 99% uptime is pretty much good enough. Otherwise you are at the mercy of power outages too, in which case you are sticking to Ludo.

 

[gruenel]

0 ms it acceptable. Games shouldn`t suffer from this at all.

Most console games you play locally have 100+ ms input lag, even disregarding your TV.

 

[Natureboy99]

You did, actually. But no matter.

Speaking as someone with some knowledge of networking and physics, you will never be able to decrease input lag over the Internet as it stands now to anywhere near the low level input lag that you experience with a hardware console that is sitting in front of you.

The Internet and networking infrastructure is simply not capable of that kind of experience right now. There is no way PS5 will be a streaming service.

Maybe by the time PS7 or PS8 arrives. Maybe.

I don't think we disagree on anything then. When I said "no lag" it was intended to mean perceivable lag.Technically there is lag on every controller ever.

 

[Tadpole]

To the naked eye, I might as well be playing local. The performance is excellent. However, there are some freezes where I need to restart. This only happened in uncharted 2.

 

[Atomski]

Still hope something like this never really takes off. For all the crap people give digital releases saying you don't own your games.. we now have services like this where you literally don't even have the game on your device and it plays based on your connection speed/stability. Ugh forget that.

Sony would be better speeding up their damn download speeds than this crap.

 

[televator]

Spoiler

I know its said to be impossible, but the fact the PS4 recognizes PS3 discs make me question it.

Current high end PCs can't run PS3 games. There's no question that a PS4 can't either. It would need a cell processor at the very least.

 

[beancent]

Tried it on the PS3 and didn't enjoy it. Felt like was playing a youtube video as in the image quality looked compressed. Still haven't tried it on the PS4, is it any better?

 

[FairXchange]

It works really well for me, I use PS Now regularly to get into games I wouldn't normally try.

 

[Fess]

Still hope something like this never really takes off. For all the crap people give digital releases saying you don't own your games.. we now have services like this where you literally don't even have the game on your device and it plays based on your connection speed/stability. Ugh forget that.

Sony would be better speeding up their damn download speeds than this crap.

Do you think Netflix is crap too?
Personally I'm super-excited for this tech, I love to have Netflix's library of 7000 or so movies and series a few button presses away and I'd love if I could get something similar with games and the huge Playstation library. I hate the fact that I'm missing out on future PS+ titles when unsubscribing to PS+ though and can never ever get those games again. You can never unsubscribe. Ever. Have fun paying for a life time subscription. :/ But with PS Now you can jump in whenever you feel like it. That's the way to go. Subscribe and you instantly have the whole library available no matter if you jump in now or 2 years later.

Sony - Remove the incredibly stupid and greedy Microsoft idea to force your customers to pay for basic online functions and add the free PS+ games on the PS Now service every month instead and I'd gladly subscribe.
But as it stands, even if I love the tech, with two pay walls I simply have to say No to this.

 

[Stacey]

When the majority of the UK is sitting on an average of a 4mb connection then this really is a waste of time.

For me however, on an "up to" 152mb line with 20mb upload it should run just fine. shame this isnt the majority.

Mums just love their talk talk, £6pm, 7 devices connected setups

 

[dh4niel]

I played a bit of Uncharted 2 while I still have the PS Now beta in the UK and I was pretty impressed. Didn't experience any lag or latency issues though. A lot of the time though it felt like watching a HD video in SD.

 

[Freshmaker]

Less than 30fps plus a whole network in between you and a game sounds like not a lot of fun unless you are fine with input lag (not sure who you would have to be).

It'd work well enough for someone who likes turn based RPG's mostly.

 

[lyrick]

When the majority of the UK is sitting on an average of a 4mb connection then this really is a waste of time.

For me however, on an "up to" 152mb line with 20mb upload it should run just fine. shame this isnt the majority.

Mums just love their talk talk, £6pm, 7 devices connected setups

This has very little to do with Up and Down speeds, they just have to be fast/large enough to deliver the video packets and send your input prompts. This has more to do with how many network hops those packets have to travel through to send and receive game information and that's on top of a trivial amount of encode & decode time at either end.

If someone knew the IP of their nearest data center to them they could perform a tracert and get a decent Idea of how much latency is being added due to the physical network layer.

 

[Hermii]

Internet speeds increase all the time. In time the lag will be imperceptible to the human eye.

Would a $50 PS5 really sound bad? At that price many would bite. Also with graphics being rendered remotely, you no longer have proc/ram limitations and could do amazing stuff. PS5 games could look better than high end PC settings.

Why would we even need a ps5 if everything is being rendered through infinite cloud power? Count we just stream it through PS4?

Besides there will always be latency.

 

[Kinthalis]

Internet speeds increase all the time. In time the lag will be imperceptible to the human eye.

Would a $50 PS5 really sound bad? At that price many would bite. Also with graphics being rendered remotely, you no longer have proc/ram limitations and could do amazing stuff. PS5 games could look better than high end PC settings.

Uhm no. This isn't an issue of internet speed... although to support high bandwidth videos, it will eventually be that issue, yes.

This is latency. The time it takes your input to be processed locally, sent out over the internet to a Sony data center, processed by the machine in the data center, then have that input affect the currently rendered frame, package up and compress that frame and send it back to you over the net.

There's only one way to reduce it: Move closer to a Sony data center (or more realistically, but also super expensive - have Sony build more data centers all over the place).

Also think about the enormous expense of doing the rendering in data centers! Right now you go out and you buy a PS4 from Sony, which actually makes them a little bit of money! And then that machine does all the hard work over at your house.

This way, Sony is on the hook for buying and maintaining the hardware necessary to support x million fo gamers playing at any one time. One thing you cna be DAMn sure about is that they will buy the lowest endhardware they can get away with, and split up resources aggressively between users.

 

[Gamezone]

Most console games you play locally have 100+ ms input lag, even disregarding your TV.

I mean extra lag over the locally lag that we already have.

 

[BKK]

When the majority of the UK is sitting on an average of a 4mb connection then this really is a waste of time.

That's not very accurate.

 

[Azure Dream]

I was skeptical, but a friend swears by it, talking about playing a bunch of games without any issue. I watched him play a pool game without any problem.

I didn't even know until then that they had switched to a Netflix-like approach, instead of buying games individually as a requirement, like it was handled in early betas.

 

[DHC-Shannow]

I'm another one in the impressed camp. Played a wide variety of games on the service on my 20mb down 1mb up connection and it's been fantastic for the most part. The only time I've seen issues has been when my sons have been hogging the bandwidth on their PC games. The service is seamless, quickly adding a game icon to your menu and it's great to be able to check out some PS3 games I missed as my lunch PS3 phat overheats within 5 mins of being turned on these days. Just hope they get the pricing right.

I was skeptical, but a friend swears by it, talking about playing a bunch of games without any issue. I watched him play a pool game without any problem.

I didn't even know until then that they had switched to a Netflix-like approach, instead of buying games individually as a requirement, like it was handled in early betas.

It has a 2 day and 30 day rental option in there and I guess the netflix subscription is the next step up. No idea on prices yet tho unfortunately.

 

[Atomski]

Do you think Netflix is crap too?
Personally I'm super-excited for this tech, I love to have Netflix's library of 7000 or so movies and series a few button presses away and I'd love if I could get something similar with games and the huge Playstation library. I hate the fact that I'm missing out on future PS+ titles when unsubscribing to PS+ though and can never ever get those games again. You can never unsubscribe. Ever. Have fun paying for a life time subscription. :/ But with PS Now you can jump in whenever you feel like it. That's the way to go. Subscribe and you instantly have the whole library available no matter if you jump in now or 2 years later.

Sony - Remove the incredibly stupid and greedy Microsoft idea to force your customers to pay for basic online functions and add the free PS+ games on the PS Now service every month instead and I'd gladly subscribe.
But as it stands, even if I love the tech, with two pay walls I simply have to say No to this.

Watching a film and live streaming a game are two completely different things. Movies have time to buffer giving you uninterrupted play. Games not so much.. it has to be streamed live at all times which is why the quality can suffer. Also the obvious there is not input lag with films lol.

 

[Sixfortyfive]

This thread is a small sample size, but it does generally seem like those who have tried it mostly like it, and those who think it's crap mostly haven't tried it.

I'm extremely picky when it comes to latency on different TVs. I let my Xbox Live subscription lapse years ago because I found online multiplayer to be a waste of money compared to local. I'm not chomping at the bit to add online lag to singleplayer games, and I don't have to try this service to know that it's dog shit for the types of games that I play.

And everybody in these topics who rattles on about bandwidth as if greater bandwidth has any significant effect on reducing latency--when the two are entirely separate concepts and issues--outs themselves as being pretty technologically ignorant. (Every single time you post your down/up speeds in a topic like this, informed posters are rolling their eyes.)

Cloud gaming is such a fundamentally flawed concept that I often assume that people who promote it either lack basic motor skills or are viral marketers. I'd really only find it passable in limited use cases (turn-based games, ideal networks, etc).

Still hope something like this never really takes off. For all the crap people give digital releases saying you don't own your games.. we now have services like this where you literally don't even have the game on your device and it plays based on your connection speed/stability. Ugh forget that.

Sony would be better speeding up their damn download speeds than this crap.

+1

 

[pmx7]

I'm glad to hear the positives reviews on here but are they still charging extortionate amounts?

 

[co1onel]

Being able to play PS3 games that I never played on my Vita is the real advantage of the service to me.

 

[toddhunter]

0 ms it acceptable. Games shouldn`t suffer from this at all.

Every game you have ever played already suffers from latency. It is just a question of how much, not if.

 

[VGA222]

I don't understand how this can ever work when you have games like Killzone 2 that feel laggy even under optimal conditions.

 

[DHC-Shannow]

I'm extremely picky when it comes to latency on different TVs. I let my Xbox Live subscription lapse years ago because I found online multiplayer to be a waste of money compared to local. I'm not chomping at the bit to add online lag to singleplayer games, and I don't have to try this service to know that it's dog shit for the types of games that I play.

And everybody in these topics who rattles on about bandwidth as if greater bandwidth has any significant effect on reducing latency--when the two are entirely separate concepts and issues--outs themselves as being pretty technologically ignorant. (Every single time you post your down/up speeds in a topic like this, informed posters are rolling their eyes.)

Cloud gaming is such a fundamentally flawed concept that I often assume that people who promote it either lack basic motor skills or are viral marketers. I'd really only find it passable in limited use cases (turn-based games, ideal networks, etc).



+1

So it's completely dismissed without you even trying it because you know better. What an impressively open mind you have. And as for the lack of motor skills / viral marketing comment, I'm just someone who didn't believe but has been converted.

 

[Panajev2001a]

You did, actually. But no matter.

Speaking as someone with some knowledge of networking and physics, you will never be able to decrease input lag over the Internet as it stands now to anywhere near the low level input lag that you experience with a hardware console that is sitting in front of you.

The Internet and networking infrastructure is simply not capable of that kind of experience right now. There is no way PS5 will be a streaming service.

Maybe by the time PS7 or PS8 arrives. Maybe.

Without going into "when everyone will have a quantum entanglement based internet" territory, if you could say render server side at 2-3x the frame rate than the local console... you could stream data back in a very competitive way.

 

[kyser73]

So many people here who don't remember what Sony have said is their long-term goal for this service, and because of that are missing the audience Sony are going for in the medium-long term as well.

 

[Pathfinder]

Without going into "when everyone will have a quantum entanglement based internet" territory, if you could say render server side at 2-3x the frame rate than the local console... you could stream data back in a very competitive way.

Hmm, interesting theory.