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[Oni Jazar]

This isn't a guarantee that Gaikai won't handle PS3 games, it just seams like a reaching goal, far from a given.

I've seen a lot of people assume that since Sony bought Gaikai it will be a good opportunity to allow PS4 users to play every single PS3 game in Sony's catalog. So much so I felt this needed a thread to introduce some facts. Gaikai can stream anything to anything right? Not really as the tech is a little more complex then that. It works fine for PC games since most PC games can handle 60fps. It's because of this that Gaikai can hide some of the latency to minimize lag.

The way it works is this: 60fps games typically have around 50-66ms latency. 30fps games are 100+ms. Gaikai (and OnLive) renders games at 60fps to keep the latency as low as possible to introduce the streaming latency into the mix.

If Sony was to have a giant server farm of PS3s to stream games through Gaikai the result would not be much better then Sony's Remote Play solution now only worse because it's not local. You've got the lag for 30fps, plus the cost of encoding, transmitting and decoding video.

Another approach would be to emulate the PS3 on high end servers. The problem with this is twofold. Not only would it be a pain to emulate Cell on any current computers, a lot of games are probably designed with the target framerate and doubling it for transmission purposes would introduce bugs.

All of this was published last year in a Digital Foundry article speculating on the uses Gaikai would provide for Sony. I'm not sure what Sony has in store for Gaikai. At least it seams like it could be a PS1/PS2 BC service. Hopefully an all inclusive one ala Netflix.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-sony-gaikai

 

[Horse Armour]

I'm assuming that Sony would be fine with the extra latency that PS3 games would have compared to PC games.

 

[DieH@rd]

It will work fine for 30fps games, and even 60will work great on WiFi distances where PS3/PS4 is rendering the game [it already works fine today with Vita and its improved remote play].

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

Honestly, how much value is there to streaming PS1/PS2 games? They're small enough to download that there's not a whole lot of incentive to go the streaming route and introduce lag and a fuzzy picture into the equation. I could see it making sense if one were just playing a demo of a game they weren't especially interested in, but that's about it.

 

[badcrumble]

Pretty much. A lot of people think Gaikai is a magic bullet.

Some sort of BC dongle/add-on using something much, much faster than USB 3.0 is still the best solution for PS3 backwards compatibility. That, or a BC SKU.

 

[fvng]

Can someone explain to me where there would be lower latency on a high FPS game?

 

[Pai Pai Master]

Honestly, how much value is there to streaming PS1/PS2 games?

There's not, I'm sure the PS4 could run PS1 and PS2 games natively with ease. It's PS3 games that are in question. It's highly unlikely to be able to run them via hardware, and even if you can emulate them, you're looking at a whole lot of games at 10-20+GB each.

There's no perfect solution to this, though. I don't think Gaikai will be used for BC purposes...I don't think there will be any PS3 BC on PS4.

 

[gofreak]

It's going to be interesting to see what content is used on this service.

One thing that comes up repeatedly on the idea of PS3 games, though, is Sony relicensing the PC version of third party games where available. Whether it was PS3 versions or not, though, it would never be 'the full catalog' - games would need to be relicensed for cloud delivery anyway, and not every pub would make every game available like that. It'd be selective.

 

[params7]

After the success HD remaster sales, I don't think either Sony or MS will be shooting for backwards compatibility. The ultimate goal of both the companies is to make as much money as possible. Why give the games away for free when you can resell them?

 

[kitsuneyo]

A service that streams every PS3 game, or even a good selection of PS3 games, to thousands of players can never be profitable. That's why it will never happen. It's just a crazy idea. No way will Sony waste their time on this.

PS Plus = great, generous service
Streaming PS3 games = inefficient, overly generous service

 

[thehillissilent]

I'd expect Sony to capitalize on the application virtualization/streaming tech of Gaikai (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168734/Gaikai_adds_rapid_downloads_to_cloud_game_arsenal.php). Basically, you stream the application to the console to be executed locally. Think App-V or Vmware ThinApp enterprise. You can run a time-limited demo of a full game title without downloading the whole thing beforehand.

Another assumption wold be since PS4 hardware is more PC like than ever, they might make a cloud version of the game for PS4 and non-PS4 devices to entice people to upgrade or to play your games on more devices.

 

[Betrayer of hope]

anyone who thinks streaming ps3 games via internet, all hundreds of them to a high quality is frankly kidding themselves.

It's like taking the body work of a ferrari and clamping it into a honda civic. No matter how beautiful it would look it still wouldn't outpace a true ferrari.

 

[Htown]

Honestly, how much value is there to streaming PS1/PS2 games? They're small enough to download that there's not a whole lot of incentive to go the streaming route and introduce lag and a fuzzy picture into the equation. I could see it making sense if one were just playing a demo of a game they weren't especially interested in, but that's about it.

This is the problem with the whole thing.

For old games, it's much easier and less bandwidth intensive to just download them and play them.

For new games, you run into a scaling issue on Sony's part, as you have to have the computing equivalent of a PS3 running somewhere for each player accessing the service at a given time.

 

[Ashes]

Pretty much. A lot of people think Gaikai is a magic bullet.

Some sort of BC dongle/add-on using something much, much faster than USB 3.0 is still the best solution for PS3 backwards compatibility. That, or a BC SKU.

No need to patronise the average gaffer.

I think most gaffers understand that latency [plus infrastructure] are the two key problems. Solve those and you go a long way to getting bc - so-called backward compatibility isn't necessarily exploited by customers, but it is a relatively big factor in deciding which console to buy. I think at least the market researchers at Sony will push this.

 

[qwerty2k]

Don't OnLive/Gaikai actually internally render at higher than 60fps to minimise latency but only send the player back a 30fps/60fps video?

 

[Bboy AJ]

As one of the bigger proponents of OnLive, or at least formerly, I agree with the OP. The tech isn't there yet to be used for everything. It works and it works well but not enough for all games.

Streaming simple games is good. Complex games, depends on what a person is willing to tolerate.

I'd use the tech for live game streaming videos. It would fit in well with the share button. The Arena on OnLive was cool.

 

[90TilInfinity]

Some sort of BC dongle/add-on using something much, much faster than USB 3.0 is still the best solution for PS3 backwards compatibility. That, or a BC SKU.

Do you have any ideas what that could be?

 

[Astral/H3X]

Can someone explain to me where there would be lower latency on a high FPS game?

Pretty sure that it's in largely part to the way games are coded, they update the engine itself only on a frame draw (at least so far as I've learned) so it can only react as fast as the framerate. I'm not talking about anything to do with Delta timing, just that it literally takes twice as long to respond.

 

[androvsky]

It's going to be interesting to see what content is used on this service.

One thing that comes up repeatedly on the idea of PS3 games, though, is Sony relicensing the PC version of third party games where available. Whether it was PS3 versions or not, though, it would never be 'the full catalog' - games would need to be relicensed for cloud delivery anyway, and not every pub would make every game available like that. It'd be selective.

At that point it'd almost be worth it to just port the PC version of games to the PS4 and call that BC.

Do you have any ideas what that could be?

PCI Express 3.0 x16 is pretty close to the PS3's memory bandwidth, but with the extra costs involved in engineering in such a large slot in a console it might be easier to slap a Cell on the motherboard.

 

[thehillissilent]

Cloud gaming is just too expensive to scale right now to support a majority of 70 million PSN users worldwide.

Nvidia has gone great lengths to attempt to mitigate this with Geforce Grid, which supports up to 24 users (2 users per GPU) per server at around the power of GT640 for lower end K1 model. There is a more higher end K2 model with top of the line GPUs.

However, Sony has chosen AMD to develop PS4 so Nvidia might have cut ties with Gaikai. However, AMD is now getting into cloud gaming with their partnership with Cinow (www.ciinow.com).

As I stated above Gaikai does have application streaming/virtualization tech (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168734/Gaikai_adds_rapid_downloads_to_cloud_game_arsenal.php) which I think Sony will use to get around slow download speeds.

 

[wazoo]

For games that are multi, there is no benefit to stream the ps3 games if the PC game is available.

It could be "play Splinter Cell Blacklist", the player may think it is the ps3 game, because that runs from ps4, but in fact it is the PC version.

Nothing forces Sony to give you access to the full ps3 catalog, but by streaming PC games, it could give you access to a catalog wich overlap ps3 catalog by 90%.

 

[Squire]

I always thought that became such a common belief. People just latched onto it. We don't know what Gaikai is for. If it's for something more creative than b/c, I won't mind.

 

[sajj316]

What's stopping them from using Gaikai to stream locally. Isn't that technically feasible?

 

[Omikaru]

For backwards compatibility of PS3 games, I'm very cynical that Gaikai will be the solution, as the OP stated. To be honest, I don't even think Gaikai is ever going to be a "be all, end all" solution. It could be touted as a part of PSN (use your synchronised cloud saves to carry on playing certain games wherever you are, for example), but I see it more as a feature of a robust platform rather than the platform/product itself.

Honestly, I'm expecting emulation to be how backwards compatibility is done on PS4, and it'll probably be achieved on a game-by-game basis, not too dissimilar to how it's done with PS2 games downloaded from PSN onto PS3, and how Xbox 360 emulates Xbox 1 games. Sony will probably work to get a large portion of the PSN library over, plus some of their popular disc games, and then call it day.

Then with PS5, I expect PS3 emulation to become more broad and all encompassing as the brute power of the system allows for it to be achieved far easier, which is also what I expect with PS2 emulation on PS4.

I'd use the tech for live game streaming videos. It would fit in well with the share button. The Arena on OnLive was cool.

I like this idea. In fact, I think the Arena streaming on OnLive is probably its coolest feature. Sharing your gameplay with others, either for entertainment, or as a guide to help a friend or whatever, is an immensely compelling feature.

I always thought that became such a common belief. People just latched onto it. We don't know what Gaikai is for. If it's for something more creative than b/c, I won't mind.

I think Sony bought Gaikai because the dogmatic view is that cloud gaming is "the future". Pretty much a hedging strategy, no more, no less. Whether they now use the technology and people they've acquired for more broader purposes, I don't know, but I don't really think there was much thought into the Gaikai purchase beyond, "This is a thing that's happening. People are saying it's important and we think it's going to be big, so let's get in on it now and protect our business interests."

 

[Graphics Horse]

The aquisition was too high to be for ps3 emulation, I think it's something more critical than that with the future in mind.

Don't OnLive/Gaikai actually internally render at higher than 60fps to minimise latency but only send the player back a 30fps/60fps video?

Ideally you'd spend something like 1ms on each frame and run 16 or 32 games from the same server.

 

[Bojanglez]

This isn't a guarantee that Gaikai won't handle PS3 games, it just seams like a reaching goal, far from a given.

I've seen a lot of people assume that since Sony bought Gaikai it will be a good opportunity to allow PS4 users to play every single PS3 game in Sony's catalog. So much so I felt this needed a thread to introduce some facts. Gaikai can stream anything to anything right? Not really as the tech is a little more complex then that. It works fine for PC games since most PC games can handle 60fps. It's because of this that Gaikai can hide some of the latency to minimize lag.

The way it works is this: 60fps games typically have around 50-66ms latency. 30fps games are 100+ms. Gaikai (and OnLive) renders games at 60fps to keep the latency as low as possible to introduce the streaming latency into the mix.

If Sony was to have a giant server farm of PS3s to stream games through Gaikai the result would not be much better then Sony's Remote Play solution now only worse because it's not local. You've got the lag for 30fps, plus the cost of encoding, transmitting and decoding video.

Another approach would be to emulate the PS3 on high end servers. The problem with this is twofold. Not only would it be a pain to emulate Cell on any current computers, a lot of games are probably designed with the target framerate and doubling it for transmission purposes would introduce bugs.

All of this was published last year in a Digital Foundry article speculating on the uses Gaikai would provide for Sony. I'm not sure what Sony has in store for Gaikai. At least it seams like it could be a PS1/PS2 BC service. Hopefully an all inclusive one ala Netflix.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-sony-gaikai

Isn't another approach to build new servers with cell processors in them that can run PS3 code natively? Not sure how realistic that is but it seems better than emulation.

 

[badcrumble]

At that point it'd almost be worth it to just port the PC version of games to the PS4 and call that BC.

PCI Express 3.0 x16 is pretty close to the PS3's memory bandwidth, but with the extra costs involved in engineering in such a large slot in a console it might be easier to slap a Cell on the motherboard.

I still think it's possible that the mobo will have a socket for BC hardware and that a higher-end SKU will include it. But yeah, PCI Express would have to be it, or a proprietary equivalent.

 

[emag]

Sony bought Virtual Game Station back in the PS1 days. Nothing came of it, despite all the speculation.

 

[fvng]

Sony bought Virtual Game Station back in the PS1 days. Nothing came of it, despite all the speculation.

I think they bought it just to stop its distribution and its possible they integrated the code into ps3's ps1 backward compatability.

Virtual Game Station did have pretty damn good ps1 emulation.

 

[Omikaru]

Sony bought Virtual Game Station back in the PS1 days. Nothing came of it, despite all the speculation.

Sony only bought them to discontinue the software's use/distribution. They tried to sue them out of existence first.

 

[Oppo]

My guesses... priorities for Gaikai:

1. it's a video distribution network. so powering the Share function on PS4.

2. once that is running, maybe instant-on demos/trials

3. once THAT is running, maybe streaming games for BC or just plain limited access

Really hard to say until we get more of a hint from Sony, though

 

[plagiarize]

Secret 60 FPS version of Uncharted 3 come out of the shadows!

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-what-if-uncharted-3-ran-at-60-fps

I don't know if there was ever an explanation as to where this 720p 60 fps video came from, but I'm guessing it was taken from a dev kit. So there may already be hardware in existence that can get PS3 games running at a more streaming friendly framerate.

 

[chaostrophy]

Isn't another approach to build new servers with cell processors in them that can run PS3 code natively? Not sure how realistic that is but it seems better than emulation.

The average cloud/web application uses a tiny fraction of a single core of a server CPU per user. Devoting an entire server CPU to a single user for hours at a time would be an incredibly expensive service.

 

[lefantome]

I don't think a ps3 or cell server farm will be a plausible option, for me this hypothesis is completely wrong.

But who knows...

 

[Raist]

Even before any technical consideration, I feel that this:

If Sony was to have a giant server farm of PS3s to stream games through Gaikai the result would not be much better then Sony's Remote Play solution now only worse because it's not local.

Is a good enough reason to think that it will never happen.

 

[Oppo]

Even before any technical consideration, I feel that this:



Is a good enough reason to think that it will never happen.

Is it? That's how they ran some dedicated server games like Warhawk:

 

[FlyingTeacup]

Is it? That's how they ran some dedicated server games like Warhawk:

they should sell those bc ps3.... mine's still working luckily (probably because I don't play much game these days)

 

[phosphor112]

Thank you for posting this. I'm tired of people suggesting it would.

Is it? That's how they ran some dedicated server games like Warhawk:

That is a really large investment for... one game.

After the success HD remaster sales, I don't think either Sony or MS will be shooting for backwards compatibility. The ultimate goal of both the companies is to make as much money as possible. Why give the games away for free when you can resell them?

Whhyyy is this always suggested as well?

Listen:

They aren't going to completely rewrite a PS3 game for x86. They wont.

Especially with higher resolutions, etc.

 

[Felix Lighter]

Is it? That's how they ran some dedicated server games like Warhawk:

That's one PS3 per multiplayer server, though, not 1 per active client.

 

[chaostrophy]

Is it? That's how they ran some dedicated server games like Warhawk:

Warhawk was a 32-player game though, right? That means a PS3 in the datacenter for every 32 players, not one per single player. That makes a big difference in scale.

 

[Camp Lo]

I'd expect Sony to capitalize on the application virtualization/streaming tech of Gaikai (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168734/Gaikai_adds_rapid_downloads_to_cloud_game_arsenal.php). Basically, you stream the application to the console to be executed locally. Think App-V or Vmware ThinApp enterprise. You can run a time-limited demo of a full game title without downloading the whole thing beforehand.

Another assumption wold be since PS4 hardware is more PC like than ever, they might make a cloud version of the game for PS4 and non-PS4 devices to entice people to upgrade or to play your games on more devices.

Ah. That sounds reasonable.

 

[joesiv]

Another approach would be to emulate the PS3 on high end servers. The problem with this is twofold. Not only would it be a pain to emulate Cell on any current computers, a lot of games are probably designed with the target framerate and doubling it for transmission purposes would introduce bugs.

Just throwing this out there, but do you remember when Sony Announced the Cell processor (along with Toshiba and the other company involved IBM maybe), one of the things that was really pushed, was how the Cell could be linked to other cells in multi core clusters.

So i theory, they wouldn't need to emulate the cell, and they wouldn't need mountains of PS3's, but they'd need a server farm with load balancing and maybe they could handle that side of things. The GPU stuff and the gaikai magic could be taken care of normally.

This is all conjecture on my part, but I remember a lot of talk of all your home devices having cell processors (your fridge? lol), and being able to network together to create processing power. I assume it'd be easier in a server farm...

 

[joesiv]

That is a really large investment for... one game.

Well someone needed to do something with those unsold PS3's (at the time)...

lol, I kid, I kid!

 

[Withnail]

I agree.

Building PS3 server farms around the globe would be far too expensive. Gaikai doesn't solve the PS3 emulation problem, it just moves it from one place to another.

Personally I expect them to use it for cloud streaming of PS4 games as part of PS+.

 

[phosphor112]

I agree.

Building PS3 server farms around the globe would be far too expensive. Gaikai doesn't solve the PS3 emulation problem, it just moves it from one place to another.

Personally I expect them to use it for cloud streaming of PS4 games as part of PS+.

PS Home (or Media Molecules new "social network" project), instant demos and music/video streaming is what I expect.

 

[Noisepurge]

what if Sony is working with Gaikai to build a custom Cell -structured PC cluster? I mean "emulating the cell" is hard but not for Sony, they know it's secrets and can probably build custom servers that RUN on several Cell's...

 

[CyclopsRock]

I wonder if you could do something like having your PS3 sit somewhere, plugged in and connected to wifi but not connected to your TV. This PS3 then runs the game and streams it to your PS4? This way you could plug your PS3 in, stick it behind the sofa or whatever, and have it to the hard work. It could (maybe) even use the BR Drive from the PS4 so it'd be basically just like offline rendering.

 

[Withnail]

I wonder if you could do something like having your PS3 sit somewhere, plugged in and connected to wifi but not connected to your TV. This PS3 then runs the game and streams it to your PS4? This way you could plug your PS3 in, stick it behind the sofa or whatever, and have it to the hard work. It could (maybe) even use the BR Drive from the PS4 so it'd be basically just like offline rendering.

Why not just play the PS3? Unless there are people who really enjoy input lag and using lots of electricity...

 

[CyclopsRock]

Why not just play the PS3? Unless there are people who really enjoy input lag and using lots of electricity...

Well, quite, but that's basically how I feel about backwards compatibility in general. It seems that it's mostly for people that a) are worried about hardware dying (which is reasonable, and which my solution doesn't cater for, but nor does relying on cloud computing really, given its propensity to disappear) or b) not wanting a ton of devices under the TV. This would solve that problem.

 

[alphaNoid]

I basically spelled out the exact same thing yesterday in another thread. Many people here at GAF have very limited knowledge of how cloud computing works, is designed, the infrastructure. But they WANT to believe things, so they believe things.

Its pre next gen hype, fans of companies are frothing at the mouth and want to hear and believe only good things about their favorite console company. Its kind of pointless to try and back up something like this with evidence. People don't want to believe it.

edit. Reading this thread hurts my head, some of you are living in a dream world.