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GeForce Grid: cloud gaming direct from a GPU, with games by Gaikai

sTeLioSco

Banned
game-latency-chart-gr.jpg


Nvidia's partnered with cloud gaming provider Gaikai, and claims that the GeForce Grid GPU has reduced latency of streaming games to just ten milliseconds by capturing and encoding game frames rapidly, and in a single pass, and promises that the enhanced Gaikai service will be available on TVs, tablets and smartphones running Android and iOS.

Perry showed off an unreleased FPS shooter called Hawken running on an Asus Transformer Prime powered by the new GeForce Grid GPU. Perry played against an opponent who was running the game on an LG Cinema TV without the need for an external console — Huang made a big deal of showing off an ethernet cord hooked up to the TV, saying that the cord was the console. One of the most noteworthy aspects of the GeForce Grid demo is the fact that gamers can play across platforms of varying power, thanks to the Grid doing all the heavy lifting. Also of note in that demo was that the server hosting the gameplay was a good 10 miles away — but the gameplay was lag-free, as you'd expect to see when playing on a local machine.

Following the presentation, Jen-Hsun Huang was able to provide a little more detail on how exactly GeForce Grid works, in response to a question by PC Perspective:

Where we used to render from frame buffer and copy to the CPU for compression and streaming, here it's already streaming right out of the GPU, saving encode time, not to mention copy time. Compressing and streaming in parallel... we've taken maybe a couple hundred milliseconds of lag, and reduced it to something that's the same performance and snappiness as a game console.

Nothing special is needed at the client-end, just a standard H.264 hardware video decoder. Anything that can play YouTube can run GeForce Grid-streamed games, Huang told us. He did say hat there's still optimizations possible at the client end to further reduce latency, though, but wouldn't confirm whether Nvidia or partners were working on a Geforce Grid-specific client for the task.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/15/3022233/nvidia-geforce-grid-gtc-2012

Cloud Gaming Moves at the Blink of an Eye With NVIDIA GeForce GRID

Tuesday, May 15, 2012
GPU Technology Conference -- Gaming enters a new era today with the launch of the NVIDIA® GeForce® GRID cloud gaming platform, which allows gaming-as-a-service providers to stream next-generation games to virtually any device, without the lag that hampers current offerings.

With the GeForce GRID platform, gaming-as-a-service providers can deliver the most advanced visuals with lower latency, while incurring lower operating costs, particularly related to energy usage. Gamers benefit from the ability to play the latest, most sophisticated games on any connected device, including TVs, smartphones and tablets running iOS and Android.

"Gamers will now have access to seamlessly play the world's best titles anywhere, anytime, from phones, tablets, TVs or PCs," said Phil Eisler, general manager of cloud gaming at NVIDIA. "GeForce GRID represents a massive disruption in how games are delivered and played."

GeForce GRID was introduced at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), as part of a series of announcements from NVIDIA, all of which can be accessed in the GTC online press room.

The key technologies powering the new platform are NVIDIA GeForce GRID GPUs with dedicated ultra-low-latency streaming technology and cloud graphics software. Together, they fundamentally change the economics and experience of cloud gaming, enabling gaming-as-a-service providers to operate scalable data centers at costs that are in line with those of movie-streaming services.

http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releas...k-of-an-Eye-With-NVIDIA-GeForce-GRID-7e1.aspx

server-density.jpg


NVIDIA GeForce GRID GPUs
Using the highly efficient NVIDIA Kepler™ architecture, NVIDIA GeForce GRID GPUs minimize power consumption by simultaneously encoding up to eight game streams. This allows providers to cost-effectively scale their service offerings to support millions of concurrent gamers.

Featuring two Kepler architecture-based GPUs, each with its own encoder, the processors have 3,072 CUDA® technology cores and 4.7 teraflops of 3D shader performance. This enables providers to render highly complex games in the cloud and encode them on the GPU, rather than the CPU, allowing their servers to simultaneously run more game streams. Server power-consumption per game stream is reduced to about one-half that of previous implementations, an important metric for data centers.

Fast Streaming Technology
Fast streaming technology reduces server latency to as little as 10 milliseconds -- less than one-tenth the blink of an eye -- by capturing and encoding a game frame in a single pass. The GeForce GRID platform uses fast-frame capture, concurrent rendering and single-pass encoding to achieve ultra-fast game streaming.

The latency-reducing technology in GeForce GRID GPUs compensates for the distance in the network, so gamers will feel like they are playing on a gaming supercomputer located in the same room. Lightning-fast play is now possible, even when the gaming supercomputer is miles away.

GeForce GRID Enables the Virtual Game Console
Also at GTC, NVIDIA and Gaikai demonstrated a virtual game console, consisting of an LG Cinema 3D Smart TV running a Gaikai application connected to a GeForce GRID GPU in a server 10 miles away. Instant, lag-free play was enabled on a highly complex PC game, with only an Ethernet cable and wireless USB game pad connected to the TV.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html
 

sTeLioSco

Banned
Geez, if they can get these cloud games to not look like shit, they're gonna take over.

its a possibility...

imagine in a few years you have an account in a gaming service that you get games and you can play the games in a TV just with a controller.also the same games you can play them from your cheap laptop out of the house or a tablet etc.......

no need to upgrade hardware or fix the consoles dvd drive when it breaks etc.....
even need less electricity.

there are disadvantages also,but long-term it could easily become a major content/game provider....
(not only gaikai,the whole streaming games part)
 
So, how they reduced the "game pipeline"?

They're comparing consoles to PC GPU, so I guess that has something to do with it. When consoles take advantage of stuff like rampant parallel code on 8-way Cell, that adds lag. Maybe it's less on PC?

Just running the game at 60 on PC vs 30 for a standard console could help a lot I guess?

Edit: Pointed out on B3D they seem to have "cheated" a bit on network latency too (how does it drop so much from cloud gaming Gen 1?).

Still even if it's not as great as they claim it seems like an advance.
 

RooMHM

Member
The latency graph with those fairly big zones means that the average display latency is between 100 and 150ms, for example? Am I reading these correctly?
 
I really hope Gaikai starts providing a service for full games other then just demos. Their service has much better quality and much less delay then Onlive does.
 

wrowa

Member
Do I read that picture right? They are claiming that their cloud service has less latency than playing offline on a console?
 

JB1981

Member
i just got done playing the crysis 2 and mass effect 3 demos on the gaikai website and the games look and run better streaming on their site than they do on the consoles. mass effect 3 looked paritcularly awesome and the lag really was not that bad.
 

AgentP

Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
I was at the Keynote today, the demo was pretty impressive. They did not go into details on how the technology is different from Onlive, that would be interesting. The compression artifacts were almost non-existent unlike Onlive. On the floor demos later they had Bulletstorm playable, it looked pretty good.

I don't understand Gaikai's business model, they don't sell or rent anything? They mentioned having a deal with LG to be bundled into TVs. They also mentioned something about Walmart.com, I guess you can jump into a game demo from a browser to see if you want to buy it? That seems kind of overkill for PC games, the market is ever shrinking.
 

Shai-Tan

Banned
"Nvidia's partnered with cloud gaming provider Gaikai, and claims that the GeForce Grid GPU has reduced latency of streaming games to just ten milliseconds by capturing and encoding game frames rapidly, and in a single pass, and promises that the enhanced Gaikai service will be available on TVs, tablets and smartphones running Android and iOS."

wait, what protocol is this data compressed and transferred in? seems like smoke and mirrors to leave out the part where it goes over the network (adding many ms). all they are saying is their GPU h.264 encoder takes 10ms compared to whatever the CPU or other hardware encodes or decodes it
 

AgentP

Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
Think you got that backwards.

They said they had data centers in 80 countries all over the world to minimize latency, for what game demos for Walmart? That is overkill. Non-Steam PC game sales are at a all time low as far as I have heard.

They should have a subscription model, pay monthly and play anything.
 

Brofist

Member
They said they had data centers in 80 countries all over the world to minimize latency, for what game demos for Walmart? That is overkill. Non-Steam PC game sales are at a all time low as far as I have heard.

They should have a subscription model, pay monthly and play anything.

Ahh ok I see what you mean, you're talking about physical game sales.
 

Sentenza

Member
They said they had data centers in 80 countries all over the world to minimize latency, for what game demos for Walmart? That is overkill. Non-Steam PC game sales are at a all time low as far as I have heard.

They should have a subscription model, pay monthly and play anything.

Actually retail sales for PC are increasing (roughly 15% over the previous year, according to the last data I heard about).
Steam (and with it digital sales in general) is simply growing even faster.
 
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