Has anyone tried this? The reviews I have seen have been pretty unreal, it seems people are getting pretty amazing results with it. I was thinking about trying it as my machine is getting to the end of its legs I believe. Some of the newer titles are starting to tax it quite a bit. https://shadow.tech/usen
I'd be careful about jumping on this, but the potential is easily present. I would personally want to know more about how they're working the hardware angle. If I were to create a system like this, it would be a series of servers and high end pc's/supercomputers rigged together to provide exemplary performance to many users, of course, this would require regular additions and upgrades as the user base increases, and technology improves, but since it's subscription based that wouldn't be terribly difficult. The way I suspect they're doing this is slightly more shady. Cloud processing isn't new, but quite a few people aren't really aware of how it operates. Rather than having one PC doing all the work, as is traditional, cloud processing takes a little bit from any PC on the cloud that isn't doing anything, borrowing idle processor time, as it were. It's really cool and has the potential to change the way we use computers forever, but... It can also be abused with very little distinction, and become a botnet. Botnets are basically the same as the cloud, but rather than using that processing power to perform the tasks people on the service ask for, it's also used to do... well, whatever else really, effectively it creates a giant amalgous supercomputer that can be used for anything from hacking security codes and truly illegal shit to simply crunching numbers at very large values and anything else a computer can do, really. Botnets themselves are not intrinsically bad, however they can be, and are highly morally questionable. Why do you care if someone is using your idle processing power for... whatever? well if they're using it for illegal shit, there's a slim chance the (insert government law branch) may be knocking on your door, because your PC is the registry they were able to pull out of the IP soup that is a botnet. More likely you simply never even know you have one, which is why it's so questionable, sure it doesn't matter much that they're using your processor when you're not, but it's still impacting your electrical bill, and a bit of data on your ISP. All in, this would be one EULA that I would have to read in full, to ensure that they're not going to be using any device I connect for anything that I don't explicitly allow them to. The irony of course, is that if everyone could agree to build a cloud with a cloud based security there isn't an illegal botnet that could be built to challenge it ^.^
I may give this a try for a month to see how it is. Probably won't sway me on my next build, but I am curious and I am having to stretch out my olde 2500K.
I'm not sure what angle you are coming from on this, but that is literally the last thing I could have thought of. The way this is working is they have a Server with 16 cores, 48GB of RAM and 6 1080P equivalent video cards. The CPU and RAM are virtualized and each session that connects get a dedicated GPU. You are connected to a Windows session running on that server running a modified version of KVM. So you get a full thick virtual desktop backed by a dedicated GPU. They explain how it works in the Linus video. I think you may be massively over thinking this. They have datacenters in several parts of the country. Also, cloud computing by in large does not use shared processing. Some very individual use cases use it. However most are using AWS or Azure.
I know you have a background in this field Gihzmo. I might be wrong about this, but I'm fairly certain you know more about this than anyone here. I'd be interested in learning more about whatever you learn. I'm afraid I don't have much to add to the conversation, though. I guess my only concern would be a hypothetical one: If I can assume that they can only serve a finite number of clients with their current infrastructure, what guarantees do they give on making sure each client receives an optimum experience? Is there any data you can see to ensure you are getting what you paid for?
I just don't like having my games on a system I don't control. Plus, there's latency issues if you're in a area with shitty internet.
Internet access latency is the deciding factor. However, they claim it only adds about 5ms of latency plus your internet latency. So as long as you have good reliable internet, it should not be a problem. They only offer it in certain areas because of that.
The data center is in the video. Just ROUGH calculations. Each rack can serve about 222 sessions. Based on what I could glean from the video I saw, based on that number that data center could POTENTIALLY serve 14,208 concurrent sessions (42U rack - 10% filler 37 1U servers, each with 6 GPUs = 222 sessions *(8 rows of 8 racks each.). They have multiple data centers across the country. I do not think that is going to be an issue to be honest. This is not going to be a huge service right now, it is a bit niche. If they have 5 data centers in the US that would give them 71,040 concurrent sessions. Just for comparison, Warframe had a peak user county of 60,900. I doubt they are putting in the ability to provide a redundant desktop for every user. With a GPU that would be almost impossible. If that server went down, they user would probably connect back to another session and pull their desktop from the provisioning server, so they would start back with the same desktop, just like you restarted your computer. This is a VDI solution, it has been around for a while and several vendors have the ability to use video cards for rendering. They magic that they have going on is the delivery. If it is as good as they say, I guarantee they will be bought by either Citrix or VMware.
Not overthinking it, just didn't find that video, if that's how they're doing it then it's very much how I originally described. In that case there really isn't anything to be concerned about save of course the durability of the company *shrug* And of course the inevitable devolution of cost/investment, as long as they have enough users they should have no problem meeting their promise, but if they don't maintain a minimum threshold the obvious is obvious.
We could be overthinking this. It's a monthly subscription you can cancel anytime and has a superfast internet connection so you should be able to have a Steam game up and running in no time. Test and decide yay or nay. In fact....my wife is out tonight....so if the kids actually go to bed and you all promise not to tell her.....I will see if I can give it a spin.
Scratch that plan. Takes 12 days to activate at the moment (i.e. build). On the plus side, looking in the Subscribe section informs me that you have the right to withdraw up to 14 days after delivery by the usual laws. If it is terrible for you then you can get a refund.3
