Cloud-based GPU hosting

Ugh, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, I don't know why people keep trying to say stuff like that lately.

Cloud gaming will never happen (be popular) any time in the foreseeable future. The server you're connected to could have all the GPU power in the world and it won't matter, because:

1) Input lag. You do something and you have to wait for your command to reach the server and then come round trip back to you before you see it, that's an easy half a second delay even with a good connection. Good luck playing anything that isn't turn based like that.
2) Bandwidth. Have fun streaming a 1920x1200@60Hz video feed, let alone anything more demanding.

I see this being used for other applications, not gaming.  Gaming has to be fluid and shouldnt have lag like already said, but for workstations where a heavy file might make maya run at the equivolent of .05 frames a sec and have input lag measured by minutes because even the most powerful graphics card cannot handle the load, having something like this where I will potentially only have network lag, and display closer to 30fps and have a second or so of lag has the potential to save a large studio millions in productivity costs.  I wont get into why some of us are forced to start with such heavy files but just know its common.

I picture an on site cluster, maybe a cluster for every 20 or so artists and as long as the studio has a network with wiring that can handle the load this would be a dream.

Films continuously push how much more detail is used, and whereas the gaming industry has really powerful engines, programs such as maya are still using opengl 2.0 which is six years old.  Now this is a software issue but seeing as how autodesk doesnt seem to care we have to get our improvements with hardware.  I know there's viewport 2.0, but its a pile of crap and not production ready in the least, but I digress. 

I think this tech has its place in the here and now, just not in games.

As is with anything cloud based at the moment. This was actually done in an iphone app a while ago. It was a browser that had flash and rendered the flash on a server remotely and streamed it to the phone. Good concept but it didn't work. All flash apps got less than 5 fps. The problem is the servers need a huge upload speed to handle demand. Users need high download speed and a fast yet strong compression format needs to be made. I mean a min of 1080pit is 1gbthe uncompressed. That's a lot to download.

oh thats what onlive is! ive seen the youtube ad but never payed attention.

Originally posted by ablahblah I'm against cloud anything as well at the moment given security issues and the idea of not having everything available locally to me, yet with the amount of tech that's being pushed cloudwise, it's starting to worry me.

Agreed! I don't like the idea of everyone else having my data. like with lastpass for passwords (which is one of the worst ideas) online backups. I like to be able to access them whenever not depending on if one companies servers are up or not. I guess this also goes into the point of one flat fee over a small monthly fee.