Gaikai Demonstration Movie

DPerry.com, the homepage of Dave Perry, now features a video showing off Gaikai, the cloud-based gaming service announced earlier this year. The clip shows off Spore, Mario Kart, LEGO Star Wars II, Need for Speed ProStreet, World of Warcraft, EVE Online, as well as Photoshop (to show non-gaming applications for the service), all running in a browser with no client downloads. The clip is accompanied by more from Perry on the project's background and goals, word that those interested in beta testing should sign up at the Gaikai Website, and this overview: "We are not in competition with any other streaming company or technology, our business model is entirely different. I will be talking about it more during my up-coming speeches at video game conferences. (Develop this month, and GDC Europe are the next two.)." Here is a list of points he makes about the planned service and the video demonstration:
(1) No installing anything. (I'm running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)

(2) This is a low-spec server, it's a very custom configuration, fully virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. We had 7 Call of Duty games running on our E3 demo server recently.

(3) Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that's where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday, but it's not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I personally would get, the good news is I don't notice it anyway.)

(4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I'm not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.

(5) We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don't need them, and so our costs will be much less. ;)

(6) We designed this for the real internet. The codecs change based on the need of the application, and based on the hardware you have. (Like Photoshop must be pixel perfect.)

(7) Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card etc.)

(8) If you hear any clicks, they are coming from my wireless headset microphone. I won't use that next time I promise. :)

(9) I made a few video cuts using Windows Movie maker to cut out dead air. Like Need for Speed has far to many menus with loads & delays between them. So I tried to keep the pace up so you see plenty of demos.
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Re: Gaikai Demonstration Movie
Jul 1, 2009, 22:18
14.
Re: Gaikai Demonstration Movie Jul 1, 2009, 22:18
Jul 1, 2009, 22:18
 
Perhaps a better way to put the server size in perspective is to take Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratories that is the second most powerful super-computer in the world and cost in the neighborhood of $100,000,000. It has about 40,000 or so quad-core 2.3ghz AMD Opterons, which would be a fine CPU to run the latest game. If we take that and, just to be sporting (extremely sporting), give each CPU the equivalent of an 8800, you'd be able to have 40,000 concurrent users. Clearly this is a gross over-simplification and ignores a lot of technical and logistical details, and they would probably get clever with the software implementation--virtualization and what have you--but it gives a reasonable ballpark.

How many people do you suppose are playing GTA4 or whatever is the latest thing right now? I dunno, but 40,000 would probably be a very, very conservative guess. Now how about the number of people playing all video games combined?

It's clearly a future thing, at least on a large scale.

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