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"which means hardcore gamers, who would want to spend money on gaming, will never be customers" I mean, either you're paying nvidia $5 per month, or odds are y

"which means hardcore gamers, who would want to spend money on gaming, will never be customers" I mean, either you're paying nvidia $5 per month, or odds are you're paying them many hundreds of dollars for a GPU every two years. I don't think they're really seeing the downside. Nor does your economic case actually make sense (nvidia is filling their own data center full of their own cards -- they can provide a much higher performance per dollar than they can feeding the same through retail channels). It's also worth noting that the quality offered by this service easily matches or beats a PS4 or Xbox One X. Not sure why you felt the need to squeeze console gamers in when defining "hardcore" gamers. Quite the contrary for people with a console but who have a desktop or laptop that wouldn't normally be able to give a good experience, this service is wonderful to bridge their experience. "Just look in this thread, the people who are impressed are casual gamers who have no interest in building a gaming PC" This is nonsensical gatekeeping. I love the service. I normally game on a pretty beefy "gaming PC" and had fed many thousands of dollars to nvidia over the years. Do I not count because you disagree? But that's irrelevant. People who talk about their "gaming PC" or try to gate-keep who counts as real gamers are a minority. In no universe is that the make or break market.

henrikschroder 7y ago
> I mean, either you're paying nvidia $5 per month, or odds are you're paying them many hundreds of dollars for a GPU every two years. I don't think they're really seeing the downside. Nor does your economic case actually make sense Sure, there's an upside for nVidia in this case, since they supply the cards, but since you need to place your rendering farms as close to the customers as possible for latency reasons, you can't have a global pool of cards to handle peaks around the globe, so your utilization rate of the cards is going to be pretty crap. Better than the utilization rate of the card that sits in my PC, sure, but not that much better. > It's also worth noting that the quality offered by this service easily matches or beats a PS4 or Xbox One X. ...if you have the bandwidth for it. 4K video eats through data caps pretty damn quick, and if you compress it too hard, you're removing details that you spent GPU time on creating, so you have to balance the render quality with a target compression rate, which means that for an acceptable video bitrate, you're not going to run at full detail, which means a local gaming PC, or a local gaming console, will provide better quality, simply because the bandwidth of an HDMI or DisplayPort cable is unlimited and consistent. Bandwidth caps are the norm at least in the US market, and you have to take those into account. > I love the service. I normally game on a pretty beefy "gaming PC" and had fed many thousands of dollars to nvidia over the years. Do I not count because you disagree? The question is if you are an outlier or the norm. There's been plenty of companies doing exactly this, and they have all pretty much failed. The one good difference I see in this case is that nVidia allows you to grab games from external libraries, games you already "own", that solves a trust issue that plagued all the predecessors. But I'm still pessimistic about this, I don't see what makes the underlying fundamentals different this time, that would magically make this thing work, when all the others have failed.

henrikschroder 7y ago

> I mean, either you're paying nvidia $5 per month, or odds are you're paying them many hundreds of dollars for a GPU every two years. I don't think they're really seeing the downside. Nor does your economic case actually make sense Sure, there's an upside for nVidia in this case, since they supply the cards, but since you need to place your rendering farms as close to the customers as possible for latency reasons, you can't have a global pool of cards to handle peaks around the globe, so your utilization rate of the cards is going to be pretty crap. Better than the utilization rate of the card that sits in my PC, sure, but not that much better. > It's also worth noting that the quality offered by this service easily matches or beats a PS4 or Xbox One X. ...if you have the bandwidth for it. 4K video eats through data caps pretty damn quick, and if you compress it too hard, you're removing details that you spent GPU time on creating, so you have to balance the render quality with a target compression rate, which means that for an acceptable video bitrate, you're not going to run at full detail, which means a local gaming PC, or a local gaming console, will provide better quality, simply because the bandwidth of an HDMI or DisplayPort cable is unlimited and consistent. Bandwidth caps are the norm at least in the US market, and you have to take those into account. > I love the service. I normally game on a pretty beefy "gaming PC" and had fed many thousands of dollars to nvidia over the years. Do I not count because you disagree? The question is if you are an outlier or the norm. There's been plenty of companies doing exactly this, and they have all pretty much failed. The one good difference I see in this case is that nVidia allows you to grab games from external libraries, games you already "own", that solves a trust issue that plagued all the predecessors. But I'm still pessimistic about this, I don't see what makes the underlying fundamentals different this time, that would magically make this thing work, when all the others have failed.