7 ms·

Or just spend $500 one time on a local rig one time that can max out 1080p at 100+frames instead of paying more per year for less. I know this is for private u

by jophde 7y ago

Or just spend $500 one time on a local rig one time that can max out 1080p at 100+frames instead of paying more per year for less. I know this is for private use but the only point of game streaming is so that companies can put ads in stream.

crazygringo 7y ago
Or maybe you're in a small apartment without space for a desktop and don't have time to game that often so this is actually a better, more cost-effective solution? Everybody's needs are different -- there's no reason to dismiss this.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I find it hard to imagine I’ll ever live in an apartment where I won’t make space for a desktop. But my experience with cloud gaming on EC2 has been pretty great too, as I’m getting older I feel less and less inclined to shell out for a new video card every two years.
  - jophde 7y ago
    As long as you are fine with 1080p cards from 5+ years ago are fun. 4k is generally not worth it.
    - cumunism 7y ago
      1440 @ higher refresh than 60 and 4k@60 is very well worth it these days. especially on a nice LG OLED with gsync ;)' HDR is pretty sweet, too. HN is horrible for gaming/pc building advice. much better places.
      - jophde 7y ago
        Thats what I have and a 1070 is still find for most games.
      - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
        > 1440 @ higher refresh than 60 and 4k@60 I've tried 1440p @ 144 hz and 4K @ 60 hz, and I'll take the 144 hz any day. > HN is horrible for gaming/pc building advice. much better places. Absolutely. I come here for my tech news and discussion, but gaming? No way.
- jophde 7y ago
  Everyone going to this would ruin games. These streaming services will always have compression artifacts or jitter which kills immersion. Worse they will be more expensive over time than hardware. Even worse your games can get deleted and you won’t own anything. Worse there will he ads put into the stream.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Price is comparison will be variable. If you're chasing the highest specs and framerates, you're spending more than streaming would cost. As for artifacts, I played most of Assassin's Creed Odyssey at the highest specs through Shadow and noticed barely any difference between the gaming rig I have, running it at the same settings. And I still owned the game, it was installed from my Steam library. Not owning is a legitimate concern with something like Stadia, but not most other services. Ads in Streams? Again, maybe for Stadia if they release a free version, but for most services where you're basically buying a friendly front end to something like EC2 and running from your own library of games, no- Ads are not an issue. You're already paying for the commodity computing, and Amazon or whoever will no more insert ads to game streams than they would an RFP session.
- runawaybottle 7y ago
  I’m not trying to take away from streaming gaming, but I find a sub 1000 dollar gaming laptop can let you play a LOT of pc games (laptop being your smallest form factor and all-in-one package with a display, etc). Budget gaming laptop really helped me get away from my MacBook which basically killed the gamer in me for years (can’t play shit on it). Last time I tried GeForce Now in beta, there was a very perceptible delay in input. Not sure if that’s still the case now.
detaro 7y ago
And then lug the local rig around the country for the occasional game?
- jophde 7y ago
  You can build a 1080p rig that is about as big as a Nintendo Switch.
  - detaro 7y ago
    Now I'm curious: GPs ~$500, lets say max double the volume of a Switch + Dock, even if we exclude the screen and input devices seems like a quite tall order. You can build some fairly impressive SFF PCs, but even an InWin Chopin breaks that volume budget if I've done the math right, and it's not a cheap hobby. They to me feel like a class above this.
    - jophde 7y ago
      You could definitely go eGPU + intel NUC and tape them together for 2x Switch + Dock. M2 nvme drives are tiny and I think some boards take laptop memory. You really only need the equivalent of a gtx 970 to do 1080p which probably exists in Pci x4.
      - ineedasername 7y ago
        Nuc makes a model called a Hades Canyon that is an awesome gaming rig for its form factir. 4k at mid-range settings, 1080p at anything you can throw at it. (And I'll be honest... Maybe I'm getting old, but from 2 feet away I can't tell the differece between 1080 and 4k.)
        detaro 7y ago
        And double the "just spend $500 one time" initially suggested as being the solution.
ldoughty 7y ago
Perhaps, but this article is ridiculous and great. There are a FEW legitimate reasons to go this route, but not many good ones, but I have to commend this article for true hacker spirit. It's lovely!
marvion 7y ago
Jup. Tried DIY cloudgaming a few times, almost signed up for shadow/Google, but then just bought a 200$ card and now I'm able to play all games, from any store I want, for next 2-3 years. In case of AWS/cloud it's not just gaming but also always thinking about aws/technical stuff.. If you can afford to buy all games on steam and have 1gig internet - go ahead and use a cloudgaming service. But you'll see the video compression and you won't be able to play the great game you once bought at humblebundle.
- benologist 7y ago
  I have an eGPU and I find Geforce Now to be more convenient when I want to stream to TV, and when I don't want to reboot into Windows which is often. It's actually so convenient I often wonder if I could just use a Shield TV for PC gaming, the only downside is several of my favorite games are not yet playable on Geforce Now.
  - zwayhowder 7y ago
    I have a similar setup and use SteamLink to stream to my shield for a lot of games. Works a treat for most of my games which are on Steam anyway.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  I think the biggest thing that stadia is trying to enable is being able to play all games on non-windows systems. You could play a desktop game on your android phone or even on your Chromebook.
  - jophde 7y ago
    I run a linux desktop with windows installed as a kvm guest with GPU passthrough which gives near bare metal performance.
    - verall 7y ago
      Do you have a link to a guide for this or more info? This is really interesting. My main desktop is dual booted but I never really boot into Linux since I often game, although I really prefer Linux interface+desktop. If Windows could be a kvm guest and GPU passthrough worked I would def go with that option. edit: I found this which seems to give a good overview but I'm still curious if you have any tips/hacks for getting it working.
cle 7y ago
My son plays about 6 hours of BeamNG and X-Plane a week. It’s much cheaper (and faster) for him to play on an EC2 instance with Parsec at $.50/hr than to invest the money and space in an equivalent gaming rig. And he can play it wherever we go. Setup details: I use Paperspace since it has an image with everything already configured (doing this is surprisingly tricky, I was never able to get GPU drivers installed and configured myself after hours of trying and also trying various AMIs). It has auto-shutdown after an hour of inactivity. I use VirtualHere to forward a joystick to the host, and Parsec for streaming. It works great, and I pay $.50/hr plus $5/mo for storage. Over WiFi with the cheapest Comcast plan, the latency is about 30 ms, which is fine for those games.
- friedman23 7y ago
  Have you tried alternatives like stadia and gefore now? I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I have a gaming pc with a 4770k and a 1080ti. I was considering upgrading it with the excuse that it would be my ML workstation (this is the lie I tell myself) but with things like colab pro coming out I'm considering if the future (for my use case) will just be renting hardware.
  - cle 7y ago
    I did try GeForce Now, since it has BeamNG. From what I could tell, it was about the same as Paperspace, except I didn't have access to the underlying OS so I couldn't install mods outside of Steam. It doesn't have X-Plane. It's slightly cheaper and easier to use since you don't have to manage the lifecycle of a host. And Stadia doesn't have either game. If you run your own host, you can play whatever game you want, and mod it however you feel like. Otherwise, you're stuck with whatever curated stuff the platform provides.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    > with the excuse that it would be my ML workstation Ah, I see we're alike. I'm glad I went ahead and got a gaming rig from best buy for $900. Because after playing legacy games at extremely high frame rate for about 2 weeks, I proceed to spend all my spare time on a random javascript game. At this rate I'll get to my ML workstation and train my own GAN at 2035.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> the only point of game streaming is so that companies can put ads in stream I don't want to own gaming hardware - I don't want the space taken up, the hassle of the upgrades, and I'm a super-super-casual gamer so I don't want to invest in anything. It sounds perfect for me and I can't wait for it to be working well!
- jophde 7y ago
  It’s never going to work as well unless you are playing the kinds of games where latency doesn’t matter.
Deimorz 7y ago
There are about 10 major game streaming services available now, and none of them inject any advertising as far as I know. Which ones are you referring to?
- ineedasername 7y ago
  If Stadia goes for a free tier, that's the most likely candidate. But I can't imagine any service where it's basically a friendly front end to an EC2 clone trying to insert ads.
SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
Its not about ads, IMHO. At least in Google's case, I bet the biggest thing in it for them, from a long term perspective, is the most literal gamification of crowd-sourced AI training.
ineedasername 7y ago
Yep, this plus Hamachi is my personal streaming server.

by jophde 7y ago

crazygringo 7y ago

Or maybe you're in a small apartment without space for a desktop and don't have time to game that often so this is actually a better, more cost-effective solution? Everybody's needs are different -- there's no reason to dismiss this.

Aeolun 7y ago
I find it hard to imagine I’ll ever live in an apartment where I won’t make space for a desktop. But my experience with cloud gaming on EC2 has been pretty great too, as I’m getting older I feel less and less inclined to shell out for a new video card every two years.
- jophde 7y ago
  As long as you are fine with 1080p cards from 5+ years ago are fun. 4k is generally not worth it.
  - cumunism 7y ago
    1440 @ higher refresh than 60 and 4k@60 is very well worth it these days. especially on a nice LG OLED with gsync ;)' HDR is pretty sweet, too. HN is horrible for gaming/pc building advice. much better places.
    - jophde 7y ago
      Thats what I have and a 1070 is still find for most games.
    - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
      > 1440 @ higher refresh than 60 and 4k@60 I've tried 1440p @ 144 hz and 4K @ 60 hz, and I'll take the 144 hz any day. > HN is horrible for gaming/pc building advice. much better places. Absolutely. I come here for my tech news and discussion, but gaming? No way.
jophde 7y ago
Everyone going to this would ruin games. These streaming services will always have compression artifacts or jitter which kills immersion. Worse they will be more expensive over time than hardware. Even worse your games can get deleted and you won’t own anything. Worse there will he ads put into the stream.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Price is comparison will be variable. If you're chasing the highest specs and framerates, you're spending more than streaming would cost. As for artifacts, I played most of Assassin's Creed Odyssey at the highest specs through Shadow and noticed barely any difference between the gaming rig I have, running it at the same settings. And I still owned the game, it was installed from my Steam library. Not owning is a legitimate concern with something like Stadia, but not most other services. Ads in Streams? Again, maybe for Stadia if they release a free version, but for most services where you're basically buying a friendly front end to something like EC2 and running from your own library of games, no- Ads are not an issue. You're already paying for the commodity computing, and Amazon or whoever will no more insert ads to game streams than they would an RFP session.
runawaybottle 7y ago
I’m not trying to take away from streaming gaming, but I find a sub 1000 dollar gaming laptop can let you play a LOT of pc games (laptop being your smallest form factor and all-in-one package with a display, etc). Budget gaming laptop really helped me get away from my MacBook which basically killed the gamer in me for years (can’t play shit on it). Last time I tried GeForce Now in beta, there was a very perceptible delay in input. Not sure if that’s still the case now.

detaro 7y ago

And then lug the local rig around the country for the occasional game?

jophde 7y ago
You can build a 1080p rig that is about as big as a Nintendo Switch.
- detaro 7y ago
  Now I'm curious: GPs ~$500, lets say max double the volume of a Switch + Dock, even if we exclude the screen and input devices seems like a quite tall order. You can build some fairly impressive SFF PCs, but even an InWin Chopin breaks that volume budget if I've done the math right, and it's not a cheap hobby. They to me feel like a class above this.
  - jophde 7y ago
    You could definitely go eGPU + intel NUC and tape them together for 2x Switch + Dock. M2 nvme drives are tiny and I think some boards take laptop memory. You really only need the equivalent of a gtx 970 to do 1080p which probably exists in Pci x4.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      Nuc makes a model called a Hades Canyon that is an awesome gaming rig for its form factir. 4k at mid-range settings, 1080p at anything you can throw at it. (And I'll be honest... Maybe I'm getting old, but from 2 feet away I can't tell the differece between 1080 and 4k.)
      - detaro 7y ago
        And double the "just spend $500 one time" initially suggested as being the solution.

ldoughty 7y ago

Perhaps, but this article is ridiculous and great. There are a FEW legitimate reasons to go this route, but not many good ones, but I have to commend this article for true hacker spirit. It's lovely!

marvion 7y ago

Jup. Tried DIY cloudgaming a few times, almost signed up for shadow/Google, but then just bought a 200$ card and now I'm able to play all games, from any store I want, for next 2-3 years. In case of AWS/cloud it's not just gaming but also always thinking about aws/technical stuff.. If you can afford to buy all games on steam and have 1gig internet - go ahead and use a cloudgaming service. But you'll see the video compression and you won't be able to play the great game you once bought at humblebundle.

benologist 7y ago
I have an eGPU and I find Geforce Now to be more convenient when I want to stream to TV, and when I don't want to reboot into Windows which is often. It's actually so convenient I often wonder if I could just use a Shield TV for PC gaming, the only downside is several of my favorite games are not yet playable on Geforce Now.
- zwayhowder 7y ago
  I have a similar setup and use SteamLink to stream to my shield for a lot of games. Works a treat for most of my games which are on Steam anyway.
jjeaff 7y ago
I think the biggest thing that stadia is trying to enable is being able to play all games on non-windows systems. You could play a desktop game on your android phone or even on your Chromebook.
- jophde 7y ago
  I run a linux desktop with windows installed as a kvm guest with GPU passthrough which gives near bare metal performance.
  - verall 7y ago
    Do you have a link to a guide for this or more info? This is really interesting. My main desktop is dual booted but I never really boot into Linux since I often game, although I really prefer Linux interface+desktop. If Windows could be a kvm guest and GPU passthrough worked I would def go with that option. edit: I found this which seems to give a good overview but I'm still curious if you have any tips/hacks for getting it working.

cle 7y ago

My son plays about 6 hours of BeamNG and X-Plane a week. It’s much cheaper (and faster) for him to play on an EC2 instance with Parsec at $.50/hr than to invest the money and space in an equivalent gaming rig. And he can play it wherever we go. Setup details: I use Paperspace since it has an image with everything already configured (doing this is surprisingly tricky, I was never able to get GPU drivers installed and configured myself after hours of trying and also trying various AMIs). It has auto-shutdown after an hour of inactivity. I use VirtualHere to forward a joystick to the host, and Parsec for streaming. It works great, and I pay $.50/hr plus $5/mo for storage. Over WiFi with the cheapest Comcast plan, the latency is about 30 ms, which is fine for those games.

friedman23 7y ago
Have you tried alternatives like stadia and gefore now? I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I have a gaming pc with a 4770k and a 1080ti. I was considering upgrading it with the excuse that it would be my ML workstation (this is the lie I tell myself) but with things like colab pro coming out I'm considering if the future (for my use case) will just be renting hardware.
- cle 7y ago
  I did try GeForce Now, since it has BeamNG. From what I could tell, it was about the same as Paperspace, except I didn't have access to the underlying OS so I couldn't install mods outside of Steam. It doesn't have X-Plane. It's slightly cheaper and easier to use since you don't have to manage the lifecycle of a host. And Stadia doesn't have either game. If you run your own host, you can play whatever game you want, and mod it however you feel like. Otherwise, you're stuck with whatever curated stuff the platform provides.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Aperocky 7y ago
  > with the excuse that it would be my ML workstation Ah, I see we're alike. I'm glad I went ahead and got a gaming rig from best buy for $900. Because after playing legacy games at extremely high frame rate for about 2 weeks, I proceed to spend all my spare time on a random javascript game. At this rate I'll get to my ML workstation and train my own GAN at 2035.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> the only point of game streaming is so that companies can put ads in stream I don't want to own gaming hardware - I don't want the space taken up, the hassle of the upgrades, and I'm a super-super-casual gamer so I don't want to invest in anything. It sounds perfect for me and I can't wait for it to be working well!

jophde 7y ago
It’s never going to work as well unless you are playing the kinds of games where latency doesn’t matter.

Deimorz 7y ago

There are about 10 major game streaming services available now, and none of them inject any advertising as far as I know. Which ones are you referring to?

ineedasername 7y ago
If Stadia goes for a free tier, that's the most likely candidate. But I can't imagine any service where it's basically a friendly front end to an EC2 clone trying to insert ads.

SmirkingRevenge 7y ago

Its not about ads, IMHO. At least in Google's case, I bet the biggest thing in it for them, from a long term perspective, is the most literal gamification of crowd-sourced AI training.

ineedasername 7y ago

Yep, this plus Hamachi is my personal streaming server.