Cloud gaming (Vortex, Nvidia, etc.). A new way to play despite a "poor" computer?

[Ashitaka.1243]

Hello guys!

So, my computer is quite poor. Even with the lowest graphics settings, my average FPS is around 20 to 30, and down to 2-5 when raiding at Palawadan for instance.I can't afford buying a new and great computer, being worth more than a few thousands of euros...Thus, a friend of mine advised me to try cloud gaming. The idea sounds so great (why didn't somebody think about it before?). It requires a very fast Internet connection (ok, I have it), and then it is possible to play on most of the games we own (which aren't necessary online, Tomb Raider for instance), on a cloud. That is to say: our computer is free from doing all those tiring calculations, and only host videos...on top graphics!)

What do you think about it? Some cloud gaming providers (e.g. Vortex for $9.99/month) allow playing to several games, including GW2.

If possible, I would also like to get some advices from people from arena.net (very appreciated: is it legal on your side? Can I enjoy these services?)

I have to admit this "cloud gaming" idea has been just like a shining star to me... I've been realizing that I can...probably play just like other players! And not being annoyed by extremely poor graphic settings with such a low FPS during mass events...

See you soon!

Ash.

[TwilightSoul.9048]

I honestly have never heard of that service before but as with all subsciption services vs one time payment you have to think about how long you will use that service. I don't quite understand how you believe you'd have to pay "a few thousands of euros" for a good PC. I've bought my PC 2 Years ago for 300€ and I can easily run games like Assassins Creed - Black Flag on max settings and GW2 on Medium settings (and some settings on High) with an average of 50 FPS and around 20 FPS average at large scale events. I'm not really knowledgeable about hardware so everyone who is would probably laugh at my setup but to me the only important thing is that the few games I play run smooth - which they do.

I personally would reccommend you to look for a friend who really knows his way around in the hardware section, tell him specifically what kind of games you play and want to play and give him a budget limit. I'm 100% sure you'll have to pay 800€ max for a PC that perfectly suits (or probably exceeds) your needs for many years, unless you want to play every newest game every year but in that case you'd have to buy a new graphic card pretty much once a year or so...

[Faaris.8013]

It's kind of funny how we went from terminals to personal computers and now we are going back to terminals (which often appear as browsers). With virtualization and fast Internet, why not.

It really only depends on your preferences. Do you want to own your stuff, or rather pay for it as a service? $10.00 per month sounds like a good deal. In Europe, these services cost about 3 times as much, and you would have to sign up for 12 or 24 months. If you don't have a minimum contract duration, you can see if it works for you and cancel at any time. I don't see any security issue either, hardware in a datacenter is more secure than your personal computer. I have a bit experience with videoconferencing solutions and it's not trivial to use a thin client for it and have a server do all the work. There are solutions to assure that you don't have annoying delay, but the thin client still needs a proper GPU.

If the service provider can keep his promise, I would say go for it.

edit: btw, you can get a computer on ebay that can handle GW2 well, for probably 300 bucks.

[Zedek.8932]

I will never understand why people just "rent" things nowadays. People rent games from Steam, what if the servers are turned off? Do you think the games will keep running without a connection sooner or later? It's their copy protection after all. Yes, the offline mode exists, but I don't trust it, especially since savegames are often in the cloud. They literally want to you to force to stay online.

Or renting music and movies (streaming). I buy my movies to keep them forever and no kill switch to remove them. Same with music. Or Photos. No cloud, no external service.

To be honest, as Faaris said, we go back from an actual Personal Computer to mainframes again. With all the bad things about it. We use Embedded stuff at work and it's terrible. We can't work when the connection is bad, we can't click on literally anything. It's all just like a "camera" that mimics the mouse click on our companies datacenter computer. It's all remote Citrix crap. When you see that printing a document relies on VPN tunnels, "receives", security ports etc. you will be happy to have everything located on your own hardware. It's ridiculous to print something and the address is not USB0 or something, but a HTTP address - and then you wait, and wait, and wait. The printer blinks (print job accepted/awaited) but nothing happens. Sorry, the print job got stuck somewhere.... I wish I could pull out a USB cable between the Thin Client (we have HPs) and the Printer and just print it easily, but nope, relying on remote service is "da new shizz" and "Kewl", so we rather get paid waiting for our documents to finally be printed.

When I see what they log (or can log), it's like a permanent spy on my computer. They know it when you write F..K on the screen and know the PC, they might call the phone next to it asking what are we doing - or simply start to take over the computer, since it's all remote access. It's creepy when suddenly the mouse moves because some admin at the datacenter access it.... No, thanks.

I paid over 2,000€ for my PC, but I need a powerhouse (I edit videos and want to be prepared for real 4K - not these fake 4K recordings from iPhones and tiny devices), but my old GTX670 would run GW2 fine. Especially for GW2, which has the worst CPU utilization, you are fine with a highly clocked Dual Core even - but stick to intel there, because during the Duo-Core times AMD blew (just until recently with the Zen architecture).

But I am 50/50 about you will hate or like such services. I hate it to the bone, but then I enjoy everything to be local. The Cloud is definitely something that I try to avoid as long as possible.

Excelsior.

[MadFable.1978]

Interesting concept... Government would love for everyone to do this. Never would use. Zedek above me nailed it. I use stuff like this at work. It sucks

[GrubySzymek.1362]

@"Zedek.8932" said:I will never understand why people just "rent" things nowadays. People rent games from Steam, what if the servers are turned off? Do you think the games will keep running without a connection sooner or later? It's their copy protection after all. Yes, the offline mode exists, but I don't trust it, especially since savegames are often in the cloud. They literally want to you to force to stay online.

For the same reason you rent your account from Anet to play GW2.

[ReaverKane.7598]

Well, i guess it should perform faster if you have a pretty good connection (i'd say you'd probably need like a optic 100/100 mbps).As far as it being TOS compliant, that you'll need a proper answer from Anet.

[Danikat.8537]

It might well be possible to upgrade your computer for a lot less than you think, if you just buy the parts you need, even if they're major parts. A few years back I replaced my motherboard, CPU and graphics card and it cost me about £700 in total (most of which was the graphics card). The end result was a computer that would have cost me about £2000 if I'd bought the whole thing new. Even if you only re-use the case and the external bits (mouse, keyboard, screen etc.) you'll save a lot.

And as long as you take your time and follow the instructions building a PC really isn't as difficult as it might seem. Ok I did mess up connecting one of the power wires so when I first turned it on nothing happened, but that was easy to fix, and I always forget how hard you have to shove RAM to actually get it in. All the stuff people warned me about, like installing the CPU, was incredibly simple.

[Faaris.8013]

@Zedek.8932 I remember the days when everybody had mp3s on their hard disk, and you would expand your collection at LAN parties. And I welcome streaming and cloud storage. I don't have to care about storing all that stuff on my own real estate anymore, and let's be honest, 90% of the stuff you never listen to or watch anyway. The only thing that pisses me off with streaming services is that the providers don't load the data in your local buffer. Whenever you loop something, it is wasted bandwidth. That's not how it should work at all. Once I have listened to a song on Youtube, I should be able to loop it without Internet connection. The only reason is stupid advertising.

If you still store gigabytes of music on your hard disk, you are a dinosaur ^^ Also, on an off topic note, it's not common business at all that an admin takes charge of your session at all. That's highly unprofessional and your privacy is violated and the company's possibly sensitive information is at risk. An Admin has no business to access, let's say, sales data, but you might have. If he can get into your session any time without your permission, he'll have this access. On the positive side, if any data is ever compromised through your access, they cannot know if it was you or some admin ^^ (which is also a reason why this is highly unprofessional)

[Danikat.8537]

@"Faaris.8013" said:If you still store gigabytes of music on your hard disk, you are a dinosaur ^^

Awesome! Can I be a triceratops? Although I still have CDs too, and vinyl albums, maybe that makes me more of a Trilobite.

My thinking with music is pretty similar to some people aboves attitude to games (which is also my attitude to games). I want copies that are unlikely to vanish due to circumstances outside of my control. I make an exception for MMOs because you have to rely on a server to play, but other than that I try to avoid giving someone else control over when and how I can access 'my' games or music.

I still have and play games from 25+ years ago. Sure some of the PC games require additional steps to run on modern PCs, but I can still play them (and the console games are actually easier than modern consoles, none of this nonsense with downloading it from the disc and updating, just ram the thing in and play). I'd be devastated if I relied on an external platform to grant me permission to play them (which is really all systems like Steam do - it's glorified DRM) and they suddenly decided some of my games are too old or not popular enough and they're taking them away. Or they had a falling out with the developers or whatever.

(There's also rarer, but worse, problems like when Apple Music suddenly decided to "helpfully" replace all copies of songs in people's libraries with 'standardised' ones - one version of each song or album. Some people lost rare special editions of albums they'd paid extra for, collectors lost hundreds of live or rare versions, and some musicians lost their own demo tracks because a computer decided it knew better than they did what they wanted to listen to.)

[Zaklex.6308]

@"Zedek.8932" said:I will never understand why people just "rent" things nowadays. People rent games from Steam, what if the servers are turned off? Do you think the games will keep running without a connection sooner or later? It's their copy protection after all. Yes, the offline mode exists, but I don't trust it, especially since savegames are often in the cloud. They literally want to you to force to stay online.

Excelsior.

So, not only can you play in offline mode(it works fine by the way), but you can also set most games to save to your HD/SDD instead of the cloud...therefore not renting anything...and do you know how many servers would have to be shutdown, I'm sure Steam has redundancy on top of redundancy, after all, those servers are the lifeblood of the company(and I don't see it going anywhere, anytime soon).

[Ashen.2907]

@Danikat.8537 said:It might well be possible to upgrade your computer for a lot less than you think, if you just buy the parts you need, even if they're major parts. A few years back I replaced my motherboard, CPU and graphics card and it cost me about £700 in total (most of which was the graphics card). The end result was a computer that would have cost me about £2000 if I'd bought the whole thing new. Even if you only re-use the case and the external bits (mouse, keyboard, screen etc.) you'll save a lot.

And as long as you take your time and follow the instructions building a PC really isn't as difficult as it might seem. Ok I did mess up connecting one of the power wires so when I first turned it on nothing happened, but that was easy to fix, and I always forget how hard you have to shove RAM to actually get it in. All the stuff people warned me about, like installing the CPU, was incredibly simple.

This.

Buying the components and installing them yourself (or bugging that one friend that does this sort of stuff for himself) can be relatively inexpensive.

But if the cloud solution works for you, go for it.

[TamX.1870]

@Faaris.8013 said:It's kind of funny how we went from terminals to personal computers and now we are going back to terminals (which often appear as browsers).

It will be like that always. Terminals - central computing - allows simpler maintenance and such, while distributed computing - personal computers connected together - allow higher total processing power, while in some cases it cannot be fully utilized.

@Faaris.8013 said:With virtualization and fast Internet, why not.

The current future trend in cloud computing is so called edge computing. It basically means a shift from servers back to clients. In this specific case, playing a game via Internet, it is all about which one is faster: your GPU or your network adapter/ISP. Current games put lots of load to GPUs, so much that most games (including GW2) put pretty small load to my CPU, and do not usually benefit that much from multicore processors. Your multicore processors are there basically only to allow you to surf in internet while playing. The more realistic effects we want, the more pressure it puts to calculate one pixel in the screen and the cheaper it comes just to transfer that pixel from some large GPU farm to your computer. But I still think that the next big thing in this cloud business will be that edge computing, even that you can make old computers with poor GPU to show some remotely rendered graphics. Cloud computing itself is a sort of "edge computing of servers" (distributed computing).

[Tolmos.8395]

Two things to add to this conversation

A) Cloud computing will be more than powerful enough to do what you need to do, but keep latency in mind. You already have, in MMOs, the latency from you to the game. Now you have 4 points of latency. You -> cloud gaming computer -> guild wars 2 -> back to the ground gaming computer -> back to you. That's a lot of node chit-chat to keep in mind. Definitely not enough to make the game unplayable, but I doubt it would be as comfortable as playing directly.

B) This is a 2012 game, so a computer worth thousands of euros would be overkill by far. My wife got the flu this week, and I loaded up an old Acer E5 laptop that I purchased last year for $500 with the game, so she could play in bed. I got it as a work laptop, with no expectation of it to play anything. It did great. Not everything maxed @ 60fps great, but this is a DirectX 9 game so that's already an uphill climb for most hardware.

The point is, even a $1000 gaming computer will run laps around what this game actually needs to run. Done get caught up in trying to build something that can max out Black Desert Online when you're just trying to make ye ole Guild Wars 2 run smoothly and look purty. That can be done for far less.

[Rezzet.3614]

An excellent cheap graphics card is the 1050ti you can grab one for 150$ and its so efficient it doesnt even require cables on it

[Ben K.6238]

@TamX.1870 said:Current games put lots of load to GPUs, so much that most games (including GW2) put pretty small load to my CPU, and do not usually benefit that much from multicore processors. Your multicore processors are there basically only to allow you to surf in internet while playing.

That's diametrically opposed to my experience - upgraded from a 5-6 year old GPU and I got 10% better FPS in GW2. Then I upgraded the 8-9 year old CPU to a multithreading i7 and my FPS increased by 200-300%.

Other games saw considerably better performance improvement from the video card upgrade, but GW2 is very CPU-heavy. That's something I've heard from a number of other friends who have looked into this as well.

[TamX.1870]

@Tolmos.8395 said:A) Cloud computing will be more than powerful enough to do what you need to do, but keep latency in mind.

Cloud computing is nothing more than distributed computing. It was originally a bunch of technology to virtualize a server - logically, you connect to one server, but physically you have lots of computers to share the load. It will follow the theories and practices of all studies past 50-80 years about the subject. That is why clouds came, and that is why they talk so much about that edge computing today.

@Tolmos.8395 said:You already have, in MMOs, the latency from you to the game. Now you have 4 points of latency. You -> cloud gaming computer -> guild wars 2 -> back to the ground gaming computer -> back to you.

This is absolutely true. In real time things like games it is not only about bandwidth and such, but more about responsiveness and latency. I have 10MB network. What I see is that GW2 transfers like 2-3 kB per second. So, it is far more up to latency than average network speed. It is totally different case when you are e.g. watching netflix or alike, because there latency will not hurt you - the content is premade, it can be transferred you in suitable chunks, and you dont see latency unlike in games.

B) This is a 2012 game, so a computer worth thousands of euros would be overkill by far. My wife got the flu this week, and I loaded up an old Acer E5 laptop that I purchased last year for $500 with the game, so she could play in bed. I got it as a work laptop, with no expectation of it to play anything. It did great. Not everything maxed @ 60fps great, but this is a DirectX 9 game so that's already an uphill climb for most hardware.

I fully agree. Most if not all MMOs are not designed to high-end computers (would be bad to their revenue).

@Ben K.6238 said:That's diametrically opposed to my experience - upgraded from a 5-6 year old GPU and I got 10% better FPS in GW2. Then I upgraded the 8-9 year old CPU to a multithreading i7 and my FPS increased by 200-300%.

Other games saw considerably better performance improvement from the video card upgrade, but GW2 is very CPU-heavy. That's something I've heard from a number of other friends who have looked into this as well.

Well, yes, GW2 is more CPU hog than other games that I have played, but I can still say, that when got a dedicated graphics board after played with integrated one, it made big difference. But I can think that games like GW2 do not take everything out from GPU. It would be too restricting to players with very variable computer specs. I can only tell that upgrading my GPU affected a lot, and that GW2 is not taking considerable amounts of my CPU time based on the system monitoring. More than some other game, yes, but not enough to bring my CPU to its knees.

EDIT: I want to add, that adding eye candy does not affect to my CPU usage. I cant measure GPU usage atm, but based on the fact that w/ integrated GPU it was impossible to add eye candy and with dedicated - few years old - GPU it does not affect to CPU usage, I could say that GPU matters as long as you want to have better visual outlook.

[Malediktus.9250]

the latency will be horrible since internet routing is even slower than light speed

[GDchiaScrub.3241]

It's fine for single player experiences, or non-competitive co-op games. Anything that requires a good internet will of course be a pain.

[Cobrakon.3108]

I tried cloud gaming a couple years back, it was called O something. Anyways It wasn't quite ready for commercial release. Anybody who cares about response times will not like this type of service. It might be okay for casual game play and certain instances where responsiveness is not as much of a concern.

That's one of the technical issues that's holding the tech back but lets talk about the big can of worms. Cloud computing has the ability to invade privacy like never before. If your using local apps and sending info over the internet yes it can be looked at but first it needs to be analyzed and unpacked to be able to read it. With these streaming cloud gaming services, the live stream of what your doing in the game originates from their server so it makes it much easier to snoop.

The whole concept of cloud computing removes power and possession away from the player and gives the companies more control.

As long as these kinds of services are optional then I don't mind. If games start becoming streaming exclusive, I wont be playing them.

[Avenroot.1693]

Hi,

I currently use Parsec cloud computing to play GW2. I was skeptical at first but I have to say the results have been very good. The graphics and gameplay are excellent with an occasional drop in framerate due to a disturbance in my connection (maybe). The most annoying is the audio. It seems to "flicker" more than the video. However, that all said I would give it a 4 out of 5-star user experience. No, it is not as good as having your own dedicated rig but it is a definite option that works very well.

Just FYI the reason I choose to try a cloud computer is that my main computer is a Mac and although GW2 does play on a Mac some of the games I enjoy playing don't. (Gwent for example). The other reason is the disk space on my Mac is limited to my development projects and such. I simply don't have space on my HD. Cloud computing is a nice option for this. And finally, I would add that I can play GW2 on my mobile device via Parsec cloud computing which I must say was a very nice option. I also play other games like Gwent on my mobile device via cloud computing when there is no app for such a game. Depending on your gaming choice it is a nice option and works very well.

Hope that helps. :)

[Steve The Cynic.3217]

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Well, i guess it should perform faster if you have a pretty good connection (i'd say you'd probably need like a optic 100/100 mbps).

That sort of thing exists. I have 1 Gbps down / 300 Mbps up (Mbps = megabits per second, not mbps = millibits per second). Of course, I live in one of the inner burbs of one of the largest cities in France, but fast fibre home Internet connections do exist elsewhere.

[Dawdler.8521]

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Well, i guess it should perform faster

if

you have a pretty good connection (i'd say you'd probably need like a optic 100/100 mbps).

That sort of thing exists. I have 1 Gbps down / 300 Mbps up (Mbps = megabits per second, not mbps = millibits per second). Of course, I live in one of the inner burbs of one of the largest cities in France, but fast fibre home Internet connections

do

exist elsewhere.In civilized countries 100Mbps is pretty much the cheapest shittiest connection you can get, heh.

Well I guess some can get like 50Mbps via wired phone connections since no one use them anymore.

[Vigio.4935]

So did anybody tried vortex cloud gaming and share his ping?I will upgrate to 50mbps when contract ends this september and was wondering if my target should be buying a new pc or invest on cloud gaming. (Greece here)I read somewhere that google will use some different rooting to lower the ping which could result to an even lower ping than loading games from local pcs, but all theories.Really would like to hear some stories on the subject.

[Yamazuki.6073]

@"Vigio.4935" said:So did anybody tried vortex cloud gaming and share his ping?I will upgrate to 50mbps when contract ends this september and was wondering if my target should be buying a new pc or invest on cloud gaming. (Greece here)I read somewhere that google will use some different rooting to lower the ping which could result to an even lower ping than loading games from local pcs, but all theories.Really would like to hear some stories on the subject.

Google would require having servers in a bunch of different locations, which doesn't work well with all games, and mainly works well for single player games. I tried Google's beta for AC: Odyssey, and even with "100 mbs" internet, there was still noticeable delay (server was a couple cities over, ~30ping), and that was before taking into account the random ping spikes.

Using these services only makes sense for people who absolutely can't get any sort of financing on getting a new desktop/laptop.