First look: Nvidia GeForce Now brings premium gaming to Mac
AppleInsider goes hands on with the latest beta version of Nvidia GeForce Now, a cloud gaming service that promises to deliver high-end gaming experiences to Mac.
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1) Will they have overseas servers (as I live in Australia and the lag would be in the 100's of milliseconds at best if the server is in the US)?
2) What connection to the internet is required for fast speeds? (ADSL 2 and above?)
Cheers Dr Hawk
"To participate in the beta, you need a compatible Mac computer with a 25 Mbps Internet connection, and to be located in the continental United States or Canada. "
So initially, it seems that there is no viable service outside the U.S. or Canada.
And very little within the USA, since most of our internet infrastructure is still pretty poor, unless you live in the very few places with fiber.
It says up to 16 GPUs per server blade. They use Pascal GPUs now. Each 1060 is as fast as a PS4 Pro so 16 PS4s per blade. They can also virtualize the GPUs, up to 16 users per GPU, some of the server GPUs have multiple GPU cores:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/grid-technology.html
Most games don't need more than 4TFLOPs for maximum quality at 1080p so some higher-end GPUs could be shared by multiple users for lower-end titles:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1060.167603.0.html
One of the difficulties is making this profitable. The demand isn't constant throughout the day, it will be almost zero during the working part of the day and then high demand for 4-6 hours and then zero overnight but they need to keep the systems operating all the time. These services all have long beta phases to figure out what the demand is going to be and if it can be sustained financially.
NVidia has an advantage in being able to use their grid for other tasks like computing so they can make money that way too. Their cloud gaming prices are high at around $0.80 per hour but other services have run out of money by pricing too low. OnLive went bankrupt years ago, Sony bought both them and Gakai and currently run Playstation Now. NVidia rebranded to Geforce Now after Sony launched their Playstation Now service.
This service applies to PC users, Steam has over 125m active users. Not all of them need the power to play higher-end games and the ones that do typically already have a setup capable of it, they haven't been waiting for a solution. The appeal would mostly be for whatever portion of low-end/laptop users want to play high-end titles. If NVidia targets 10 million gamers and each server blade can handle 16 users and there are 20 blades per rack, they'd need 30k racks e.g 10k per data center. They wouldn't need to target 10m concurrent, Steam peaks at 14m.
They can build a 1060 for ~$150, that would be a $1.5b cost for all the gamers and as GPUs improve in performance, they can satisfy more gamers with fewer GPUs. To make a profit at $0.8/hour, they'd need every one of 10m users to play 187 hours of games. Average games only take 10-20 hours each, a handful can take a long time. It's easy to see why the other companies went out of business.
NVidia is better suited for this than the other services because they make the GPUs, the other services had to buy the GPUs from AMD/NVidia and NVidia has its own money to invest in it.
These services will likely only ever be a small portion of the overall games industry but it's a great option to have for low-end Mac users because it saves having to install Bootcamp. Using it for an occasional demanding game would be ideal. Mac ports are typically more expensive anyway so this way you can get a game as soon as it comes out or in a sale and just add $15-20 to the price to be able to play it under macOS without putting any load on the hardware at all.
I'm not sure why the video says 200fps on a 12" MacBook (aside from click-bait). There's no way you're going to get 200fps to that MacBook.
Interesting, though, for some gaming for people who aren't fanatical about it... if they live in the right places or this services becomes distributed enough.