Apple's block of Xcloud & Stadia game streaming apps is at best consumer-hostile

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  • Reply 161 of 197
    avon b7avon b7 Posts: 7,959member
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 
  • Reply 162 of 197
    tmaytmay Posts: 6,453member
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
  • Reply 163 of 197
    avon b7avon b7 Posts: 7,959member
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
    You do realise that the entire cloud based gaming roll out is geared towards 5G, don't you? 

    It cannot reach its full potential without it. 

    What on earth were you thinking?

    4.5G just cannot fulfil the potential of cloud based high bandwidth gaming. 

    Which is why I pointed out QoE and QoS. It is baked into 5G. Along with network slicing. 

    There is no 'sales pitch', just reality. 

    You also realise that 5G absolutely depends on ultrafast fibre backhaul, right?  And that during 2020 virtually all Chinese 5G installations will be SA and existing NSA installations will be upgraded to support SA. 

    That is what will allow cloud based gaming to progress. 




    muthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 164 of 197
    canukstormcanukstorm Posts: 2,732member
    Beats said:
    Pascalxx said:
    @Beats ;
    Thanks for your response! I do see the point that an inventor or owner should have some control over their platform. At the same time, there is some merit in the argument that restrictive policies on platforms may stifle innovation or competition once that platform's size or power grows beyond a certain degree. That's the whole reason why there is antitrust regulation in many countries. To what extent a government should be able to intervene is a difficult question.

    I'm pretty sure that Amazon is investigated for its own practices, but what Amazon does or does not do doesn't affect whether what Apple does is right or beneficial to its users. Amazon being worse doesn't make another company with similar behavior 'good'; it just makes it comparatively 'less bad'. However, I'm not even sure Apple is being uncompetitive in this case. There may be legitimate concerns, other than financial, that are driving Apple's decisions. That is why this discussion is so interesting to me.

    i didn't say amazon was worse, nor was my intent to compar them directly. It was an analogy as it's obvious the posters here do not own a store nor invented anything, so analogies help them understand.

    Here's another analogy that hits close to home.

    How would you feel if the government mandated that your neighbors can use your property for yard sales. You get ZERO percent. The idea is, because you paid for your home you should be able to spread your accomplishments with others. Fair?

    "I'm not even sure Apple is being uncompetitive in this case."
    Apple wasn't even gonna allow 3rd party apps when they invented iPhone. That would have been their choice. Do you really think if App Store was not successful, that the government and corporations would be telling Apple what to do with their business?
    That was Steve Jobs' choice and his choice only.  His original choice was web app & he only changed his mind when the rest of the leadership team convinced him that he was wrong.  And boy was he wrong.  Just like he was wrong when he didn't want iTunes on Windows and it wasn't until Eddy Cue convinced him otherwise.  Steve Jobs was a visionary, no doubt, but he was very dogmatic and stubborn on many things.
    muthuk_vanalingammdriftmeyerelijahg
  • Reply 165 of 197
    BeatsBeats Posts: 3,073member
    Beats said:
    Pascalxx said:
    @Beats ;
    Thanks for your response! I do see the point that an inventor or owner should have some control over their platform. At the same time, there is some merit in the argument that restrictive policies on platforms may stifle innovation or competition once that platform's size or power grows beyond a certain degree. That's the whole reason why there is antitrust regulation in many countries. To what extent a government should be able to intervene is a difficult question.

    I'm pretty sure that Amazon is investigated for its own practices, but what Amazon does or does not do doesn't affect whether what Apple does is right or beneficial to its users. Amazon being worse doesn't make another company with similar behavior 'good'; it just makes it comparatively 'less bad'. However, I'm not even sure Apple is being uncompetitive in this case. There may be legitimate concerns, other than financial, that are driving Apple's decisions. That is why this discussion is so interesting to me.

    i didn't say amazon was worse, nor was my intent to compar them directly. It was an analogy as it's obvious the posters here do not own a store nor invented anything, so analogies help them understand.

    Here's another analogy that hits close to home.

    How would you feel if the government mandated that your neighbors can use your property for yard sales. You get ZERO percent. The idea is, because you paid for your home you should be able to spread your accomplishments with others. Fair?

    "I'm not even sure Apple is being uncompetitive in this case."
    Apple wasn't even gonna allow 3rd party apps when they invented iPhone. That would have been their choice. Do you really think if App Store was not successful, that the government and corporations would be telling Apple what to do with their business?
    That was Steve Jobs' choice and his choice only.  His original choice was web app & he only changed his mind when the rest of the leadership team convinced him that he was wrong.  And boy was he wrong.  Just like he was wrong when he didn't want iTunes on Windows and it wasn't until Eddy Cue convinced him otherwise.  Steve Jobs was a visionary, no doubt, but he was very dogmatic and stubborn on many things.

    Yup.....

    So as 3rd party developers they should be grateful.

    Heck Apple invented iPhone and made people millionaires and they're still bit**ing.
  • Reply 166 of 197
    BeatsBeats Posts: 3,073member
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    And MS is better than both, Apple and Google in gaming.   I think we can agree in that... ;)

    MS would trade Xbox for the App Store, iPhone and iPad. So, no.
    mdriftmeyer
  • Reply 167 of 197
    BeatsBeats Posts: 3,073member
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios....

    Wait, what the hell???
    muthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 168 of 197
    tmaytmay Posts: 6,453member
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
    You do realise that the entire cloud based gaming roll out is geared towards 5G, don't you? 

    It cannot reach its full potential without it. 

    What on earth were you thinking?

    4.5G just cannot fulfil the potential of cloud based high bandwidth gaming. 

    Which is why I pointed out QoE and QoS. It is baked into 5G. Along with network slicing. 

    There is no 'sales pitch', just reality. 

    You also realise that 5G absolutely depends on ultrafast fibre backhaul, right?  And that during 2020 virtually all Chinese 5G installations will be SA and existing NSA installations will be upgraded to support SA. 

    That is what will allow cloud based gaming to progress. 




    You may be correct that it needs 5G AND a local server to get the latency down, but playing at 60 to 130 ms, and even slower, would be an awful experience, and that's typical for Stadia on "basic" 35 Mbps networks. If anything, my back of the envelope calculation of 16 ms and 60fps doesn't even appear possible, and PC gamers are used to essentially no latency and up to 1000 fps.


    https://qz.com/1752223/google-stadia-is-not-the-cloud-gaming-future-we-were-promised/

    "The Washington Post’s Gene Park, who reviewed the console on a computer, a 4K television, and a Google Pixel smartphone, described “horrendous latency” and “buggy, quick” cuts while playing games on anything other than the Pixel. For each test, Park said his internet speeds were higher than Stadia’s recommended 35 Mbps. Forbes reported“periodic stuttering issues with massive resolution and frame drops” while hooked up to internet speeds that ranged between 200 and 350 Mbps".


    Meh, Apple is absolutely correct to disallow game streaming, at least for the near term.




    edited August 2020 macplusplusmdriftmeyer
  • Reply 169 of 197
    danvmdanvm Posts: 1,465member
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    And MS is better than both, Apple and Google in gaming.   I think we can agree in that... ;)

    MS would trade Xbox for the App Store, iPhone and iPad. So, no.
    And Apple would trade Apple Arcade and Apple TV for and XBox Live / xCloud / GamePass and XBox, What's your point?
    edited August 2020 cflcardsfan80razmatazelijahg
  • Reply 170 of 197

    Wow, I'd never thought I'd see an editorial like this on AI, I enjoyed it thoroughly. Nitpick: Stadia uses H.264 and VP9, not H.265. I think H.265 is way too risky for Google to implement anywhere. And now that Apple is getting more and more into video delivery services I suspect they'll also walk away from HEVC as per their AV1 participation.

    As for commenting further on the article, I don't have time to handle the grief my consumer leaning views would cause me. But for those that do comment, please continue :smile: , it's been fun reading.

    Pascalxx
  • Reply 171 of 197
    kimberlykimberly Posts: 434member
    I'm a hardware and software user, and my distaste for financials is well known as they are a profound waste of time and effort. I would rather feed my leg to a wood chipper with it still attached, than write what you're asking for, here.

    Assuming your question is legitimate, and not some kind of "aha, gotcha!" that is too subtle for me to process properly, the long and the short of it is, Apple pays what it is required to pay across the world. It makes legal arrangements with governments, and utilizes the tax laws that are already written to benefit large companies to their advantage.

    Want Apple to pay X units of currency in Y country? Fix the tax laws in Y country so they have to, and see what happens.
    I've posted this before ... circa 1991 Australia's richest person Kerry Packer facing down a Senate inquiry:
    When asked about his company's tax-minimisation schemes, he replied: "Of course I am minimising my tax. And if anybody in this country doesn't minimise their tax, they want their heads read, because as a government, I can tell you you're not spending it that well that we should be donating extra!"
    bikerdude
  • Reply 172 of 197
    kimberly said: I've posted this before ... circa 1991 Australia's richest person Kerry Packer facing down a Senate inquiry:
    When asked about his company's tax-minimisation schemes, he replied: "Of course I am minimising my tax. And if anybody in this country doesn't minimise their tax, they want their heads read, because as a government, I can tell you you're not spending it that well that we should be donating extra!"
    Oh yes, all those independent business people who rush to the government to get their LLC designation and then complain to the public that the government gets in their way.
    cflcardsfan80mdriftmeyer
  • Reply 173 of 197
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,569member
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
    You do realise that the entire cloud based gaming roll out is geared towards 5G, don't you? 

    It cannot reach its full potential without it. 

    What on earth were you thinking?

    4.5G just cannot fulfil the potential of cloud based high bandwidth gaming. 

    Which is why I pointed out QoE and QoS. It is baked into 5G. Along with network slicing. 

    There is no 'sales pitch', just reality. 

    You also realise that 5G absolutely depends on ultrafast fibre backhaul, right?  And that during 2020 virtually all Chinese 5G installations will be SA and existing NSA installations will be upgraded to support SA. 

    That is what will allow cloud based gaming to progress. 




    You may be correct that it needs 5G AND a local server to get the latency down, but playing at 60 to 130 ms, and even slower, would be an awful experience, and that's typical for Stadia on "basic" 35 Mbps networks. If anything, my back of the envelope calculation of 16 ms and 60fps doesn't even appear possible, and PC gamers are used to essentially no latency and up to 1000 fps.


    https://qz.com/1752223/google-stadia-is-not-the-cloud-gaming-future-we-were-promised/

    "The Washington Post’s Gene Park, who reviewed the console on a computer, a 4K television, and a Google Pixel smartphone, described “horrendous latency” and “buggy, quick” cuts while playing games on anything other than the Pixel. For each test, Park said his internet speeds were higher than Stadia’s recommended 35 Mbps. Forbes reported“periodic stuttering issues with massive resolution and frame drops” while hooked up to internet speeds that ranged between 200 and 350 Mbps".


    Meh, Apple is absolutely correct to disallow game streaming, at least for the near term.




    Tmay, there's been a lot of changes since the service first launched last November. You really should look at reviews much more recent.

    This April one is from IGN who knows a little something about gaming. 
    https://www.ign.com/articles/google-stadia-review

    "There is something undeniably cool about playing a game like Doom Eternal on a MacBook that can barely handle Chrome on a good day... With the right internet connection, games looks phenomenal. The games we’ve tested look about as good as XBox One X or PS4 Pro.

    If your internet is dodgy, the first thing to go is your resolution, then your gameplay. When I was near my router, the games I played performed flawlessly. I listened to Spotify, streamed YouTube TV, and played the game, but my connection remained stable. In fact, in a dozen or so hours of testing, I only experienced a handful of quality drops and brief input stutter, and each recovered in a matter of seconds... When I moved to the furthest corner of my house, it was a different story. Stadia was nearly unplayable...
    Even so, I’m still pretty impressed with Stadia’s performance. When tested alongside GeForce Now, it was far less prone to latency or GeForce Now’s disruptive rubber-banding effects." 

    Google Stadia does a great job of minimizing the usual latency that comes with game streaming services. That said, latency isn’t completely eliminated as there’s still a bit of a perceptible delay, but it’s far shorter than the half-second or more of lag I’m used to experiencing with Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Project xCloud.

    I ran a few tests with Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat 11 to see how much more latency we got on Stadia versus playing the game locally on an Xbox One X and I came away somewhat impressed.

    Latency with the Stadia controller and service sat around 150-175ms while playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Comparatively, the Xbox One X’s latency sat at 100ms. In Mortal Kombat 11, Google’s game streaming added about 50ms more latency compared to playing on console."

    Things aren't quite as horrid as you're leading us to believe. I'm guessing that when you tried it  for yourself it must have been last year. at it's release. What's your internet speed and have you tried Stadia more recently? You should. 
    edited August 2020 cflcardsfan80elijahg
  • Reply 174 of 197
    tmaytmay Posts: 6,453member
    gatorguy said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
    You do realise that the entire cloud based gaming roll out is geared towards 5G, don't you? 

    It cannot reach its full potential without it. 

    What on earth were you thinking?

    4.5G just cannot fulfil the potential of cloud based high bandwidth gaming. 

    Which is why I pointed out QoE and QoS. It is baked into 5G. Along with network slicing. 

    There is no 'sales pitch', just reality. 

    You also realise that 5G absolutely depends on ultrafast fibre backhaul, right?  And that during 2020 virtually all Chinese 5G installations will be SA and existing NSA installations will be upgraded to support SA. 

    That is what will allow cloud based gaming to progress. 




    You may be correct that it needs 5G AND a local server to get the latency down, but playing at 60 to 130 ms, and even slower, would be an awful experience, and that's typical for Stadia on "basic" 35 Mbps networks. If anything, my back of the envelope calculation of 16 ms and 60fps doesn't even appear possible, and PC gamers are used to essentially no latency and up to 1000 fps.


    https://qz.com/1752223/google-stadia-is-not-the-cloud-gaming-future-we-were-promised/

    "The Washington Post’s Gene Park, who reviewed the console on a computer, a 4K television, and a Google Pixel smartphone, described “horrendous latency” and “buggy, quick” cuts while playing games on anything other than the Pixel. For each test, Park said his internet speeds were higher than Stadia’s recommended 35 Mbps. Forbes reported“periodic stuttering issues with massive resolution and frame drops” while hooked up to internet speeds that ranged between 200 and 350 Mbps".


    Meh, Apple is absolutely correct to disallow game streaming, at least for the near term.




    Tmay, there's been a lot of changes since the service first launched last November. You really should look at reviews much more recent.

    This April one is from IGN who knows a little something about gaming. 
    https://www.ign.com/articles/google-stadia-review

    "There is something undeniably cool about playing a game like Doom Eternal on a MacBook that can barely handle Chrome on a good day... With the right internet connection, games looks phenomenal. The games we’ve tested look about as good as XBox One X or PS4 Pro.

    If your internet is dodgy, the first thing to go is your resolution, then your gameplay. When I was near my router, the games I played performed flawlessly. I listened to Spotify, streamed YouTube TV, and played the game, but my connection remained stable. In fact, in a dozen or so hours of testing, I only experienced a handful of quality drops and brief input stutter, and each recovered in a matter of seconds... When I moved to the furthest corner of my house, it was a different story. Stadia was nearly unplayable...
    Even so, I’m still pretty impressed with Stadia’s performance. When tested alongside GeForce Now, it was far less prone to latency or GeForce Now’s disruptive rubber-banding effects." 

    Google Stadia does a great job of minimizing the usual latency that comes with game streaming services. That said, latency isn’t completely eliminated as there’s still a bit of a perceptible delay, but it’s far shorter than the half-second or more of lag I’m used to experiencing with Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Project xCloud.

    I ran a few tests with Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat 11 to see how much more latency we got on Stadia versus playing the game locally on an Xbox One X and I came away somewhat impressed.

    Latency with the Stadia controller and service sat around 150-175ms while playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Comparatively, the Xbox One X’s latency sat at 100ms. In Mortal Kombat 11, Google’s game streaming added about 50ms more latency compared to playing on console."

    Things aren't quite as horrid as you're leading us to believe. I'm guessing that when you tried it  for yourself it must have been last year. at it's release. What's your internet speed and have you tried Stadia more recently? You should. 
    I'm sure the what you are saying is true, but, it is also true, that these streaming services do suffer from latency issues. I'm assuming that people just put up with it.

    For the record, 100 ms is 3 frames at 30fps, and 6 frames, at 60fps. That's a lot of granularity that is being lost in responsiveness if your actual gameplay is 10fps.

    I'm assuming that wired controllers have very low latency, so that would be the gold standard of experience on PC or console based games.

    The fact that people are putting up with a half second of latency on GeForce now or xCloud is mind numbing.
    edited August 2020 mdriftmeyer
  • Reply 175 of 197
    XedXed Posts: 2,808member
    tmay said:
    gatorguy said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
    You do realise that the entire cloud based gaming roll out is geared towards 5G, don't you? 

    It cannot reach its full potential without it. 

    What on earth were you thinking?

    4.5G just cannot fulfil the potential of cloud based high bandwidth gaming. 

    Which is why I pointed out QoE and QoS. It is baked into 5G. Along with network slicing. 

    There is no 'sales pitch', just reality. 

    You also realise that 5G absolutely depends on ultrafast fibre backhaul, right?  And that during 2020 virtually all Chinese 5G installations will be SA and existing NSA installations will be upgraded to support SA. 

    That is what will allow cloud based gaming to progress. 




    You may be correct that it needs 5G AND a local server to get the latency down, but playing at 60 to 130 ms, and even slower, would be an awful experience, and that's typical for Stadia on "basic" 35 Mbps networks. If anything, my back of the envelope calculation of 16 ms and 60fps doesn't even appear possible, and PC gamers are used to essentially no latency and up to 1000 fps.


    https://qz.com/1752223/google-stadia-is-not-the-cloud-gaming-future-we-were-promised/

    "The Washington Post’s Gene Park, who reviewed the console on a computer, a 4K television, and a Google Pixel smartphone, described “horrendous latency” and “buggy, quick” cuts while playing games on anything other than the Pixel. For each test, Park said his internet speeds were higher than Stadia’s recommended 35 Mbps. Forbes reported“periodic stuttering issues with massive resolution and frame drops” while hooked up to internet speeds that ranged between 200 and 350 Mbps".


    Meh, Apple is absolutely correct to disallow game streaming, at least for the near term.




    Tmay, there's been a lot of changes since the service first launched last November. You really should look at reviews much more recent.

    This April one is from IGN who knows a little something about gaming. 
    https://www.ign.com/articles/google-stadia-review

    "There is something undeniably cool about playing a game like Doom Eternal on a MacBook that can barely handle Chrome on a good day... With the right internet connection, games looks phenomenal. The games we’ve tested look about as good as XBox One X or PS4 Pro.

    If your internet is dodgy, the first thing to go is your resolution, then your gameplay. When I was near my router, the games I played performed flawlessly. I listened to Spotify, streamed YouTube TV, and played the game, but my connection remained stable. In fact, in a dozen or so hours of testing, I only experienced a handful of quality drops and brief input stutter, and each recovered in a matter of seconds... When I moved to the furthest corner of my house, it was a different story. Stadia was nearly unplayable...
    Even so, I’m still pretty impressed with Stadia’s performance. When tested alongside GeForce Now, it was far less prone to latency or GeForce Now’s disruptive rubber-banding effects." 

    Google Stadia does a great job of minimizing the usual latency that comes with game streaming services. That said, latency isn’t completely eliminated as there’s still a bit of a perceptible delay, but it’s far shorter than the half-second or more of lag I’m used to experiencing with Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Project xCloud.

    I ran a few tests with Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat 11 to see how much more latency we got on Stadia versus playing the game locally on an Xbox One X and I came away somewhat impressed.

    Latency with the Stadia controller and service sat around 150-175ms while playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Comparatively, the Xbox One X’s latency sat at 100ms. In Mortal Kombat 11, Google’s game streaming added about 50ms more latency compared to playing on console."

    Things aren't quite as horrid as you're leading us to believe. I'm guessing that when you tried it  for yourself it must have been last year. at it's release. What's your internet speed and have you tried Stadia more recently? You should. 
    I'm sure the what you are saying is true, but, it is also true, that these streaming services do suffer from latency issues. I'm assuming that people just put up with it.

    For the record, 100 ms is 3 frames at 30fps, and 6 frames, at 60fps. That's a lot of granularity that is being lost in responsiveness if your actual gameplay is 10fps.

    I'm assuming that wired controllers have very low latency, so that would be the gold standard of experience on PC or console based games.

    The fact that people are putting up with a half second of latency on GeForce now or xCloud is mind numbing.
    That's like people claiming the iPhone display is "second rate" because it's PPI is slightly lower than some other smartphone. I know console gamers that bought Satdia and love it. If the experience is good then why does it matter if one aspect isn't as good as a different product. 
    cflcardsfan80avon b7elijahg
  • Reply 176 of 197
    tmaytmay Posts: 6,453member
    gatorguy said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
    You do realise that the entire cloud based gaming roll out is geared towards 5G, don't you? 

    It cannot reach its full potential without it. 

    What on earth were you thinking?

    4.5G just cannot fulfil the potential of cloud based high bandwidth gaming. 

    Which is why I pointed out QoE and QoS. It is baked into 5G. Along with network slicing. 

    There is no 'sales pitch', just reality. 

    You also realise that 5G absolutely depends on ultrafast fibre backhaul, right?  And that during 2020 virtually all Chinese 5G installations will be SA and existing NSA installations will be upgraded to support SA. 

    That is what will allow cloud based gaming to progress. 




    You may be correct that it needs 5G AND a local server to get the latency down, but playing at 60 to 130 ms, and even slower, would be an awful experience, and that's typical for Stadia on "basic" 35 Mbps networks. If anything, my back of the envelope calculation of 16 ms and 60fps doesn't even appear possible, and PC gamers are used to essentially no latency and up to 1000 fps.


    https://qz.com/1752223/google-stadia-is-not-the-cloud-gaming-future-we-were-promised/

    "The Washington Post’s Gene Park, who reviewed the console on a computer, a 4K television, and a Google Pixel smartphone, described “horrendous latency” and “buggy, quick” cuts while playing games on anything other than the Pixel. For each test, Park said his internet speeds were higher than Stadia’s recommended 35 Mbps. Forbes reported“periodic stuttering issues with massive resolution and frame drops” while hooked up to internet speeds that ranged between 200 and 350 Mbps".


    Meh, Apple is absolutely correct to disallow game streaming, at least for the near term.




    Tmay, there's been a lot of changes since the service first launched last November. You really should look at reviews much more recent.

    This April one is from IGN who knows a little something about gaming. 
    https://www.ign.com/articles/google-stadia-review

    "There is something undeniably cool about playing a game like Doom Eternal on a MacBook that can barely handle Chrome on a good day... With the right internet connection, games looks phenomenal. The games we’ve tested look about as good as XBox One X or PS4 Pro.

    If your internet is dodgy, the first thing to go is your resolution, then your gameplay. When I was near my router, the games I played performed flawlessly. I listened to Spotify, streamed YouTube TV, and played the game, but my connection remained stable. In fact, in a dozen or so hours of testing, I only experienced a handful of quality drops and brief input stutter, and each recovered in a matter of seconds... When I moved to the furthest corner of my house, it was a different story. Stadia was nearly unplayable...
    Even so, I’m still pretty impressed with Stadia’s performance. When tested alongside GeForce Now, it was far less prone to latency or GeForce Now’s disruptive rubber-banding effects." 

    Google Stadia does a great job of minimizing the usual latency that comes with game streaming services. That said, latency isn’t completely eliminated as there’s still a bit of a perceptible delay, but it’s far shorter than the half-second or more of lag I’m used to experiencing with Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Project xCloud.

    I ran a few tests with Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat 11 to see how much more latency we got on Stadia versus playing the game locally on an Xbox One X and I came away somewhat impressed.

    Latency with the Stadia controller and service sat around 150-175ms while playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Comparatively, the Xbox One X’s latency sat at 100ms. In Mortal Kombat 11, Google’s game streaming added about 50ms more latency compared to playing on console."

    Things aren't quite as horrid as you're leading us to believe. I'm guessing that when you tried it  for yourself it must have been last year. at it's release. What's your internet speed and have you tried Stadia more recently? You should. 
    Actually, I'm not a gamer, but I understand latency, hence why I'm questioning all of these posters that are stating that latency is low.

    It is likely true that a Stadia user with wired connections to his equipment, a wired control, very good internet performance, a VPN, close to a Stadia server, and running on an appropriate gaming PC, could get latency under 30 ms, which would equate to 30 fps gameplay. 

    A casual user will never do all of those optimizations, so will routinely see 150 to 200 ms latency, or worse.

    If they're happy with that, then these game streaming platforms should be very successful, though I still don't see that Apple should be part of that.


  • Reply 177 of 197
    XedXed Posts: 2,808member
    tmay said:
    gatorguy said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
    You do realise that the entire cloud based gaming roll out is geared towards 5G, don't you? 

    It cannot reach its full potential without it. 

    What on earth were you thinking?

    4.5G just cannot fulfil the potential of cloud based high bandwidth gaming. 

    Which is why I pointed out QoE and QoS. It is baked into 5G. Along with network slicing. 

    There is no 'sales pitch', just reality. 

    You also realise that 5G absolutely depends on ultrafast fibre backhaul, right?  And that during 2020 virtually all Chinese 5G installations will be SA and existing NSA installations will be upgraded to support SA. 

    That is what will allow cloud based gaming to progress. 




    You may be correct that it needs 5G AND a local server to get the latency down, but playing at 60 to 130 ms, and even slower, would be an awful experience, and that's typical for Stadia on "basic" 35 Mbps networks. If anything, my back of the envelope calculation of 16 ms and 60fps doesn't even appear possible, and PC gamers are used to essentially no latency and up to 1000 fps.


    https://qz.com/1752223/google-stadia-is-not-the-cloud-gaming-future-we-were-promised/

    "The Washington Post’s Gene Park, who reviewed the console on a computer, a 4K television, and a Google Pixel smartphone, described “horrendous latency” and “buggy, quick” cuts while playing games on anything other than the Pixel. For each test, Park said his internet speeds were higher than Stadia’s recommended 35 Mbps. Forbes reported“periodic stuttering issues with massive resolution and frame drops” while hooked up to internet speeds that ranged between 200 and 350 Mbps".


    Meh, Apple is absolutely correct to disallow game streaming, at least for the near term.




    Tmay, there's been a lot of changes since the service first launched last November. You really should look at reviews much more recent.

    This April one is from IGN who knows a little something about gaming. 
    https://www.ign.com/articles/google-stadia-review

    "There is something undeniably cool about playing a game like Doom Eternal on a MacBook that can barely handle Chrome on a good day... With the right internet connection, games looks phenomenal. The games we’ve tested look about as good as XBox One X or PS4 Pro.

    If your internet is dodgy, the first thing to go is your resolution, then your gameplay. When I was near my router, the games I played performed flawlessly. I listened to Spotify, streamed YouTube TV, and played the game, but my connection remained stable. In fact, in a dozen or so hours of testing, I only experienced a handful of quality drops and brief input stutter, and each recovered in a matter of seconds... When I moved to the furthest corner of my house, it was a different story. Stadia was nearly unplayable...
    Even so, I’m still pretty impressed with Stadia’s performance. When tested alongside GeForce Now, it was far less prone to latency or GeForce Now’s disruptive rubber-banding effects." 

    Google Stadia does a great job of minimizing the usual latency that comes with game streaming services. That said, latency isn’t completely eliminated as there’s still a bit of a perceptible delay, but it’s far shorter than the half-second or more of lag I’m used to experiencing with Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Project xCloud.

    I ran a few tests with Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat 11 to see how much more latency we got on Stadia versus playing the game locally on an Xbox One X and I came away somewhat impressed.

    Latency with the Stadia controller and service sat around 150-175ms while playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Comparatively, the Xbox One X’s latency sat at 100ms. In Mortal Kombat 11, Google’s game streaming added about 50ms more latency compared to playing on console."

    Things aren't quite as horrid as you're leading us to believe. I'm guessing that when you tried it  for yourself it must have been last year. at it's release. What's your internet speed and have you tried Stadia more recently? You should. 
    Actually, I'm not a gamer, but I understand latency, hence why I'm questioning all of these posters that are stating that latency is low.

    It is likely true that a Stadia user with wired connections to his equipment, a wired control, very good internet performance, a VPN, close to a Stadia server, and running on an appropriate gaming PC, could get latency under 30 ms, which would equate to 30 fps gameplay. 

    A casual user will never do all of those optimizations, so will routinely see 150 to 200 ms latency, or worse.

    If they're happy with that, then these game streaming platforms should be very successful, though I still don't see that Apple should be part of that.
    I don't consider myself a gamer, but there are some games I play. Usually it's Seven Little Words or Good Sudoku or my iDevice, but I also have a Nintendo Switch which I bought specifically for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which is the first 3D, open world video game I've ever played).

    It's a different technical metric, but neither of the aforementioned platforms are the most powerful gaming options on the market. Even coming out after the Xbox One(?) and PS4 the Nintendo Switch wasn't as powerful but I and countless others have found the gameplay for Breath of the Wild to be very enjoyable.

    Personally, I'm hoping that Apple allows the Nintendo Switch controllers to be synced to the Apple TV like they allow for bluetooth  Xbox and PS controllers) so I can give Apple's gaming solutions a whirl. The Nintendo controller does pair with my Mac so I know it is standard bluetooth.
    edited August 2020
  • Reply 178 of 197
    tmaytmay Posts: 6,453member
    Xed said:
    tmay said:
    gatorguy said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
    You do realise that the entire cloud based gaming roll out is geared towards 5G, don't you? 

    It cannot reach its full potential without it. 

    What on earth were you thinking?

    4.5G just cannot fulfil the potential of cloud based high bandwidth gaming. 

    Which is why I pointed out QoE and QoS. It is baked into 5G. Along with network slicing. 

    There is no 'sales pitch', just reality. 

    You also realise that 5G absolutely depends on ultrafast fibre backhaul, right?  And that during 2020 virtually all Chinese 5G installations will be SA and existing NSA installations will be upgraded to support SA. 

    That is what will allow cloud based gaming to progress. 




    You may be correct that it needs 5G AND a local server to get the latency down, but playing at 60 to 130 ms, and even slower, would be an awful experience, and that's typical for Stadia on "basic" 35 Mbps networks. If anything, my back of the envelope calculation of 16 ms and 60fps doesn't even appear possible, and PC gamers are used to essentially no latency and up to 1000 fps.


    https://qz.com/1752223/google-stadia-is-not-the-cloud-gaming-future-we-were-promised/

    "The Washington Post’s Gene Park, who reviewed the console on a computer, a 4K television, and a Google Pixel smartphone, described “horrendous latency” and “buggy, quick” cuts while playing games on anything other than the Pixel. For each test, Park said his internet speeds were higher than Stadia’s recommended 35 Mbps. Forbes reported“periodic stuttering issues with massive resolution and frame drops” while hooked up to internet speeds that ranged between 200 and 350 Mbps".


    Meh, Apple is absolutely correct to disallow game streaming, at least for the near term.




    Tmay, there's been a lot of changes since the service first launched last November. You really should look at reviews much more recent.

    This April one is from IGN who knows a little something about gaming. 
    https://www.ign.com/articles/google-stadia-review

    "There is something undeniably cool about playing a game like Doom Eternal on a MacBook that can barely handle Chrome on a good day... With the right internet connection, games looks phenomenal. The games we’ve tested look about as good as XBox One X or PS4 Pro.

    If your internet is dodgy, the first thing to go is your resolution, then your gameplay. When I was near my router, the games I played performed flawlessly. I listened to Spotify, streamed YouTube TV, and played the game, but my connection remained stable. In fact, in a dozen or so hours of testing, I only experienced a handful of quality drops and brief input stutter, and each recovered in a matter of seconds... When I moved to the furthest corner of my house, it was a different story. Stadia was nearly unplayable...
    Even so, I’m still pretty impressed with Stadia’s performance. When tested alongside GeForce Now, it was far less prone to latency or GeForce Now’s disruptive rubber-banding effects." 

    Google Stadia does a great job of minimizing the usual latency that comes with game streaming services. That said, latency isn’t completely eliminated as there’s still a bit of a perceptible delay, but it’s far shorter than the half-second or more of lag I’m used to experiencing with Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Project xCloud.

    I ran a few tests with Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat 11 to see how much more latency we got on Stadia versus playing the game locally on an Xbox One X and I came away somewhat impressed.

    Latency with the Stadia controller and service sat around 150-175ms while playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Comparatively, the Xbox One X’s latency sat at 100ms. In Mortal Kombat 11, Google’s game streaming added about 50ms more latency compared to playing on console."

    Things aren't quite as horrid as you're leading us to believe. I'm guessing that when you tried it  for yourself it must have been last year. at it's release. What's your internet speed and have you tried Stadia more recently? You should. 
    Actually, I'm not a gamer, but I understand latency, hence why I'm questioning all of these posters that are stating that latency is low.

    It is likely true that a Stadia user with wired connections to his equipment, a wired control, very good internet performance, a VPN, close to a Stadia server, and running on an appropriate gaming PC, could get latency under 30 ms, which would equate to 30 fps gameplay. 

    A casual user will never do all of those optimizations, so will routinely see 150 to 200 ms latency, or worse.

    If they're happy with that, then these game streaming platforms should be very successful, though I still don't see that Apple should be part of that.
    I don't consider myself a gamer, but there are some games I play. Usually it's Seven Little Words or Good Sudoku or my iDevice, but I also have a Nintendo Switch which I bought specifically for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which is the first 3D, open world video game I've ever played).

    It's a different technical metric, but neither of the aforementioned platforms are the most powerful gaming options on the market. Even coming out after the Xbox One(?) and PS4 the Nintendo Switch wasn't as powerful but I and countless others have found the gameplay for Breath of the Wild to be very enjoyable.

    Personally, I'm hoping that Apple allows the Nintendo Switch controllers to be synced to the Apple TV like they allow for bluetooth  Xbox and PS controllers) so I can give Apple's gaming solutions a whirl. The Nintendo controller does pair with my Mac so I know it is standard bluetooth.
    I don't know much about the switch, but if the game itself resides on a device connected on the network, and not the cloud, and if there was an App for the connection, I would think that it would pass.
  • Reply 179 of 197
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,569member
    tmay said:
    gatorguy said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    avon b7 said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    tmay said:
    danvm said:
    Beats said:
    danvm said:
    Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 
    Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.
    Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.
    I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

    His sentence is not wrong. Apple CAN do better than both. Apple just doesn't care about gaming the same way they do hardware innovation. 
    My post is also right when I said ""as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming", specifically when talking about cloud gaming.
    Is Google really better at it, or are you fucking bullshitting us.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrychesbrough/2020/03/03/dont-play-games-with-platformsa-lesson-for-google-stadia/#691214147f24

    "The dominance of the major tech firms is very much in the news these days. Yet even mighty organizations sometimes make mistakes that we all can learn from. One such mistake may be the Google launch of Stadia, an online platform for streaming interactive games. Instead of buying games and special gaming hardware, Stadia users can simply pay a fee (reportedly $130 per year) and play with their internet connection and their computer. Yet take-up of Stadia to date has been quite meager, and very few third party game developers currently have games available on the platform. Is Stadia a mistake?"

    ...

    "But the comments of third party game developers towards Stadia are revealing, and show that Google appears to be in the process of making a big mistake by underinvesting in Stadia. Developers charge that Google is offering little or no incentive for them to invest in developing games for the Stadia platform.[3] Since Stadia is brand new, and hasn’t yet been widely adopted, there isn’t much market pull for the platform. And Google has withdrawn from other initiatives in the past when the market for these offerings turned out to be disappointing (e.g., Google Hangouts, Google Health, Google Glass). So gaming companies don’t want to be investing, just when Google decides to head for the door."

    What the fuck.

    There are a number of articles that reflect the same point, that Stadia uptake is slow, even after Google added a free tier for two months. 

    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/72266/apple-arcade-12-million-subscribers-prediction/

    Apple Arcade estimated to have 12 million subscribers by end of 2020.

    Definitely looks like Apple is better at games than Google is...
    Did you read my post?  I said "as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming, specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  Did you noticed when I said "specifically when talking about cloud gaming".  As bad as Google is / could be with Stadia, still better than Apple when talking about cloud gaming, since they don't have it.  Apple is doing very good as a mobile gaming platform. A part from that, they are awful.  Just look at the status of gaming in macOS and Apple TV, a device they try to push as a gaming console.  
    And I stated that Apple is better at games...

    ctt_zh
    said:
    tmay said:
    What is stopping all the complaining companies from creating their own video game streaming devices and bypassing what they consider Apple’s restrictive App Store policies?

    Say the companies do create their own video game streaming devices, what are the odds they will not allow other companies to create stores for games to be streamed to those devices?

    It is easy to join the chant that Apple is being hostile to consumers when other companies are not willing to put their own money on the hardware line to do what Apple Has with iPhone and iPad. Facebook gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not want its spyware. Microsoft gave up on mobile phones because consumers did not its bloatware. 

    The complaining companies have decided hardware is too hard for them to pursue even when they promote their “must have” video game streaming services. Yes, Microsoft has Xbox. Would Microsoft allow Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot and others to create gaming services for Xbox? Would Epic allow companies to create and sell mods for Fortnite outside Epic’s store?

    The complaining companies want a free ride. Let’s be honest here. Microsoft sees Apple’s hardware success and wants a piece of it for free. The same goes for Epic, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Riot, etc. And, The complaining companies think there is an opportunity to collect the data Apple has prevented them from collecting. Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is 100% about data collection. 

    How long ago was AppleInsider reporting how Facebook and Google provided consumers with Enterprise Developer Licenses to bypass Apple’s security? I wonder if AppleInsider remembers the good old days when Microsoft promoted the PlayForSure DRM then created a better and exclusive DRM for itself? 

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers publishing articles about Facebook experimenting on its customers subliminally to make them sad or happy? And articles about Facebook monitoring everything about game players using Oculus headsets?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Google limiting the functionality of Google Maps on iOS unless Apple provided more user data? And how Google Maps for iOS miraculously improved when Apple created Apple Maps?

    I wonder if AppleInsider remembers Publishing articles about Microsoft giving up on Mixer, Cortana and a chat bot, a social media app and more?

    I wonder if AppleInsider wonders why Spotify has not created a music player or speaker for its music streaming service?

    AppleInsider and others will never tell complaining companies to invest money and time no matter how hard to make their dreams come true because the chant is Apple is wrong for being successful and Apple should be willing to allow multi-billion dollar companies create their own stores to compete with the App Store on iPhones and iPads while ignoring the truth that these companies only want to mine and sell Apple’s customer data. 

    Microsoft needs to find ways to remain relevant. There is no doubt in my mind Satya Nadella will illegally pay the US Treasury to be allowed to buy parts of TikTok. And Microsoft will do and say whatever it can to gain unrestricted access to iPhones and iPads. Facebook wants unfettered access to Apple’s customers to sell ads and promote disinformation from everybody willing to pay money to do so. 

    Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot, Spotify, etc could successfully work within Apple’s App Store guidelines but they do not want to do that. They know that by going to AppleInsider, Axios, Bloomberg, CNBC, Facebook, Forbes, Fortune, MacRumors, New York Times, Twitter, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, 9to5Mac, etc and the EU and US governments is time consuming but the effort is pretty much free compared to spending billions to truly compete with Apple. 

    AppleInsider knows this to be true but it is easier for AppleInsider to tell people Apple is wrong while Epic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Riot are absolutely right to protest Apple’s restrictive policies. 

    I'll add EPIC just secure nearly $2 Billion in financing this week thus they plan to have an IPO. Let them build their streaming gaming service to compete and draw people to them, and if they financially see a value in Apple Gaming they can port some games to it. 
    If Apple were going to create a game streaming system, they would be building an ASi based backend passing Metal instructions to the client device. MS is fine with brute force video streams so that developers don't actually have to do anything, but what a waste of bandwidth.
    Could you explain how that would work and how it would be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the Microsoft cloud streaming model? Would the game logic be processed in the cloud and the Metal instructions sent to the client device for processing / rendering, followed by a return trip to update the game logic engine in the Cloud, more processing there, followed by again sending Metal instructions to the client for processing / rendering etc. etc.? It's not clear how you think this would work or how it would be a less brute force approach.
    Yep, you nailed it. Sending metal instructions to Apple hardware requires less bandwidth than sending streaming video, but it's possible I'm wrong about that. It probably depends on fidelity being equal in both, as a very compressed video stream might not take as much bandwidth as a high fidelity Metal instruction stream. There's also some machine learning / AI benefits to the upload instruction stream, given that there might be a lot of prediction occurring wrt to the player, but that is just speculation on my part.

    Apple already figured out how to add a GPU over thunderbolt, which granted has inherently less latency than a long internet path, but it's essentially just a coax cable.

    On the other hand, mixed reality would benefit, but at the same time, it should be stated that Apple prefers everything close to the hardware. Advertisers, on the other hand, do not and would love to be able have access to a realtime A/R system.
    In 5G scenarios, QoE and QoS will potentially make it less important to have lots of on board resources. 
    But Apple, as I noted, already has the infrastructure in its iPhones to provide high quality rendering at high frame rate, and high resolution, and of note, they will have mmwave 5G this fall. Why would they not base streaming on Metal it if they were going to be creating a streaming game system for iPhone specifically?

    The real question is how granular would the server farms be to support streaming games in Metal at lowest latency? 5G doesn't solve the backhaul latency, only the transaction latency on a 5G network. In essence, to cut down latency, you need to have the server as close to the client as possible, possibly in the in the same community.

    1 milisecond would be the minimum time required up and down to the cloud for a server 90 miles distant. Then you have a frame rate of 16 ms for 60 fps, and your transaction latency in the 5G network. The balance of that is the time you have to calculate and output a single frame. 

    Maybe that is 14 milliseconds maximum, for the backend to create a single frame and output it to the client. Still, I expect that Metal could reduce the amount of bandwidth significantly, but as I'm not a developer, I don't know how significant those savings would be. 

    Needless to state, Apple would have a technical advantage over MS, et al, if they created a streaming game platform based on Metal.
    Backhaul shouldn't be a problem if the carrier hardware is in place and actually ready to cater to gaming/video/VR/AR demands etc. 

    We are already seeing ICT hardware capable of 48 Tbit/s over a single fibre to be able to satisfy high bandwidth ultra fast connections.

    Sunrise has been operating its 5G 4K gaming service in Switzerland since last year. 

    There is a possibility that low to mid range phones might become gaming drivers even without being gaming phones. Especially those with larger screens and bigger batteries.

    It will be up to the providers (as opposed to gamers) to keep their hardware upgraded to create a lag free experience. 

    It's still early days but game streaming platforms are becoming more widespread and getting better. 5G can give the platforms more chance of success. 

    Fuck, always with the 5G sales pitch...
    You do realise that the entire cloud based gaming roll out is geared towards 5G, don't you? 

    It cannot reach its full potential without it. 

    What on earth were you thinking?

    4.5G just cannot fulfil the potential of cloud based high bandwidth gaming. 

    Which is why I pointed out QoE and QoS. It is baked into 5G. Along with network slicing. 

    There is no 'sales pitch', just reality. 

    You also realise that 5G absolutely depends on ultrafast fibre backhaul, right?  And that during 2020 virtually all Chinese 5G installations will be SA and existing NSA installations will be upgraded to support SA. 

    That is what will allow cloud based gaming to progress. 




    You may be correct that it needs 5G AND a local server to get the latency down, but playing at 60 to 130 ms, and even slower, would be an awful experience, and that's typical for Stadia on "basic" 35 Mbps networks. If anything, my back of the envelope calculation of 16 ms and 60fps doesn't even appear possible, and PC gamers are used to essentially no latency and up to 1000 fps.


    https://qz.com/1752223/google-stadia-is-not-the-cloud-gaming-future-we-were-promised/

    "The Washington Post’s Gene Park, who reviewed the console on a computer, a 4K television, and a Google Pixel smartphone, described “horrendous latency” and “buggy, quick” cuts while playing games on anything other than the Pixel. For each test, Park said his internet speeds were higher than Stadia’s recommended 35 Mbps. Forbes reported“periodic stuttering issues with massive resolution and frame drops” while hooked up to internet speeds that ranged between 200 and 350 Mbps".


    Meh, Apple is absolutely correct to disallow game streaming, at least for the near term.




    Tmay, there's been a lot of changes since the service first launched last November. You really should look at reviews much more recent.

    This April one is from IGN who knows a little something about gaming. 
    https://www.ign.com/articles/google-stadia-review

    "There is something undeniably cool about playing a game like Doom Eternal on a MacBook that can barely handle Chrome on a good day... With the right internet connection, games looks phenomenal. The games we’ve tested look about as good as XBox One X or PS4 Pro.

    If your internet is dodgy, the first thing to go is your resolution, then your gameplay. When I was near my router, the games I played performed flawlessly. I listened to Spotify, streamed YouTube TV, and played the game, but my connection remained stable. In fact, in a dozen or so hours of testing, I only experienced a handful of quality drops and brief input stutter, and each recovered in a matter of seconds... When I moved to the furthest corner of my house, it was a different story. Stadia was nearly unplayable...
    Even so, I’m still pretty impressed with Stadia’s performance. When tested alongside GeForce Now, it was far less prone to latency or GeForce Now’s disruptive rubber-banding effects." 

    Google Stadia does a great job of minimizing the usual latency that comes with game streaming services. That said, latency isn’t completely eliminated as there’s still a bit of a perceptible delay, but it’s far shorter than the half-second or more of lag I’m used to experiencing with Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Project xCloud.

    I ran a few tests with Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat 11 to see how much more latency we got on Stadia versus playing the game locally on an Xbox One X and I came away somewhat impressed.

    Latency with the Stadia controller and service sat around 150-175ms while playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Comparatively, the Xbox One X’s latency sat at 100ms. In Mortal Kombat 11, Google’s game streaming added about 50ms more latency compared to playing on console."

    Things aren't quite as horrid as you're leading us to believe. I'm guessing that when you tried it  for yourself it must have been last year. at it's release. What's your internet speed and have you tried Stadia more recently? You should. 
    Actually, I'm not a gamer, but I understand latency, hence why I'm questioning all of these posters that are stating that latency is low.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVTsj66g9bA
    This is an overall pessimistic opinion video so when anything positive is mentioned it's probably legit.
    Latency is not the problem you believe it to be IMO. Now "negative latency"? LOL. No. Good marketing of "why Stadia"? Nope again. 
     
    Google's propensity to kill services would be a legitimate concern IMO and that will be the tougher impression to address.  
    edited August 2020 elijahg
  • Reply 180 of 197
    y2any2an Posts: 207member
    One risk is access to adult titles Apple
    would not allow in the store (not kid safe). Maybe they are not there today, but opening up this category presents new risks.
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