[News] OnLive: A New Era for PC Gaming?

Over in San Fransico at the moment is the Games Developers Conference. Aswell as previews of the new Crytek engine, and new features for the Unreal Engine comes a new little device that could banish the need for upgrading/buying a new PC.

The device I'm talking about is called OnLive. In essence its a little adapter which can be plugged into a low budget PC and yet allows you to play the latest PC games, on their maximum graphical settings.

How does this work? Put it this way, you'll basically be streaming the game via your broadband connection from a server that has the game installed on.

Taken from popular gaming site Kotaku:

Using patented video compression in tandem with algorithms that compensate for lag, jitter and packet loss, OnLive delivers video at up to 720p resolution at frame rates up to 60 frames per second. Of course, the quality of the video feed relies on your connection.

For standard definition television quality, a broadband connection of at least 1.5 megabits per second is required. For HDTV resolution, a connection of at least 5 mbps is needed.

What about lag, you say? OnLive's technology "incubator" Rearden Studios claims that its servers will deliver video feeds that have a ping of less than one millisecond. Its patented video compression technique is also advertised as blazing fast, with video compression taking about one millisecond to process.

All very fancy? It certainley sounds like an interesting product. It also has the big names on board already, such as EA, Atari and Epic Games.

It's currently being beta tested internally, with a possible launch being penned in for the end of this year.

Kotaku have posted 2 Tech Interview videos on their site, the first is below. To view the article and to see the second video, here's the link



For the full article by Kotaku about OnLive can be found here.

What does everyone think? Could this mean no more need to splash the cash on a new gaming rig? Or will the promise of lag-free streaming gaming be too hard to pull off, especally in regards to playing online matches? Post your comments!

With thanks: OnLive Makes PC Upgrades Extinct, Lets you play Crysis on your TV
See OnLive in Action