If you love games, the first thing you would need is a PC or Gaming console. In PC there are much more options, power as well as expandability. So most of the hard core gamers go for PCs. But there is one major problem.
You will need a PC with powerful hardware such as 6 core Intel Core i7 CPU at GeForce GTX 670 GPU, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, a lightning speed SSD and all the goodness. Yeah, now you can be happy, but for how long? After a couple of months you may need another GPU to play the latest games in full HD quality with 60 FPS. This is a never ending process.
To save your day and let you play full HD quality games even in an average computer, laptop, tablet or even Smartphone, Cloud gaming came in to the picture. Let’s go and see how it works.
How Cloud Gaming Works?
Generally the graphic rendering of a game is using native hardware. That’s why you need latest and greatest CPU and GPU PC. And that’s why you can’t play your favorite PC game on your low spec laptop and can’t even dream of playing them in your shiny Tablet or Phone.
In Cloud Gaming everything runs on a cloud computing infrastructure. Your controller signals from Keyboard, mouse, game pad etc. will be sent to the game running on the cloud and rendered video will be streamed to your device. As long as you have a decent broadband connection with minimum pinging time, everything will happen smoothly.
Pros and Cons of Cloud Gaming
The best thing here is you don’t need a muscle PC to play games in full HD quality. You can spend that money to buy high end gaming controller, keyboard or mouse.
You don’t have to install games on your hard drive. A simple light weight cloud gaming client would be enough to stream rendered video and send control signals. The actual game is installed and running on the cloud. So you have the freedom to continue the same game on laptop, tablet or Smartphone.
When it comes to money factor, you don’t have to buy game DVDs here. It will be subscription based service, something similar to cable TV service.
The dark side is everything depends on the internet connection. A poor quality internet connection would reduce gaming performance significantly. And it will be highly bandwidth intensive, same as HD video streaming. So you have to keep a close eye on bandwidth cap.
What are the available Cloud Gaming Platforms?
The idea of cloud gaming was here for couple of decades. Back in 2000 G Cluster was the first company to demonstrate this concept as a real life application. Then many other companies joined including CryTech, Cloud Union, Gaikai etc. But they could not reach large number of gamers due to half baked technology and poor broadband connections.
Luckily, the situation is changing step by step.
Microsoft released next generation Xbox One which support partially cloud based game rendering. They are investing lots of money to get cloud gaming infrastructure in shape.
NVidia Grid is another great cloud gaming platform. They have manufactured hardware, game development API and client software as well. Any company which is interested in providing cloud gaming service, can buy NVidia Grid severs, put them in a server rack, install cloud games on it and provide the service to customers.
Finally
The problems cloud gaming had in early stages are no more. Today we have high speed internet connections with unlimited or big enough caps. When it comes to cloud computing infrastructure, they also had few leaps and today we are streaming video and audio with different services.
So why not Cloud Gaming? Soon you will be able to enjoy high end gaming performance spending much lesser money on any device you have.
Join the discussion in the comment section below and tell me what you think about cloud gaming.
Tags: #Cloud Computing #Gaming #Microsoft #Nvidia