Play Crysis on your IPHONE

[Smooth Groove]

I just glanced over the article but it seems to work in a similar manner as the PSP method for playing PS3 games.  The only difference seems to be that it works over the internet.

This could be really interesting if a company sets up a subscription service for you to play graphically demanding PC games anywhere with your portable device. 

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/09/amds-next-gen-gpu-powers-crysis-on-an-iphone.ars

First, the game is rendered like normal on the server machine, where frames from it are grabbed by the OTOY server-side software. Next, these frames are compressed and sent out over the network to the client, which decompresses them using a very small chunk of code (about 780K, hence the iPhone demo) and displays them in a window. User input is sent back to the server over UDP because it's tolerant of packet loss, so you don't add to latency by resending dropped packets.

The demos of Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto, and World of Warcraft were surprisingly responsive, despite the fact that the games were being served up by machines in Los Angeles. There was some discernible lag, but not much worse than what I was comfortable with in my Quake deathmatch days. The main problem with these demos was that I could easily see a ton of compression artifacts on the large monitors that AMD was using, to the point where text wasn't very readable. Smaller monitors and fewer demo stations (for more bandwidth per station) would've put OTOY in a better light, but unless the visual experience was very significantly improved I couldn't see immediately see many PC or console gamers settling for this in its present state.

But for casual/handheld gaming, this tech has immediate potential, as Crysis running the iPhone demostrated. The iPhone's screen was small enough that I couldn't discern any compression artifacts, and the gameplay was smooth and responsive. Aside from the half-baked control scheme, which was apparently hacked together at the last minute, this really was Crysis running on an iPhone.

[ManaByte]

Not going to happen. AT&T won't allow this over 3G. You'll need WiFi, which limits it.

AT&T won't allow Skype, Slingbox, etc to work over 3G so you better believe this is not getting anywhere near it.

[Sho Nuff]

AT&T is such an awesome provider 

[Don Flamenco]

sounds nice in theory, but no thanks.  there's no control scheme that could possibly work, unless the game had about one point of input.  which limits it to Peggle, Puzzle Quest, and Every Extend Extra.  even Pong could suck on the iphone.

[Smooth Groove]

sounds nice in theory, but no thanks.  there's no control scheme that could possibly work, unless the game had about one point of input.  which limits it to Peggle, Puzzle Quest, and Every Extend Extra.  even Pong could suck on the iphone.

Yes, it would suck if the technology is simply limited to Iphones.  However, from the article, it seems like the technology would be able to work on other portable devices as well.  A company could design a portable gaming device with traditional controls to support this or maybe Sony could get it to work on the PSP2. 

[Don Flamenco]

that makes sense.  once everything is on some insane fast satellite network that doesn't have bandwidth caps (like 3G on super steroids)

not sure if we'll see that in our lifetime or not 

[originalz]

that makes sense.  once everything is on some insane fast satellite network that doesn't have bandwidth caps (like 3G on super steroids)

not sure if we'll see that in our lifetime or not 

Considering how fast internet infrastructure has progressed (hell, 10 years ago most of us were still on dialup), I'd be surprised if we didn't see such advances within our lifetime.

[Don Flamenco]

From here on, I can see incremental upgrades, so as to drag out the process of hitting the internet speed ceiling (assuming there is a point where it's just damn near perfect for everyone.)