Wednesday, November 10, 2010

New interview with Jules Urbach (in German)

Link to an interview with Jules Urbach from October:

Google translation from German

There's an interesting part about latency:

For encoding and decoding of 1080p we just need a millisecond, which is negligible. A data packet travels the nearly 4,000 miles between New York and Los Angeles in 85 milliseconds, in addition there are about eight milliseconds input delay. So we are below our targeted 100 milliseconds which doesn't matter for a 3D shooter like Crysis. If we distribute our hosting offerings to five strategically placed data centers in the U.S., the total latency drops to around 30 milliseconds. Our biggest concern is therefor not so much the connection speed, but server-scaling. After all, it costs a lot of money to provide one GPU per user. This is where virtualization comes into play: for example, on a modern graphics card we can run eight instances of the CryEngine. We also do not stream games 24 hours a day. Only five to ten minutes go by, until enough data is present in the local cache (on the client side) to run it from there. A title such as Lego Batman is streamed in the background in a single minute on the client computer, which again frees up resources on the server. This works on both the Mac and the PC - and we are working on a special mini-hardware that does the job without a local computer.

So one of OTOY's goals is to stream the game data to your local PC or Mac, but you can instantly start playing the game remotely, while it's streaming to your local system until it can run locally.


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