Cloud-Based, Ray-Traced Games On Intel Tablets

An anonymous reader writes "After Intel showed a ray traced version of Wolfenstein last year running cloud-based streamed to a laptop the company that has just recently announced its shift to the mobile market shows now their research project Lalso running on various x86-tablets with 5 to 10 inch screens. The heavy calculations are performed by a cloud consisting of a machine with a Knights Ferry card (32 cores) inside. The achieved frame rates are around 20-30 fps."

Eheh

[SmallFurryCreature]

So, basically Intel is saying, fuck Online with its 100ms lag times! We can go for SECONDS! No MINUTES even. Infinite lag! We can do it!

All you need is to run an old game on hardware that can easily run the real game with an insane data plan.

The bubble is indeed back, remember all those ideas of sites that wanted 100kb avatar images on real time updating forum posting sites with 500kb flash animated signatures? When most people were happy with a 56kb modem? Served from Sun hardware? Well this is the same thing.

I am quite willing to accept that you can render a game beautifully on a server. I am quite willing to believe tablet can be a lot cheaper if they only got to show a movie. I am even willing to believe that response time over the internet can in theory be fast enough not to produce outlandish lag in ideal circumstances.

In real life?

• ISP's and especially mobile ISP's have been trying to cut back on that amount of data consumed. Can you imagine their reaction to the demands of an UNBUFFERED HD video stream during peak hours on a MOBILE device? Most of them can barely stand you downloading a low rez youtube video of a couple of minutes. How long is the average game level?
• Latency. It is already bad enough on the wired internet were with multiplayer your computer only has to transmit the data not the actual screen itself. On 3G or even 4G? Forget about it. For web pages the latency can easy reach a minute. In chess game that would be to slow.
• Hardware. It just keeps on getting more powerful, my netbook can now play some of the older games just fine. I recently replaced my Linux desktop with a amd cpu on motherboard setup because I realized that for desktop and movie watching, I don't need anymore (game machine is properly silly overpowered). Tablets are getting more powerful all the time, someone for fun sake report how wolvenstein runs on an atom CPU.

It is interesting geek stuff but the same thing that killed so many "great" ideas during the last bubble still is there. Bandwidth and latency are still not solved enough for this. We now finally can do the instant messaging people had dreamed up around 2000. 10 years later. (Check how long it has been since your mobile phone became truly capable of doing IM without endless waiting or insanely high prices)

Another piece of proof? Slashdot itself. Take the new "ajax" method of posting. No feedback, endless lag, errors, missing posts. It is clear what they wanted but the tech just ain't there yet. For the instant feel to work you need servers that can process a request in a handful of miliseconds, not seconds Mr Slashdot.

Nice idea Mr Intel, now get out your mobile phone and make a post on slashdot. Then you will know how unrealistic your dream is.

There is a reason we carry crotch burning CPU's and insane amounts of storage with us. Moore's law doesn't apply to the internet. AT&T won't allow it.