Through the utilization of elastic resources and widely deployed data-centers, cloud computing has provided countless new opportunities for both new and existing applications.
Existing applications, from file sharing and document synchronization to media streaming, have experienced a great leap forward in terms of system efficiency and usability through leveraging cloud computing platforms.
Much of these advances have come from exploring the cloud’s massive resources with computational offloading and reducing user access latencies with strategically placed cloud data-centers.
Recently, advances in cloud technology have expanded to allow offloading not only of traditional computations but also of such more complex tasks as high definition 3D rendering, which turns the idea of Cloud Gaming into a reality.
Cloud gaming, in its simplest form, renders an interactive gaming application remotely in the cloud and streams the scenes as a video sequence back to the player over the Internet.
A cloud gaming player interacts with the application through a thin client, which is responsible for displaying the video from the cloud rendering server as well as collecting the player’s commands and sending the interactions back to the cloud. Figure 1 shows a high level architectural view of such a cloud gaming system with thin clients and cloud-based rendering.
Onlive and Gaikai are two industrial pioneers of Recent advances in cloud technology have turned the idea of Cloud Gaming into a reality. Cloud Gaming, in its simplest form, renders an interactive gaming application remotely in the cloud and streams the scenes as a video sequence back to the player over the Internet.
This is an advantage for less powerful computational devices that are otherwise incapable of running high quality games. Such industrial pioneers as Onlive and Gaikai have seen success in the market with large user bases. In this article, we revealing critical challenges toward the widespread deployment of Cloud Gaming.
cloud gaming, both having seen great success with multimillion user bases. The recent 380 millon dollar purchase of Gaikai by Sony, an industrial giant in digital entertainment and consumer electronics, shows that cloud gaming is beginning to move into the mainstream.
From the perspective of industry, cloud gaming can bring immense benefits by expanding the user base to the vast number of less-powerful devices that support thin clients only, particularly smartphones and tablets.
As an example, the recommended system configuration for Battlefield 3, a highly popular first-person shooter game, is a quad-core CPU, 4 GB RAM, 20 GB storage space, and a graphics card with at least 1GB RAM (e.g., NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 or ATI RADEON 6950), which alone costs more than $500. The newest tablets (e.g., Apple’s iPad with Retina display and Google’s Nexus 10) cannot even meet the minimum system requirements that need a dual-core CPU over 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, and a graphics card with 512 MB RAM, not to mention smartphones of which the hardware is limited by their smaller size and thermal control.
Furthermore, mobile terminals have different hardware/software architecture from PCs, e.g., ARM rather than x86 for CPU, lower memory frequency and bandwidth, power limitations, and distinct operating systems. As such, the traditional console game model is not feasible for such devices, which in turn become targets for Gaikai and Onlive.
Cloud gaming also reduces customer support costs since the computational hardware is now under the cloud gaming provider’s full control, and offers better Digital Rights Management (DRM) since the codes are not directly executed on a customer’s local device.
However, cloud gaming remains in its early stage and there remain significant theoretical and practical challenges towards its widespread deployment. Finally, we need discuss the future of cloud gaming as well as issues yet to be addressed.
For a future work we would like to further investigate the effect other network conditions such as packet loss and jitter have on the end users cloud gaming experience.
Cloud gaming is a rapidly evolving technology, with many exciting possibilities. One frequently mentioned is to bring advanced 3D content to relatively weaker devices such as smart phones and tablets.
This observation is made even more relevant by the fact that both Gaikai and Onlive are actively working on Android apps to bring their services to these mobile platforms.
However, recent large scale research indicates that it is not uncommon to find cellular network connections that have network latencies in excess of 200 ms, which alone may already cause the interaction delay to become too high for many games. Seamless integration between cellular data connection and the lower latency WiFi connection is expected, and the switching to LTE may help alleviate the problem.
Other potential advancements involve intelligent thin clients that can perform a portion of the game rendering and logic locally to hide some of the issues associated with interaction delay, or distributed game execution across multiple specialized virtual machines. This will likely require creating games specifically optimized for cloud platforms.
Besides software and service providers, hardware manufacturers have also shown a strong interest in cloud gaming, and some have begun working on dedicated hardware solutions to address the prominent issues of cloud gaming. NVIDIA has just unveiled the GeForce grid graphical processor, which is targeted specifically towards cloud gaming systems.
It is essentially an all in one graphical processor and encoding solution. The published specification shows that each of these processors has enough capability to render and encode four games simultaneously. NVIDIA’s internal tests show that it can significantly mitigate the latency introduced in current cloud gaming systems.
It is widely expected that this type of specialized hardware will usher in a new generation of cloud gaming.