Odd that it doesn't have sound yet, what's older and simpler than streaming sound? Perhaps the sound makes the lag too obvious and that's why they hold off on it.

......... to fill that niche of everyone that wants to play games with 250ms latency with highspeed connections and no graphic cards ..... ugh

The future, cool. One day personal computers won't have cpus or gpus, just a low powered combo just to connect to the internet; there you'll do all your gaming, video watching and photo/video editing.

It's probably a couple of decades away, but it'll most likely happen. Steaming games could happen in a few years.

As proof of concept this is a fairly impressive technology, but also unrealistic and inefficient.

As for my personal opinion I think this is the worst thing to happen to personal gaming. Let me tell you why I have come to this conclusion.

1. As nice as it may seem to be able to play a game at full settings over the internet on someone elses hardware it's not. This is another one of those things where people are going to expect something for nothing, but in reality it wont turn out that way and some one will most definitely have to foot the bill. It's unrealistic to think that this will make high end gaming any cheaper, you may think that the per monthly bill isn't that much but it will add up.

2. You will never own anything again. This takes away yet another element of gaming and turns it into a service, your computer hardware. You'll find that once a service like this becomes popular developers of PC games will do more work to optimise it for the hardware that the service runs on as opposed to your home PC, meaning you'll get the short end of the stick eventually making PC gaming redundant and forcing you over to this service. It's better to own than to rent, because more often than not, renting comes with interest, which will more than just sting you in the long run.

3. Service dependency. Yet again, typical of the free market we live in, another service dependency is being fabricated from nothing. Not only will they be able to charge you for playing on their cluster of servers (cause really this is a cluster service, not a cloud, however it might be a cloud of clusters), but it also artificially inflates demand for internet services, another company that can charge you through the roof.

4.Some big joe upstairs has devised another way of putting a drain on your wallet that's consistent and that he has full control over. No more modding of games, no more free custom content (TCs, skins, models, maps), no more free game servers. I stress the word FREE. This is a method of consolidation, centralising all gaming hardware so that someone else can have control over your gaming experience.

5. For smaller countries like mine (New Zealand) where the internet is in a terrible state (very low data caps with high bandwidth costs and sub-par speeds, lucky to get 10mb) users will get a stick that is short on both ends. Not only will games be unoptimised for our hardware, but it'll be unrealistic for us to use our internet to play on this service. A 20Gb cap isn't even enough to get any decent content off steam, download linux isos, browse youtube, we ration it as is.

That's my 2c, I just wish people gave it some consideration before fully embracing a service like this.

I hate lag. Anything over 50ms bothers me. It's something that's variable, so timing of button presses in timing-critical situations will be annoying. Playing FPS games online at home is bad enough when information lag kills you. If my controls lagged too, I think I'd be very frustrated. In multiplayer games, as long as there's an advantage to using your hardware at home, I don't think people would use this service instead, unless they didn't mind getting their asses handed to them over and over by my roboninja-quick reflexes.

That said, on a laptop where you couldn't play the aforementioned FPS game at all, this would be much cooler than nothing.

Although, for many of us this is something we would end up passing and relying on our own hardware and it's still yet to be proven under demand, the concept of playing such pc games on pretty much any pc with highspeed internet is really cool. There's no denying that.

I have one other worry that they cannot control if this is pulled off. Exactly how much bandwidth are you using over time? With ISPs claiming we're running out of interwebz and capping, it would be ashame for this to use up a lot and prevent people from taking advantage of this.

What makes this work over the Internet when doing similar at home using a VPN / remote desktop / whatnot hasn't? Lack of ubiquitous decoding power?

I wish they will port Americas army to Cloud so i can play it on EEE (just a wish :) ).
Good work AMD

PS - first post after more than 6 years of regular reading of TR
Till now I was resisting temptation to post, but ...

And yeah, big thanks to UberGerbil and Adi for years of good reading, good posts guys.

I'm not up on this "Cloud" stuff. Is this like Skype where the people using it are contributing the computing power necessary to sustain it? Or are there "Cloud" servers out there that crunch numbers and send the results?

All the potential drawbacks aside (ownership, cost of service, bandwidth caps)....

This is very impressive. True cross platform gaming, no plug-ins to install, excellent looking, and apparently very playable. Wow.

AMD is doing some damn good work these days. This tech will be great for the low-end gamer. I still think enthusiasts will want to own and operate their own hardware. The technology looks promising though.

Perhaps this is the 'thin client' of the gaming world. I can see this as a competing tech to consoles/PC's with decent CPU/GPU, not a replacement.

all of this nifty new innovation..... all of it bandwidth dependant at a time when service providers are trying to cap and offer less bandwidth at higher prices.

where I'm at the cable and DSL providers are putting caps in place that lockout users if the caps are exceeded, they are also moving towards chasing down the competition that still offers unlimited bandwidth going through the courts trying to get access to "heavy users" so that they can be flagged and disabled even though their provider offers unlimited access.

this comes across as a serious impediment to cloud adoption until providers get onboard.

My grandfather could use that. Impressive. Can't wait to try it myself.

When I first read about cloud gaming it was rather loosely defined. To me, the concept was a graphics farm done over the Internet using other people's spare cycles. The latter was iffy, but the prior sounded like a good idea, using another computer's or computers' graphical power as an "external" GPU. As such, it could even be stretched to physics via Havok and other engines that supported accelerators. You would still have sound (much more affected by lag) and the actual client on your system, which would be roughly as secure for anti-cheating purposes.

The actual way cloud gaming works, though, is a huge disappointment to me. For free-to-play, Internet-only games, this could be acceptable. Once the Internet is taken out of the equation, it wouldn't matter if you were processing the software on your local system or via the cloud; it simply wouldn't play. The issue, though, is who pays for the number crunching? I doubt too many publishers would be willing to foot the bill unless cracking down on cheating would be an asset. More likely you'll be footing the bill to "rent a video card." Then add on top of that the cost of bandwidth. Hmm...

I'm just having a very hard time seeing a viable market for this, widespread or niche.

Headcasting Two Point Oh

I wonder how OnLive reacted to this.

More generally, given an always-on internet connection, you don't need a big CPU either. All you need is the equivalent of a terminal with a network card and simple graphics chip, and a big CPU somewhere else on the network you can access (or a pricing model for accessing cloud CPUs).

It won't happen for several years, i.e. until internet connections are fast and ubiquitous and stable and big and cheap enough to handle it, and the relevant pricing models and methods are devised, and so on.

But once it does, it offers the promise of portable computing devices that won't need to drive chunky CPU/GPU/etc, and hence will be extremely cheap and will last for ages and ages even with existing battery technology.

Before I get shouted down by the knee-jerk naysayers: there are technical and commercial preconditions as listed above; such a solution won't be suitable for everyone; YMMV, etc etc.

Yeah, we just need to figure out what the url was...

I'm really psyched about the lack of plug ins/ This is the future!

Minus the lag, the fact that your internet connection needs to be working, that you need to be in a place with internet, the fact that almost certainly there will be compression resulting in loss of image quality, that their servers need to be up, the large amount of bandwidth that will be needed, and the idea that you will never actually own a game and when you shut off the subscription all saved games and everything is lost this idea is somewhat acceptable to me. Somewhat.

Great, just what we need.
Another step toward never being able to own anything.

As long as this isn't the permanent future for all gaming, it's a good idea for laptops.

PS. If this doesn't bring a head to bandwidth caps, then I don't know what will. Online movies haven't done it, so far.

Future, are we there yet?
It's cool, but you just have to try it out yourself, how it's gonna work for your favorite game, for your connection, how much it's gonna cost. But there's one thing for shure, it has a lot of potential.

Is this AMD's OnLive? I see the beginning of a new trend. Cloud Gaming Boooooo!

This is pretty cool, especially being able to be played with no plug-ins etc.

(PS - First post :P)