Let's kick off with the first of two comparisons. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood's mix of fast-paced aerial acrobatics, detailed scenery and more sedate moments during the cut-scenes allows us to get a good general look at how well things hold up on both services. Let's take a look at our first head-to-head video. What we've done here is to match Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood's settings on Gaikai as closely as we can with the OnLive version - in essence this meant lowering most of the presets to the minimum.
Lowering the graphical settings in Gaikai gives us an idea of what OnLive titles would look like running on the service. The reduced level of detail means that compression artifacts are slightly more visible, but Gaikai still decimates OnLive when it comes down to video quality.
Use the full-screen button for full p playback. In terms of video quality, Gaikai's advantage is clear. While OnLive often looks muddy, blurry and is filled with heavy compression artifacts during the general run of play, video quality is much more solid with Gaikai - in fast-paced scenes with lots of complex scenery, detail is maintained, and despite there being some visible artifacts on show at times, we really get the impression that we are looking at something closer to a native high definition presentation.
However, in slower scenes where depth-of-field is present and the colour scheme is more muted, there's little to separate the two services at all, and here OnLive holds its own. Less demanding scenes simply don't require huge amounts of bandwidth or advanced encoding techniques and it's here that we see visual quality between the two services close up.
The use of a more refined video encoder obviously helps a great deal to give Gaikai its advantage, but the decision to target a lower frame-rate than OnLive obviously plays its part. OnLive aims for a 60FPS update in order to minimise latency so that the player gets the fastest controller response possible.
On the other hand, Gaikai appears to aim for a more manageable 30FPS, seemingly relying on the use of more local datacentres to keep the level of input lag in check. Our theory is that the games themselves may actually be running at 60FPS server-side with Gaikai, but with the video encoder not encoding every frame generated, giving a lower frame-rate client-side.
Basically, fewer unique frames means less work for the compressor to deal with when encoding the video stream.
From another perspective, dropping down to 30FPS also provides double the amount of bandwidth for image quality and thus delivers overall clarity closer to the experience of gaming on local hardware.
Orcs Must Die is a far less ambitious title than Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, so the difference between the two cloud services isn't so pronounced, but it is still noticeable. Of course games with less in the way of fast motion and more muted colour schemes work much better with OnLive.
Orcs Must Die actually fares pretty well - handing in a much better presentation overall than Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. There are compression artifacts, and things do tend to blur together and begin to fall apart in fast moving scenes, but viewing from a few feet away on a smaller HDTV screen, the results can actually look rather good. It's not directly comparable quality-wise with Gaikai, let alone running the game locally on PC, but it holds up well enough for the reduction in quality not to be so much of an issue.
The overall conclusion we draw is that OnLive is better suited to slower moving games a touch ironic perhaps, considering its 60Hz update , such as RPGs and adventure titles, while Gaikai is more versatile, retaining enough image quality in demanding scenes to handle faster paced action games and first-person shooters - at least in terms of raw video quality.
The trade-off is that the 60FPS update is gone. We define input lag as the time taken between the player inputting a movement on the control pad and his action playing out on-screen. Our extensive testing of latency on Xbox and PlayStation 3 tells us that games running at 30FPS usually operate with around to ms of input lag, while those running at 60FPS tend to see this drop to between 50ms and 83ms. The simple fact is that higher frame-rates result in a faster controller response, leading to a more enjoyable gameplay experience.
Gaikai's more local datacentres offer the service an important advantage over its rival. The principle behind OnLive is basic enough: render console titles at faster frame-rates on server-side PCs, then use the latency saving to mitigate the cost of encoding and transmitting the video to the player. However, Gaikai is a lesser known beast. Our findings strongly suggest that the service is also rendering its games natively at 60FPS on its servers, but with a much lower frame-rate on the actual video encode.
In theory, this introduces slightly more latency, although Gaikai claims that by having its datacentres positioned closer to the player, this additional lag is cancelled out, and the result is overall close to the native 30FPS console experience.
Our extensive tests with OnLive revealed that the amount of latency produced by the service with titles running at 60FPS measured between a very respectable ms and a virtually unplayable ms.
So, how well does Gaikai hold up in comparison, given that the service sacrifices some of the gains of having a 60FPS refresh rate for better video quality?
In order to measure baseline latency with OnLive, we used a Ben Heck monitor board, which has LEDs that light up when button presses are made on a wireless controller, and film the action using a 60FPS camera. We then count the number of frames between the LEDs lighting up on the monitor board with a specific action occurring in-game.
Afterwards the additional lag created by our display is factored out and this gives us our latency reading. For our comparison between OnLive and Gaikai where the gamepad is not supported in all titles , we couldn't use this technique. Instead we used FRAPS to map action buttons on the keyboard to the benchmarking tool's capture button. The FRAPS frame-rate indicator changes colour when recording is engaged and we counted frames from this event to the action happening in-game.
While this technique doesn't give us a complete measurement, it gives us the differences in latency between Gaikai and OnLive, and comparing the OnLive measurements to the same tests using the pad apparatus then allows us to calculate overall latencies for both services with some degree of precision. As consistency appears to be an issue in both cloud services, we've produced two sets of measurements - gameplay with not much going on and in-game frame-rates at their maximum, and then we followed that up with further metrics taken from more demanding scenes where performance drops.
We tried to match these as closely as possible between the two services. We also took multiple readings, as they can change significantly at any given point. The results are rather interesting. Not only does the amount of latency present in some of the titles running on Gaikai equal that of OnLive, but there are also times where controller response is significantly faster despite the frame-rate being lower due to the 30FPS video encode.
Taking a closer look at Assassin's Creed on Gaikai reveals that when the frame-rate is consistently hitting the target, the level of latency hovers around the ms to ms mark - it's playable, but inconsistent. When performance drops, both platforms are impacted, but it's Gaikai that seems to suffer the most.
On the other hand, when looking at Orcs Must Die we get far better latency results and as such a completely different feeling of controller response. With Gaikai, baseline latency isn't exactly wonderful at ms, but we found it to be consistent and it was possible to adjust to the gameplay experience. Gaikai annihilated OnLive in terms of response here with a consistent 83msms advantage - remarkable. Other tests were equally polarising when it came to seeing how well Gaikai fared when put up against games running on the Xbox and natively on PC.
Sometimes we got some incredibly good results: playing Bulletstorm, we found controller response to be slightly slower than the game, but sometimes it hit parity - a truly remarkable achievement. The quickest response time we measured was ms identical to Bulletstorm but it could drift to ms, in-line with The Darkness 2 on the or Killzone 2 on PS3 - and we also recorded the odd ms measurement too.
A matter of 17 or 33ms in additional lag might seem miniscule but you can definitely feel it in the inconsistency of the response. Regardless, Bulletstorm is still playable on Gaikai, and we didn't find the additional latency to be too impactful across a general run of play. A look at Crysis 2 is far less pleasing though, with controller response being measured anywhere from ms, all the way up to ms, resulting in a virtually unplayable experience when it came to aiming and shooting with any degree of precision.
Both of these shooters feature gamepad support, so we were able to measure latencies in exactly the same way between platforms. From what we can see, OnLive's decision to target a 60FPS update definitely helps, but the geographic location of its datacentres is perhaps the cause of its disappointing performance against Gaikai.
In our case, the input from the user's controller has to be beamed from the UK all the way to Luxembourg where the server for Europe is located before the game's output is encoded into streaming video and sent back, travelling across a multitude of network connections to do so. Details of the deal are scant which led gaming news site MCV to speculate that Sony would use Gaikai to help with a future PlayStation 4 console.
It is not clear what impact the acquisition will have on Samsung's plans to offer gaming via its smart TVs through Gaikai. Samsung announced its deal with Gaikai at the E3 trade show in early June. Samsung reveals cloud gaming plan. Nintendo Wii U has social network. OnLive cloud gaming comes to UK. At the time, Sony gave every indication that it would harness the full potential of a PlayStation cloud. Mind you, Google is already having plenty of trouble meeting the lofty goals it cribbed from Gaikai, breaking many of the promises it made before launch.
But how did Sony let Google become the front-runner in cloud gaming to begin with, after having the better part of a decade to freely build it out? His words:. With the Gaikai cloud technology, our goal is to make free exploration possible for virtually any PlayStation 4 game in the PlayStation Store.
You can simply press the X button to hop in and start playing the game. That was why Gaikai originally streamed games from YouTube and Facebook ads — they were legitimately ads! It worked with an off-the-shelf Android tablet.
Best Buy and Walmart had live game demos you could play on their websites, and you could share demos on Facebook with your friends and relatives they could play right inside the social network if you liked.
I stopped giving speeches, I stopped pushing this as the future of the industry But it took until late for Sony to finally let you play PlayStation games on a PC , and it was mid before it added a back catalog of current-gen PS4 titles instead of exclusively older games. Or how the company wound up diverting its attention to VR.
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