Computer power goes up exponentially thanks to Moore's law. Sprinkle some softwa...

nitwit005 · on March 21, 2023

> Computer power goes up exponentially thanks to Moore's law

If you look at a graph, that stopped being true well over a decade ago.

jiggawatts · on March 22, 2023

Only for single-threaded programs. Multi-threaded performance continued along the curve unabated.

nitwit005 · on March 22, 2023

Moore's law is specifically about the number (density) of transistors in an integrated circuit.

You could always get as much parallelism as you wanted by adding more chips.

ffitch · on March 21, 2023

the processing may as well shift to the clouds. With the subscription fee, of course : )

TylerE · on March 21, 2023

Until we break the speed of light, I’m very bearish on cloud gaming. It just feels so bad. You’ve got like 9 layers of latency between you and the screen.

jimmySixDOF · on March 21, 2023

One possible definition of Edge Compute is GPU capacity at every last mile POP

jlokier · on March 21, 2023

I agree, though my last mile latency to the nearest POP is about 85ms. Still a bit on the high side for action games compared with playing locally.

kijiki · on March 21, 2023

85ms, holy crap, who is your ISP?

On Sonic fiber internet in San Francisco, I get 1.5ms to the POP. It is only 4.5ms to my VM in Hurricane Electrics Fremont DC.

fooker · on March 21, 2023

You don’t have to break the speed of light, just have the ping below human perception.

~20ms is that threshold, but even 40ms latency is barely noticeable for single player games.

enlyth · on March 21, 2023

It's quite noticeable actually, and it adds up, it's not just an extra 20ms.

For casual gamers and turn based games maybe it could work, as a niche. For FPS, multiplayer, ARPG, and so on, it's a dealbreaker, anything over 100ms feels too sluggish.

We should be happy we have so much autonomy with our own hardware, I don't want some big cloud company to be able to tell me what I can play and render, unless we want the "you will own nothing and be happy" meme to become reality.

TylerE · on March 21, 2023

I actually, in my testing, JRPG/other turn based games were amongst the worst because there is so much “management” (inventory, loot, gear, etc) and the extra lag really throws you off

TylerE · on March 21, 2023

A wireless controller ALONE is already over 20ms, and that’s before you touch the network, actually doing with that input, wait for the display to redraw…

At a 20ms total round trip, that only buys you about a 1500 mile radius, again completely ignoring all other latencies.