Play high end PC games on a PlayStation 3

Posted at: 4:08am 14th January 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

There's no crappy emulation involved - you simply 'network your GPU' to play PC games on a PS3, or any low-end Windows or Linux system around your house

The PlayStation 3 might have a groundbreaking CPU, but many PC gamers quite rightly see its lowly GeForce 7-series RSX graphics chip as a prime subject for ridicule. As such, the idea of playing PC games on a PlayStation 3 seems about as logical as brushing your hair with a piece of toast, but not if you use StreamMyGame, which uses your gaming PC's horsepower instead.

How does it work? Richard Faria from the company told Custom PC that 'We capture your games video and audio directly from your graphics card, and then we compress it into an MP4 IPTV stream in real time.' It really is that simple - with a video and audio stream you can use your main PC as a gaming server, and then play your games on a low-end laptop in the bedroom, or on the PS3 that's plugged into your widescreen TV.

'We use part of the graphics card and part of the CPU to compress it in real time,' explained Faris, 'and we form a frame packet of data, combine that with the audio and then fire that over a network. It then gets to the device at the other end, which will decompress the frame and the audio and pass it through to the device's graphics card and audio subsystem. We then capture the keyboard commands from your device and send them back to your main PC, so you're almost remote-playing your games. You're networking the GPU, basically.'

In order to use StreamMyGame, you need to install the company's software, and then add your games via the StreamMyGame website. You can then use the browser on your PS3, Linux PC or whatever compatible device you're using to select a game, and the software then tells your gaming PC to launch it.

With such a simple technology, you could theoretically link just about any device to your gaming PC, and the choice of operating systems could well eb set to widen. 'We recently unified our source tree,' says Faria, 'so there's one piece of source code that can be ported into Windows or Linux, and can be built into whatever operating system you want. We're going to try to push that forward into building into Apple Mac or anyone who wants it.'

In fact, it could even work on the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. 'We have no doubt that it will run on the 360 in terms of the code and the amount of power it requires,' says Faria, 'and we're sure it'll work on the Wii, but it's whether these companies actually people into their closed systems or not. Sony obviously opened up the PS3 by allowing you to load an alternative operating system. We could possibly hack our way through it but we may not end up with something that's easy to install.'

Fancy giving it a go? If so, there's a free download of StreamMyGame that allows resolutions up to 640 x 480, which will be fine for standard TVs. However, you'll need to pay $9.99 US a year for a 720p version, and $19.99 US a year for anything above that.