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Play the latest games, regardless of your hardware
Author: Ben HardwidgePublished: 25th March 2009
OnLive's MicroConsole enables you to play games on your TV without the need for the latest graphics hardware.
Unveiled at the Games Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco yesterday, OnLive works in a similar way to StreamMyGame, sending your controller actions upstream, and compressing the game’s visuals into a video stream and sending them downstream via the Internet. The difference with OnLive, however, is that all the games are held at OnLive’s game server centre, rather than on your own home PC.
The technology isn’t limited to ageing retro games, either. The list of launch titles features an impressive array of current, high-spec games, including F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, Crysis Warhead and Burnout Paradise. A large number of developers have been announced as launch partners too, including big players such as EA, Ubisoft, THQ, Eidos, Codemasters and Epic, while independent developers such as 2D Boy are also supporting the technology.
OnLive’s was founded by Steve Perlman, who was also responsible for WebTV and had a hand in developing QuickTime for Apple as well. He described OnLive as “the most powerful game system in the world. No high-end hardware, no upgrades, no endless downloads, no discs, no recalls, no obsolescence. With OnLive, your video game experience is always state-of-the-art.”
Perlman also pointed out that OnLive “cleared the last remaining hurdle for the video games industry: effective online distribution.” He added that “by putting the value back into the games themselves and removing the reliance on expensive, short-lived hardware, we are dramatically shifting the economics of the industry.”
As well as offering you the ability to play games online, OnLive also says that it can take advantage of its system to eliminate the need to download or install games before you play. The company says that you can play any game instantly, and will also be offering gaming community features, which will include a section for showing off your best gaming clips.
OnLive can either be operated from a PC or Mac via a web browser, or you can use the OnLive MicroConsole to play the games on the TV. The latter supports two USB controllers, four wireless controllers and four Bluetooth headsets, and it also features HDMI and optical S/PDIF outputs.
OnLive will be launched in the US in summer this year, although you can also sign up to be a BETA tester if you fancy having a play with it before then. However, no plans have been announced to bring the technology to Europe yet.
Could OnLive offer a glimpse of the future when it comes to playing games, or will there always be a need to have all your own hardware? Would you be happy playing games using a video stream? There's already a discussion going on in the forums, so why not join in?
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I think it would be great if you didn't have to buy any hardware though. The 'microconsole' may deter people.
It'd need decent bandwidth both upstream and downstream to be able to work properly - not only to receive data from the service, but to send your mouse/keyboard movements back.
Can't see it working, tbh.
if its just marketing jargon however i wouldn't be in the slightest bit surprised.
And yeah, 1ms of lag... Unless the server was in another room, you couldn't PING it in 1ms.
I call BS.
If a service like this was ever going to work it would have to be installed at the local exchange of your ISP and even then you are never going to get the same quality you do locally.
The game could possibly 'buffer'. I don't exactly know how that would work, but let your imagination figure that out.
Who knows, if they do this right, it might be great. Remember when Steam totally sucked?
did u need a beta key or is it just available to try?
edit: sorry misread thought you were talking about this service
Guess we'll just have to wait and see, it's certainly very interesting though and I bet there are some hardware manufactures out there quietly pooping their collective pants about this.
but i would like to have their video codec card, so i can play Crysis on my iPhone :P
If it does work, then the hardware market will suffer a lot gaming wise.
For something that apparently isn't going to work, it's getting way too much media....
And no one would develop something for SEVEN years that isn't going to work, period.
Very good video of the founder explaining it here. He is even stating "You think this is impossible, but it's revolutionary, and it works etc". One thing I have spotted though it doesn't streaming at 1080p, only 720p and below.
http://uk.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/?series=on-the-spot&event=on_the_spot20090324
The console is tiny, which is going to be an advantage to them. The problem might be game availability, but if this thing gets popular, then I'm sure you'll see nearly every recent game on there. They show this working in that video, and it works there, but it is a performance, so you never know. Momo seems pretty cool, very realistic.
One word, Vista.
It does work, it just needs tweaking.
AKA Windows 7.
;)
Just seen the developers they have, wow, EA, Ubisoft, THQ, Take2, Eidos, Rockstar etc...
But like I stated before, availability will be key for this to work.
None of the game data ever reaches the end user, only video and audio data. Essentially each user will have something like virtual machine running on the onlive servers, which accepts the input from keyboard/mouse/controller over the internet, renders the game on their servers and sends the audio/video feed back to the user through the net.
So input lag will be no greater than with normal online gaming, there could actually be a reduction in overall lag due to the onlive virtual machines having direct connections.
So as long as you're internet connection can stream the A/V feed, you could actually have a better gaming experience than with current online gaming (no framerate drops, etc)
It's ingenious to be honest, wish I'd thought of it.
Edit: http://www.onlive.com/about/team.html the developers are possibly the ugliest bunch of people ever though :p
I'm going to wait and see it working before I make up my mind, though my default POV is skeptiscism, but if those are key arguements for you then you've obviously never seen Dragons Den :p
Everything else is totally plausible, if the codec works I'm in.
True, some people do develop silly ideas, and I remember someone selling their home, losing their family etc over an idea that was so stupid words cannot describe (think it was the US version).
But this is at a different level, if you know what I mean. Why would any big companies and ISPs partner up with an idea what doesn't work.
Some things do seem too good to be true sometimes, it is revolutionary. It they can make the consumer and business side of things work, they have a winner, and the money they make out of it once it becomes mainstream if it does will be quite amazing.
The only problem I can see, which has been brought up before, is consumers like physical media etc. People like to have a PS3 sitting below their TV, people like CD and DVDs sitting on a shelf, they like to feel what they have bought. When you own a PC and make it top end, you like to see the graphics card, it's your own creation, it's yours.
With this, it's slighty different, and some people might not like it. Some people do not like Steam due to this, and Steam downloads the game onto your PC. People spend thousands building a PC so they can have the maximum FPS on games, play Crysis at maximum level and boast about it. If everyone has maximum graphics, does that end the fun of maximum graphics? Will it change PCs as we know them?
Google did say the future of the PC will be server based (or something like that), now I see where they are coming from.
Like said before, it's all about the codec. They would need some beefy encoder on the server side that will encode it extremely fast, leave great quality, and have it small enough to be streamed. Also, what about frame rate? You might not need 60fps for RTS/RPG but you definently would want more than 23.97fps for shooters and even driving games.
Isn't it like?
Game -> PC -> Unmodded Game Server in some unknown location -> ISP
And this
Watching streamed game controlled by you -> Modded Server in ISP?
The "lag" in say an FPS is where your PC has assumed someone kept running the same way so displayed them at location X, but in fact they had changed direction and were at location Y but that information hadn't had time to reach the server and then be pushed to your PC yet, so when you shot at X you missed.
The lag on the streamed games will be much more unpleasant, because every action you take will need to make a round trip to the server before it updates. You press the fire button, 200ms later (which is a long time in an FPS) your onscreen character appears to fire his gun.
I'm not going to comment on how well the system works, because neither I or any of you know how well this works.
Neither do i, was just some crazy idea. :)
Exactly. Anyone who has used Citrix (I'm using it now) knows the problem of this.
For those who don't know Citirx, it's exactly the same principal but for Office applications instead of games. You'd think Office apps would be no worries, but you have no idea just how infuritating it is to click on something and it take between 100 and 250ms to respond. It feels as though your computer is running through custard, and that's simply because of the time it takes for the electrons to travel from your PC to the Citrix server and back again. A dedicated billion gigbit line can't speed light up, by the laws of physics there's always going to be a lag between mouse/keyboard input and screen update. Even just typing words is slow. You press a button, and it doesn't appear on the screen for a second, so you're always waiting for the screen to update.
For anything quicker than a turn based strategy game, it's going to get extremely annoying extremely quickly.
I imagine anti-aliasing should be no problem. It looks like the servers are pretty powerful so they should be more than capable, and AA won't add any network latency.
I think they're saying 1ms on top of your ping, not 1ms connection!
speaking of input lag, it's unbearable. eg, i find it annoying that in Sins, even when connected to the LAN server via 100Mbps RJ45, still get a small lag when clicking to build stuff.
so it's almost impossible to eliminate input lag in this cloud-computing idea.
great news for netbook users and console players. but useless for us PC gamers, those who enjoy graphics, AA and micro-shuttering as much as gameplay.
also, what about server load? wouldn't 6pm to 9pm be fully loaded? wouldn't that introduce low frame rates?
Bandwidth-wise it makes me think of the differences between VNC / citrix and remote desktop / remote X-server connections: the former essentially sends raw compressed screen data over the network and is quite BW intensive, while the latter ones are more 'rendering on the remote system' way of doing things.
I may be proved wrong, but it still seems a bit too good to be true IMHO, one of those 'good idea but not really workable in real life' kind of things
If they've been working on it for 7 years and claim that it introduces only 1ms of extra latency, let's hold them to it.
But hold off from the snap judgements! :)
On my cable modem, to the ISP's network it's a minium 10-20ms. Going outside their network, is around 30ms at the best case.
So assuming best case of 30ms latency times for the network connection, and even ignoring any processing times, display times, etc, 30ms latency is roughly what you see at around a 30fps framerate.
So bestcase, under ideal (and likely unrealistic) circumstances, you get the responsiveness of a game running at 30fps. Which isn't that bad, and is certainly palatable for many people. But if you slip up to 40ms, that gives you the response time of 25fps which starts to dip into dangerous territory. At 50ms, you have the equivalent of 20fps which falls into the range of noticable and often unplayable, especially for a more twitchy game.
If the game was designed for this, you could add in client side prediction (like online games do), to make the game appear more responsive, but that defeats the whole purpose as it's all about everything on the server and no game code on the client.
In some ways, the infamous Phantom was a more likely proposition then this service. That being said, the proof is in the pudding and so we have to wait and see.
http://www.gamingbits.com/content/view/5432/1/
I figured they'll have good servers, with all the money they've put in and the support from major software companies. If I ping google.co.uk I get a response time of about 35ms, so that seemed like a good starting point.
I do doubt their codec can really do it in 1ms, so for the purpose of my experiment I've assumed 5ms to encode on their almighty cloud of servers, and 20ms to decode locally.
This means a total round trip latency of 60ms.
BEHOLD: OnLive v0.00001 alpha!
This is a little script I whipped up to demonstrate what key board latency feels like, you can choose the latency at the top (default 60ms) and move the black square with the arrow keys.
I find 60ms is just on the limit of ok, anything above would be unplayable. But of course if their codec really is as good as they say then we could see 40ms (maybe 30ms with amazing servers) which would be fine.
Latency and frame rates are two entirely different things, if the video was streamed at 60fps on a horrible connection (200ms) the video would still display at 60fps, just each frame will appear 200ms after it was sent.
I think it will do a lot better in the US as our connections are all so limited, streaming that much data would cause the old "fair use policy" to be called in to play a lot :(
If the video from GDC was as real as they claim (streaming live over a broadband connection from a server 50 miles away) then I think it will be amazing.
Thanks, although I couldn't live with 100ms, it feels really laggy to me (and I'm not any kind of hardcore gamer) feels too much like its moving on key-up instead of key-down :?
If I get in, I'll let you know how it goes.
+1 to the awesome psy track that plays on the homepage.
100ms you can feel the lag slighty., 80ms would be fine though.
( :) Didn't actually buy one really)
Huh?
From what I can tell, this is real....
Where do you get your news?
I would love this service so much but the issues with the UK's copper jungle is a crippling factor.
This is true, I was waiting for someone to bring that up ;) However on a traditional setup, the two are rather tightly coupled. There is actual response time lag in regular pc games. A frame that takes 30ms to be rendered/drawn, by very definition must contain a picture from at least 30ms ago.So you must wait that long before you can see the result on screen of your input/actions/keypresses. As framerate drops, frame time increases, and so does input lag/response time.
So one can use as a quick approximation, the input lag at different framerates to get a feeling for how this would impact, say a twitch shooter. Personally, when framerate dips it's not so much the "slideshow" that I have a problem with, but rather the accompanying increase in input lag. At around 20fps and lower (50ms response time) is where it starts to get rather annoying personally.
If they could miraculously achieve a soid 30ms, then that would give you the input lag that typically accompanies ~30fps, which could be more then acceptable.
Another thing, though I don't know how copyright laws affect logos and the like, but OnLive's logo is remarkably similar to that of www.nextgentel.no which I find weird (insert made up conspiracy theory here).
At the moment you have to layout big cash to play the latest shiny new games. A monster rig to push those pixels in Far Cry 2 or Crysis.
Are they going to charge a straight fee per game per user, or are you going to have to fork out extra cash if you use more system resources on the "Power Cloud".
Patent Pending on Power Cloud, by the by... ;)
seems to me that if a monthly fee is needed torrents will still fill the try before you buy void
...
therefore, if i can't do Fold@Home on it just like my PC while it's idle, then why should i pay for the monthly fee?
so without F@H, i'd probably spectate Crysis or the next most demanding game 24/7, or im not getting my money's worth of computing hours.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article
I wish them good luck but the article posted above sums up (and adds to) my initial scepticism.
If this DID actually work, we would have seen it in other mediums (pornography) before gaming.
Tim reckons that article is full of ****, because a lot of the hardware stuff is just not properly researched.
Me, I'm sure that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will just swat this thing with a marketting push anyway - so it doesn't matter if it works or not. Too many people have too much to lose by letting it succeed, including Intel and AMD and Nvidia.
Lets face it, cloud computing really is the way that mainstream computing is going to go. There is no need for most users to have uber powerful machines as even the cheapest computer is enough for 99% of tasks (net, office, video decoding).
I can't see this being the thing that really bucks the trend in terms of users running programs remotely, but it's a step in the right direction.
I'm not saying that onlive is definitely real, I'm just saying that h.264 in real time is pretty easy now.
Press Release:
http://www.animationmagazine.net/pressbox/2009/03/spawn-labs-uses-mako-hd-h264-codec-to-enable-real-time-remote-access-to-game-console-dev-kits-from-a.html
They cite a 70ms "end to end" latency best case. Using a fancy new "zero latency" h.264 realtime encoding codec. I'm not exactly sure what "zero latency" (or 1ms latency that the Onlive guy quotes) actually means. Realtime encoding certainly exists, and at 60fps each frame has to be encoded at least as fast as ~16ms or so. But 1ms as frame encode time seems a little strange, as that means it could theoretically handle a 1000fps stream, which seems a tad fantastical. That being said the "MAKO-HD™ H.264 ultra-low-latency codec" quotes the figure in it's literature, so it must mean *something*, although I'm not exactly sure what else it could be?
Edit: A little more digging, from the HaiVision (creators fo the MAKO codec) site: "Zero latency" can be considered within systems that operate assuring hand eye coordination (below 90ms) or operating within a blink of an eye (100 ms). That answers that question. It is also very likely what the OnLive people will be using and would explain the slight misquote.
Still, while 70ms is considered enough for hand-eye coordination, I'd imagine it's still something very perceptible when playing a twitch based video-game. 70ms input lag ("mouse lag"?) is around what you see at a framerate of 15fps. I certainly find that unplayable in terms of response lag.
For less then twitchy games though, this certainly seems feasable.
So it'll look smooth but feel like 15 FPS? Not nice. :(
About encoding HD stuff in real-time: Badaboom, anyone?
For example, they could render and transmit each screen larger than needed (IE add a bit of overscan). By pan & scanning in real time on the client you "may" be able to fool some players that there is less lag. You'd have to have sophistacted routines to tweak the scaling of the image, but it's the same sort of techniques used when created panoramic photos or correcting wide angle distortion so nothing complicated really.
You could also zoom in & out of the image to create the impression of immediate feedback for W & S keys.
A&D straffing would be a simple pan, parallax would go out the window but again, I'd say it could improve the feel.
Resolution is less important than which of the engine's features are turned on with something like Crysis. If you're rendering hugely complex shadows, shaders, physics, lighting, textures etc. etc, that you need to output fewer pixels at the end isn't going to improve things much, especially when 720 isn't exactly a tiny resolution. We're not talking 320x240 here. Besides, any reduction in resolution output is completely eclipsed by the need to encode every single frame to video as you go along.
Found on Google they received funding from Warner Brothers etc a couple years ago of $10m+, and that was from one funding, they have plenty of money, and I don't see why companies would fund a company with a product that doesn't work.
That still doesn't answer the question of how they are going to fund the hardware. Regardless of how many or few server farms they have, unless they've invented some crazy new hardware us mortals know nothing about, if they want to run Crysis on maximum for each player (which I've heard they do), they will need about £400 worth of core consumer priced components (at the very least) for every single player. And in three years time (at the very most) all that will be redundant and they'll have to buy it all over again. My idea of server-sized hardware may be wrong, but as far as I can tell, the sheer cost of maintaining a decent gaming rig for every player who ever wanted to use them is going to be absolutely huge. Regardless of how much investment they have, if they want to break a profit they'll have to earn enough money to buy every player a new high-end gaming rig every few years, even before covering the cost of the games themselves. I'm sorry, it just doesn't seem to add up for me.
As for hardware, if you already own a computer you dont need the little console thingy to stream the games, you only need it if you want to stream games on you TV.
I guess one big problem is that the need for proximity to servers means that even after a worldwide roll-out they won't be able to benefit from time zone differences by repurposing US servers to cover Europe during the European evening peak, then repurposing Euro servers to cover the US during the US evening / Euro middle of the night.
They must have a pretty chunky data pipe to stream 5 Mbit / sec (actually a bit less - they say that's the minimum rated broadband connection you'd need for 720p, but actual peak throughput will be a little less, and average may be less again) to thousands of gamers simultaneously, but that is doable. Latency, scalability, hardware costs and bespoke software / hardware design are FAR bigger issues for these guys.
@Jenny yes there are techniques to fudge the input lag issue, but they claim their microconsole and PC / Mac plugins are effectively dumb terminals, so I doubt they are using them. Also transmitting an overscanned image to allow scanning would increase their bandwidth issues, and that sort of thing (e.g. pan/zoom instead of true parallax movement) looks pretty horrible and smeary - gives me headaches, like the oldschool Doom 1/2 games with their skewy parallax adjustments when you move. Can give a reasonable approximation of camera rotation though (i.e. turning, looking up/down). Anyway, it is only a hack - it doesn't really fix the issue.
I think current MMO's plan for peak load to be %30 of their customer base at any time. This might be comparable then. They don't need enough gaming rigs for every customer, merely enough to service whoever is currently online.
Plus of those online, only a certain percentage will be playing the most demanding games.
Even despite all that, the costs still seem pretty heafty. Especially when you take into account bandwidth.
I wonder if they might use an "On Demand" / "pay as you play" style pricing model/option? Since their costs seem to be tied based on how much time you play (bandwidth + timeslices on the hardware) it would make sense to charge accordingly.
I still don't see this as more of a novelty for the high end games though. If you want to play Crysis to beging with, or play twitchy FPSs anything more then casually, having your own box is likely the way to go. This is something that would seem better suited to the more mainstream titles with wider appeal. And it would make it easier on them as the performance requirements would probably be lessened. Less Crysis and more Starcraft II?
An OnLive server has to do everything - management, rendering, streaming, everything. And that effectively means the equivalent of one (high powered) PC per connected user.
They also need to price themselves at a sensible price point. After all, if Joe Q Public works out that it'll cost them $100 to complete Crysis, then they'll just go out and buy themselves a copy of the game. Of course, they'll probably forget about the $1500-worth of PC they'll need to play the game, but that won't be a part of the "gut reaction" to the pricing model.
I'll be surprised if this (a) lives up to the hype; and (b) actually gets any paying customers, playing more than just Tetris at 3pm - but I'm willing to be surprised.
Let's just say that I'm not holding my breath ;)
reason 1 is very annoying problem in UK, and as Gadget Show on Five said, 99% of ISP has it.
reason 2 has been discussed here.
this also raised point of 720p video is being compressed, so major quality lost if it is being scaled up to say 24 or 30 inch.
reason 3 is of most concern, almost everyone now uses a Router, so the what if your sistor starts steaming video on your 5Mbps connection? or what if that Folding just completed, you'd have to live through 1minute of laggyness?
reason 4 is quite sad for those such as Garry, but im sure offline version should keep it going. alternatively, they may find a way to provide it, always keep mods up-to-date, similar to Steam.
reason 5 meh from me.
reason 6 depends on personal views, i prefer to backup all my savedgames, so this might make it difficult for me.
it all comes down to the internet connection and whether you are willing to accept quality loss. it's great for console crowds, but may not look so good for us PC gamers
Not everyone has powerful connections either. I only have a 1.5Mbps download speed and 500Kbps upload. This is sufficient for Xbox Live and whatever else I do. However, sending all the video data, sound data, and playing with other multiple users. Am I going to have a lag free gaming experience comparable to my 360?
Yeah I doubt it.
Netflix Instant view is a good example of where this type of technology is at. I've tried the trial for 2 weeks, and to be honest, it didn't work that well for me. My connection doubled the minimum requirements and I couldn't get more than "2 bars" and most of the time it was at "1 bar". To give an idea what that looks like, imagine a Youtube video being blown up to fill the screen. Artifacts everywhere! It leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
A way to get around this problem for Netflix is to allow a buffer override, where I could let the video buffer for a longer time to allow a better quality playback.
Instead I got the video instantly, 2 minutes into watching the video the playback would stop and it would throttle the quality down to "1 bar".
Overall I wasn't happy with my experience.
If I had a faster connection, say 5Mbps or so, I could see this OnLive service working for older titles. Say Xbox & PS2 era games.
Real-time life robot battle with user control = win
It doesn't change a thing if it's old games or new games. The video stream remains 720p.
I'm hoping this works out.
Well a solution that would help save bandwidth is run older games at their native 480i/480p resolution. That's what I was getting at. (coming from a console game point of view that is)
Sending a 720p video stream and the capability to provide a decent gaming experience seems to be wishful thinking.
On a LAN this would be easy because everyone would have at LEAST 10Mbps connection and only a few hops between devices at MOST.
I'm currently a Network Engineering student, so I'm just rattling thoughts around my head of how plausible this could be. I do not know much about compression though and how much actual bandwidth this would all require.
I'm finding it difficult to imagine. Especially since Netflix has left me sour towards instant streaming media.
Turn based games would work...
:)
Yeah, for that I wish them the best of luck!
I imagine this company will tank when their idea fails.
Or they will just have to settle for less.
I laugh at you everytime I read that, Windows 7 is older than Vista. Vista is a tweaked version of 7, not the other way around. What was supposed to be a cut down version became a victim of feature creep.
From Wikipedia:
The fair use policy is gonna be their biggest hurdle in the UK, but then if they are dealing with ISPs direct, that problem could be solved at the source.
Part of their plan is to offer cheap dev-kits that run in the onlive system, so you can develop on PC, Mac or even TV if you wanted, so depending on the cost I think the mod scene could actually thrive.
really want to be positive but im dubious. i live in ireland and i know it definately wouldnt work here. broadband in ireland is crap, i cant even play an online game of GTAIV without my connection crashing
As many of said, I love my hard copies and I love to build my own system and be able to look over at my accomplishment.
Hehe it made me think of the Virtual Boy.
And if you truly think about it, if it was all that good, why isn't Microsoft or Sony trying to buy it. After all Microsoft is trying to buy Nintendo (because of the success of the Wii).
Well you learn something new everyday. ;)
Is what I thought, oh well.
"Onlive Will Work"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7976206.stm
hes very definsive over it in that article
If "anyone" works on something for SEVEN years, and the same day you reveal it, without any testing or real life usage, the majority of the technology world, the people who will be "using" your service, thinks it's all rubbish, you're going to be defensive!
:)
well, if OnLive fails, they should re-market those into codec cards, eg, encode 1080p on the fly. i'd love a programme like that so all my videos can be viewed on my iPhone. currently, i have to encode ones i want to watch with my CPU (or GPU using badaboom) first.
Also check out the heavenly sword video on linked in the article, 300ms lag, completely unplayable if you ask me
but for PC gamers, i have to say i did felt the "167ms" in GTA4 when it was first released on PC and on PS3 (less on PS3 due to analogue stick). only after patch 1.0.2 did Rockstar managed to smooth out the gameplay for an enjoyable experience.
see if you can feel the 100ms lag, go and try out GTA4 on highest your card will allow without any patch, i am 100% sure you'd feel it when moving around with the mouse.
as long as we don't attach a mouse to OnLive, no one will notice the input lag :) Heavenly Sword was okay on the PS3, felt no lag when using the controller.
Just imagine, your playing resident evil 5, boss encounter you have a trickle of heath left and so does the boss, all you need is one good shot, you leap out of the shadows, aim your reticle AND...
*Buffering... please wait*
On another note, think of current remote desktops or even some of those lcd screens that have super high processing lag. Even using regular windows desktop on those is very slow and something like gaming to any degree is laughable.