“Cloud gaming” has a future—just maybe not in the cloud

Found on Ars Technica on Sunday, 24 March 2013
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Nvidia has reminded us that they want to virtualize the graphics processor. The company wants to take it out of the computer on your lap or on your desk and put it into a server somewhere without you noticing the difference.

There are situations where this makes sense. Given the cost of buying and maintaining workstation hardware, Nvidia's argument for the VCA seems more or less convincing. But I'm slightly less optimistic about the prospect for the Grid gaming server, or any cloud gaming service, really—call it leftover skepticism from OnLive's meltdown earlier this year.

No matter how fast your Internet connection is or how near you are to the server room actually rendering your game, Grid just won't be 100 percent as smooth as local rendering all of the time.

Not too long ago people complained about DRM which requires gamers to be always online, even for games which can be played in an offline mode, and now people suggest to put even the GPU into the cloud, adding another point of failure. You'll depend more and more on your network connection, even for something simple as an offline game. Looks like we're going back to the times of UNIX mainframes were everybody only had a dumb terminal.