Potential solution for slow computer gaming?

Hey everyone

This may sound like a load of garbage but I was thinking, would it be possible to run an online game off a super powerful server that actually renders the game for every player, then sends a live video to the client.

So say I'm playing a battlefield style game, rendering all the particles and destruction is just something many computers can't handle. So what if the server actually rendered my viewpoint and just sent me a live stream video of that. That way it would be like watching a YouTube clip, but still controlling my character.

This would also mean the client would only have to download a game that's a few mb as all the textures and animations are rendered by the server and therefore wouldn't need to be on the clients hard drive.

Think it could work?

 

Unless your connection is amazing, you're gonna have loads of latency.

 

Yeah, OnLive is a thing and has been around for quite a while.

--Eric

 

Things like Skype get basically no latency though. And that's a live video stream? How do they manage?

 

Oh sweet aha didn't know about that

 

Well, I haven't used skype in ages but they used to have a tonne of latency. It depends on your connection really, with a good connection the latency to the other side of the world can be like lower than the time it takes your graphics card to send a picture your screen. Then you have stuff like rusty wires and pre historic networking gear and suddenly you latency is through the roof.