How significant are speed of light limitations in streaming from a remote box? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Comrades, liberals, and the unaligned misers lend me your eyes.

Computer gaming is increasingly unaffordable, in Australia second hand previous gen GPUs are like a million billion dollars. Games increasingly look like dogshit due to stochastic rendering methods and reliance on advanced lighting methods that require rendering at high resolutions for good performance.

Games are also skyrocketing in price, along with dark patterns becoming ubiquitous. The age of making a good system for 1k aud once every 8 years or so is over. Consequently I am wondering about the economics of a seedbox + renting a high performance server and streaming video games to a cheap minipc that is connected to my TV.

Unfortunately in Australia compute is expensive as hell, and we are far away from places with cheap compute. To the point where light speed limitations means rtts of like 200-300 ms

I'm curious if anyone has experience in similar conditions, either combining a seedbox and high performance computer, or having both and spinning up the HPC when you want to waste some time.

How has it worked out? what genres work and what don't? has it been cost effective?

If this is stretching the limits of relating to piracy removal won't offend me. This seems the most relevant, but it is more into hardware and using pirated software (since shit is unaffordable) than piracy directly.

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[-] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 26 points 1 week ago

Obviously this is antithetical to this community, but when Stadia was a thing, it was actually really amazing. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 on release day with a shit PC blew me away. I'm not sure how it worked in Australia, but the lag was only noticeable sometimes, and never was a distraction or took away from the game play. GeForce Now is ok, but they need to support your game, and then you need to purchase the game + have a subscription. I know Stadia got a lot of shit, and also had a limited catalog, but it actually got me to buy cutting edge games, sometimes on release day, with no subscription.

For me, piracy is not about cost, but more for combating anti-consumer behavior by corporations. Say what you will about Google, but Stadia was actually a good product. I guess it's just good they killed it before they could enshitify it.

[-] Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 6 days ago

Meanwhile I can't even use steam in-home streaming to my chromecast because the artifacts and input lag is too bad to use.

[-] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 5 days ago

Does Steam have built in Chromecast support, or are you mirroring the whole Desktop? I've had good success with Moonlight, to use Steam Streaming, but have never tried with a Chromecast.

[-] Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 days ago

I think there was a specific app for google TV which I used. My main problem was probably the lack of a wired connection since the Chromecast doesn't have an ethernet port

[-] DaGeek247@fedia.io 7 points 6 days ago

Counterpoint; it required gigabit internet and still had noticable delay to my eyes. It also had compression artifacts as well as low-medium graphics settings. It also hitched semi-regularly for no apparent reason.

All the above meant that stadia was only good for people with the money to spend on it and located in an area with fast internet and didn't play any FPSes. It was too many requirements to be a popular thing, kinda like VR is.

It also suffered from the "games get removed straight from my library" problem. They also couldn't support every game, or even the bare minimum if most popular right now, simply because they had to make sure it's supported on their backend.

It should have stuck around, but I don't think it would be a big thing until much later when internet is actually decent in most places, instead of a very select few.

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 3 points 6 days ago

Stadia was amazing, and would likely still be around if not for Phil Harrison. I have fond memories of unloading my Whisper of the Worm into the Scourge of the Past raid boss with my Destiny 2 clan, from my phone, on the toilet.