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Anyone playing KSP On a GeForce?


Kerbinchaser

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I have requested Beta acces to Nivida's Geforce NOW, so I can play KSP with visual mods at 60 FPS and not worry about framerate drops, but I was dying to know:

Do any of you guys use this service? Do you think it's secure? Feasible? Let me know, I am so curious! 

 

EDIT:

Geforce does not support mods. D: 

Edited by Lo Var Lachland
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Cloud based GPU's?   Wut?!

 

 

In case you don't know what the OP is talking about; I didn't:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/mac-pc/

 

Its not for me.  I get 60fps with visual mods and no problems running all the games I play at Ultra.  Interesting concept though.  I guess you're streaming the game to yourself?   I laughed at the girl in the video that was psyched about saving her precious harddrive space, lol. 

Edited by klesh
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8 minutes ago, klesh said:

Cloud based GPU's?   Wut?!

In case you don't know what the OP is talking about; I didn't

Ah, ok. It’s one of those things for folks who have unmetered terabit internet service or live inside the serverfarm. A nice concept, but unlikely to work as adevertised for folks outside of the Bay Area (like 99% of tech stuff). 

Cynicism aside, I am curious whether it works or helps at all. Keep us posted, @Lo Var Lachland

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It's not just Cloud GPUs. It's basically logging into a remote server that is a decently high-end gaming rig. You send keyboard, mouse, and controller inputs to the server, and it feeds you high quality, low latency (in a perfect world) audio and video. Eventually it'll be a paid subscription so you can play all your games as if you had a $1500+ computer from practically any system... provided you have a decent internet connection.

I applied for Beta access since it's free, but haven't been selected yet. I figure it's worth a shot at no cost.

I believe there is a similar service called Shadow, run by the French company called Blade, that is already available as a paid service in very limited areas. You pretty much rent a high-end gaming rig with your own Windows 10 install, if I recall correctly, for a not insignificant amount of money each month.

This stuff is pretty neat, and it seems like the tech is getting to a point where it's viable provided your internet connection is decent. I'm interested to see how well this idea catches on. I don't know if I'd ever want get away from building my own systems, but if hardware prices keep rising as they have been this might actually have some appeal.

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Sounds like an enormous waste of bandwidth to me.
As KSP is CPU bound, I don't really see how this is going to get better performance than a modern gaming PC. Useful if you have a potato-powered MacBook and a fast internet connection perhaps, but I doubt it'd be "not worry about framerate drops",  NVIDIA will be running this on commodity CPUs just like everyone else.

It's just "gaming as a service", so you can pay infinity dollars for someone else's PC instead of owning one.

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16 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

Ah, ok. It’s one of those things for folks who have unmetered terabit internet service or live inside the serverfarm. A nice concept, but unlikely to work as adevertised for folks outside of the Bay Area (like 99% of tech stuff). 

Cynicism aside, I am curious whether it works or helps at all. Keep us posted, @Lo Var Lachland

I don't have it yet... What times are 1 month to 6 months. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. :)

2 minutes ago, klesh said:

Here is a similar service, http://www.pixelstellar.com/

Its only 1€/Hour ($1.25 USD) !

 

Playing KSP on this type of service would've cost me  $2,026.25 with the hours I've logged so far.

Yes, but for right now: The Geforce is a free open beta... So...

15 minutes ago, Mako said:

I applied for Beta access since it's free, but haven't been selected yet. I figure it's worth a shot at no cost.

Want to race for who gets it first? :D

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if you built your own PC you could build a rig for kerbal and other light games for about 350.00 using Ryzen  3 2200g series with the on chip Vega graphics. then you could add dedicated GPU later to transform it into a mid range gaming rig. 

cpu 99.99

motherboard 75.00

ram 85.00

psu 50.00

case 40.00

 

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1 minute ago, invision said:

if you built your own PC you could build a rig for kerbal and other light games for about 350.00 using Ryzen  3 2200g series with the on chip Vega graphics. then you could add dedicated GPU later to transform it into a mid range gaming rig. 

cpu 99.99

motherboard 75.00

ram 85.00

psu 50.00

case 40.00

 

 

Definitely the savvier approach.  Though from the hype video linked above it would seem this GeForce Now thing is aimed at folks who find updating gfx drivers to be unwieldy.  I don't imagine that crowd would find building their own pc appealing.

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2 minutes ago, klesh said:

 

Definitely the savvier approach.  Though from the hype video linked above it would seem this GeForce Now thing is aimed at folks who find updating gfx drivers to be unwieldy.  I don't imagine that crowd would find building their own pc appealing.

yeah i know i just try to encourage people to take the plunge, watch videos how easy it is, and build something they will appreciate for less money vs these 999.99 pc's people buy that barely run games.

 

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It's technically not possible to stream video games over a package based service at an acceptable quality, as there are routing and caching delays, leading to an often unacceptable input lag. Of course there are exceptions: Games where input lag is not an issue. Also, since the delays are a fundamental property of the used technology, having more bandwidth will not be able to solve them. It will however reduce latency spikes by allowing redundancy.

If it were a connection based service (what the internet is not), quality might get close to acceptable as it'd "only" be limited by the speed of light (what is still a quite considerable input lag for realistic distances between server and client).

 

I personally would not like to play KSP with input lag, although it's certainly playable, as anyone who landed a probe on the moon in Realism Overhaul can confirm (thanks to signal delay of Remote Tech).

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I dunno, it seems a bit naff. I imagine input lag would be a major problem so only certain sim or strategy games would be playable. And judging by the amount of hours I put into games it'd be more cost effective to fork out £1000 for a new pc than this service. 

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This is something that businesses have been using for a long time to improve the performance of client-server applications i.e. those with a local PC app running the graphics side of things and a remote server handling the shared database. Their downside being that you need to maintain the client application on a 100s or 1000s of remote PCs and there needs to be a low-lag, high-bandwidth connection to handle the data passed between client and server. 

That's where software like Citrix comes in. You install your applications on high-spec PC servers physically close to the database servers. Each PC server runs several virtual PC machines. This makes it easy to control software installation, and the bandwidth between the PC servers and the database server can be virtually lag-free, typically being on the same fibre LAN.  

The user-end software is just a generic thin client app that is like a remote desktop or screen-scrape of the PC server. This client can be installed on a PC, Mac, browser, Android, etc i.e. you get user-end OS independence. The network requirements and lag-dependency are much lower for the thin client to PC server than for the PC server to database server. 

These systems have been really effective for businesses. They save huge client distribution and maintenance costs,  drastically reduce network requirements and lag dependency,  and generally speed up how apps run.

Enter gaming. MMOs have all the same issues: A client has to be installed and run on a load of disparate machines, over a huge variety of network speeds. If instead the game's client is installed on some high spec and tightly maintained servers that are next to the game backend servers then lots of the installation, patching and performance issues disappear. The gamer just installs a generic thin client on just about any machine, with wet string for an internet connection, and they get very good performance from the game. 

It really is an excellent idea for games and has been a long time in coming. 

(PS: I imagine that the gamer would not be given access to the virtual machine's OS, only to the pre-installed game application. This means everyone gets the same game application to play (reducing cheating) but does mean that only approved (or no) mods would be available). 

Edited by Foxster
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3 hours ago, klesh said:

Here is a similar service, http://www.pixelstellar.com/

Its only 1€/Hour ($1.25 USD) !

I remember when America On Line access cost $1/hr.  That was down from (when I started getting online) $1/min for some services, and $20/hr for AOL when it opened up for PC (it started as a Mac-only service).

I'm inclined to think this level of cloud computing is on the opposite side of the pricing curve -- that is, it's as cheap now as it'll ever be, and prices will go nowhere but up from here.

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Oh... no.  no no no no no.

One of the best things about KSP is the non-dependency of the internet or some random server somewhere.  If you play KSP enough that this would even interest you, you'd be way better off and money ahead to just buy decent hardware.

 

Also, I suggest changing the thread title to be a little more specific.  I play on a GeForce GTX-1050Ti, but I would never, ever consider a service like this.  So thread title? Yes.  Thread content?  Noooooo.

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8 minutes ago, TheMadKraken2297 said:

I don't see the point of a cloud based GPU- how does it work? 

You are basically playing the game on someone else's computer over the internet.

So it'd be like if I gave you remote access to my desktop and you launched KSP and started playing.

The big companies that do this likely have dozens of high end PC's though so they can serve a larger number of clients. I still have my doubts about the idea as a whole though, latency and input lag is definitely gonna be a factor. It might be OK for playing something turn based like Xcom I guess? I doubt you could play an FPS and have a satisfying experience though.

Edited by Rocket In My Pocket
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it's a clever idea, but for someone like me who lives in the sticks (where I'd literally get faster upload speeds by taping USB sticks to homing pigeons) it wouldn't work. 

Also I can't help but be kinda bothered about yet more of my data/life/PCusage info being collected into the big pot of cloud user tracking.  "How can we farm more user info" seems to be the driver behind so many services, I kinda think that this will become just another data harvester over time. 

It does also seem like for the serious gamer, the cost over time would be greater than building your own rig (and without any of the satisfaction that brings).

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22 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

So it'd be like if I gave you remote access to my desktop and you launched KSP and started playing.

I can, and have, done this with readily available free software, from my desktop to my gutless netbook over the internet. It works. It's mostly pointless.
I wouldn't want to play an FPS with it though, unless one's pings were sub 50ms.

 

4 hours ago, Foxster said:

That's where software like Citrix comes in.

Yuck. Every citrix thin-client installation I have encountered has had an appalling user experience.  Maybe they were just doing it wrong, or knowingly shafting the users to reduce work for the IT staff, I dunno. Not small companies I'm talking about though.

 

4 hours ago, Foxster said:

It really is an excellent idea for games and has been a long time in coming.

Unless you want reasonable input response...
Playing with ~180ms of input lag (my current ping to Nvidias servers), no thanks.

 

I don't really know why anyone would bother with this thing, unless the server farm is just down the road it's going to be pretty horrible.
No harm in it if it's free I guess, but it won't stay that way.

 

14 minutes ago, katateochi said:

"How can we farm more user info" seems to be the driver behind so many services

And then there's this^.

Rest assured, Nvidia will mine your data while you use this service, and they'll almost certainly sell it to advertisers.

 

Sounds to me like some bright-spark at Nvidia thought "Hey, now that everyone has super-fast internet (which they don't), why not rent out our GPUs instead of selling them? This way we can keep charging the users forever!"

 

Edited by steve_v
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I'm very much in the 'no way for me' and 'don't trust it as far as i can s##t' camps.  I resent having to get online to Steam just to play single player CoD (on the rare occasion i do now).

And even at 'just' €1 an hour that soon adds up to silly amounts.

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I get the naysaying, and while I'm not yet convinced as I haven't tried it myself, the review I read for Shadow was better than I expected since the performance was better than the reviewer expected.

Of course I didn't dig deep into the review, but the reviewer mentioned they had tried similar concepts in the past and said that Shadow was the first one they tried that actually seemed viable and ready for consumers. The catch is you have to live relatively close to one of their server farms to reduce latency, and you must have an internet connection capable of at least 15Mbps. As far as I saw, Shadow is only available in California in the US, and four countries in Europe at the moment.

As others have said, this is not a new concept. I set up remote login for Windows probably about 15 years ago and cloud computing has been around for a while as well. And now it seems like multiple companies think that it is possible to provide an acceptable gaming experience to folks who only have access to a lower-spec system. In the case of Shadow, it's a bit more than I want spend (US$35 - $50 a month depending on monthly or yearly subscription) and you only get 250gb of space to install games (or whatever you want to install, it's your own Windows 10 environment and space for however long you subscribe). With big budget Triple-A games coming in at 80gb+, you could be spending a lot of time downloading and deleting and installing games if you want to play a variety of things.

All of that said, it seems to me overkill for KSP. The processors seem like server grade Intels and I'm not sure of the core clock speed. They're probably fine for most games, but perhaps not as good for a CPU dependent game like KSP. Also, no one needs a GTX 1080 to play KSP. Ram, at 12gb, would be sufficient for many, I suspect. But overall it's overkill for KSP.

If you have a 4k TV you really want to play games on, no newer console, a potato for a computer, a good internet connection, and live close to a server farm, maybe this could be worth it to you. But I think that there is probably limited appeal for something like this.

And I'm curious, and I bit skeptical, about how well it really does work.

Edited by Mako
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Uhhh.. Cloud gaming was a thing in, um, 2013? But never went through. I think even NOW it's not the time for such thing. I'd rather save some bucks and buy a decent rig ONCE instead of paying regularly for someone else's computer PLUS Internet connection.

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