Count me amongst the many who heard Steve Perlman’s announcement of OnLive in 2009 and went “No bloody way. They can’t do that.” Yet here I am, some months later, with a Founding Members invite and access to a handful of the games I’ve used to benchmark graphics cards and CPUs on Tom’s Hardware. Well I’ll be…
I’ll refrain from bloviating on the specifics of how OnLive does what it does—I’ve already read plenty of analysis one way and the other about what a cloud service could mean for gaming and why it’s a technically infeasible (one of the best, from Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter, can be read here). Moreover, OnLive has been fairly low-key about the information it’ll give out. All that matters today, on Day 1 of availability, is how it performs—the experience OnLive enables. It’s time to step away from the “what ifs” and dig into the “how does it do?”
Loading Up
Getting up and running after receiving the email literally took five minutes. You fill in your information, billing data, and download a 500KB client setup app, which, by default, runs in a window on your desktop. Just make sure that when you fire up the client, you’re not doing anything else to tax your Internet connection—which must be at least 5 Mb/s for a high-def stream. I have access to AT&T’s 24 Mb/s U-Verse plan, so I’m alright there, but when I tried to load the service with a file transfer running in the background, I was politely turned away from logging in. If it turns out that you share your pipeline with a college roommate, for example, that’s going to quickly become a problem. Here, we’re going from worrying about our graphics card to stressing over who’s using the network.
With all other transfers halted, I hopped on. For the folks who get in on the Founding Members plan, you can join OnLive for 12 months free, after which you pay $5 a month for the privilege of having your content delivered in this manner. From there, you can play many games in demo mode, 30 minutes at a time (without the ability to save). I need another monthly recurring bill like I need a hole in my head.
If you want to continue on, you’ll need a PlayPass, available in Full (unlimited access), 5-day, and 3-day options. Now, not all PlayPasses are offered for each game. If you want to play Batman: Arkham Asylum, you can buy a 5-day pass for $7 or a 3-day pass for $5, but there is no full pass. Assassin’s Creed II is only available as a full pass for $40. DiRT 2 is only available as a demo. The model that makes the most sense, I think, is paying a few bucks for a game you’d otherwise play and beat in a week and never touch again. Fair enough. No way I’d pay $50 for the full version of a game without a way around OnLive’s imposed Internet-optimized settings, though. Charge an extra $5 or $10 and give me the option to download the full game locally and I might be interested.
Just Cause 2 running on a desktop and Just Cause 2 on a notebook with integrated graphics. Thanks OnLive!Just Cause 2 running on a desktop and Just Cause 2 on a notebook with integrated graphics. Thanks OnLive!
Now, I wanted to get the experience of using OnLive on a powerful desktop that’d have no trouble playing any of the available games using its own hardware, and then on a notebook with no chance of touching 3D at all.
Use Case 1: Desktop
Not surprisingly, OnLive shows poorly on a Core i7-960-based desktop with a pair of GeForce GTX 480s installed. There’s simply no reason to pay for a service like this if you already have the hardware to back up better quality settings. Nevertheless, a large percentage of the Tom’s Hardware audience has capable components at its disposal, so it’s absolutely worth noting that the enthusiasts already running 1280x720 or higher probably aren’t going to like what they see, quality-wise, from OnLive.
If you want a better comparison, check out the two videos below in 720p—one captured via OnLive and the other captured locally—of Just Cause 2. Try to look past the choppy frame rates. They don’t accurately convey the performance of playing on both systems. Even on machines with SSDs, FRAPS doesn’t seem to like capturing at a 60 FPS target while gaming. Take my word for it, the OnLive version ran at a constant 20 FPS or so, while the local version ran at 120 FPS. While 20 frames per second sounds low, it turned out to be playable. With that said, real-world gameplay did get choppy on occasion.
The OnLive Gaming Service
But I think we can all agree that this isn’t the market for which OnLive is gunning. They want the guys on notebooks with Intel integrated graphics, or the guys using Macs without much choice when it comes to game access. So let’s move on to the more ideal test case.
I have an older Core 2 Duo T9300-based laptop with 4GB of RAM and Intel’s GMA X3100 graphics engine. It’s wholly incapable of playing Just Cause, Batman, F.E.A.R., or any other of the games OnLive is hosting. It'll handle WoW, so long as you turn every setting down to its lowest option. But the system does satisfy OnLive’s minimum hardware requirements for running its client.
This is where the service is totally in its element. In DiRT 2, Just Cause 2, and Batman—the three games I spent some time in—frame rates were ample to play smoothly, though nowhere near an even 60 FPS. With my 1280x800 screen running much closer to OnLive’s native 1280x720, quality appeared much better than the professional Dell 1920x1200 displays on my workstation. Latency, though perceptible, still didn’t prevent me from doing well in single-player campaigns.
Truly, this is where OnLive really shines. I have to wonder, though, how many folks with four-year old notebooks and no better desktop system at their disposal pay for 5+ Mb/s Internet connections? As it stands today, I’m certainly not worried about cloud-based gaming impinging upon what enthusiasts expect from a desktop gaming experience. Note also that you need a wired connection. There goes the novel idea of fragging out at Starbucks.
And there’s another factor to take into account here. Just because OnLive relieves you of the hardware burden doesn’t mean that load is magically alleviated altogether. Server-side requirements for each physical connection are substantial, and the service is still in its infancy. Performance is respectable right now, but we’ll have to see how OnLive handles scaling as an increasing number of curious gamers take a peek under the kimono.
I’ll be honest—OnLive is a point-blank look at life in the cloud, which will almost certainly be a more prolific usage model moving forward. As much as I (we) resist it, there’s an inherent convenience to having your documents, pictures, videos, and—maybe someday—games available from anywhere and on a more diverse range of hardware platforms. I’m not there yet. For as much as friends and family rave about Google Docs, I prefer everything local, on my networked storage, and within the confines of my own infrastructure. That includes games. Let me pick my quality settings. Let me set my resolution. Let me decide when I want to play and on what platform. And don’t require that I have at least a 5 Mb/s wired connection. There’s only one place I have access to that—at home. And at home, I have the hardware I need to play at 2560x1600. I don’t foresee hitting the road and getting a hotel room with enough bandwidth to play Just Cause 2 on a netbook anytime soon, so the convenience of portability only really goes as far as the high-speed Internet connections at your disposal.
Fairly constant network load. CPU utilization was around 9% of a Core i7-960 during game play.Fairly constant network load. CPU utilization was around 9% of a Core i7-960 during game play.
But this push forward is frightening for reviewers everywhere, understandably. OnLive is telling you that your hardware doesn’t matter—they’ll take care of it. Suddenly, it ceases to be relevant that Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 480 offers superior tessellation, or that AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 was the first DirectX 11 graphics card by more than half a year. It’s also threatening to enthusiasts, who lust after the most powerful components, and don’t necessarily want to see their gaming experience distilled down into whoever has the fastest Internet connection—though saving thousands of dollars on high-end hardware takes the sting off somewhat, I have to imagine.
At the end of the day, though, OnLive does not deliver a gaming experience to rival what a power user at home with even a modest PC can already achieve. This is very much the theater-cam version of a movie, when what you really want at home is the Blu-ray. Games run at pre-determined quality settings at a maximum resolution of 1280x720. That’s a far cry from the enthusiast-class resolutions we test here at Tom’s. And even then, putting a game like Just Cause 2 at 720p running remotely next to the same resolution locally is a completely one-sided comparison.
OnLive can't match the image quality of local play.OnLive can't match the image quality of local play.
To OnLive’s credit, the gaming service works. It masks latency well enough that more casual gamers on ample connections should not be hampered by the delivery mechanism. It turns an out-of-date notebook into a capable gaming platform. The company is actually doing something I didn’t think was possible one year ago. And while the first demonstration of OnLive’s technology came under scrutiny for what was undoubtedly a controlled showcase, I’m a good 250 miles away from the company’s Santa Clara data center. This is definitely a real-world trial of the service. It’s just not something I’d pay for today. And I’d really avoid paying full price for the titles in OnLive’s library, preferring to perhaps “rent” the game for three days instead.
To anyone who suggests that you may never need another high-end PC to play the latest games, I respond: I’ll hold onto my high-end PC, thanks. OnLive doesn’t come anywhere close to displacing it.
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