As a gamer, what hardware options are available to me in The Cloud?

October 10, 2015 8:33 AM

I've recently become intrigued by the thought of applying the same cloud services that run the likes of twitter and facebook to my measly gaming needs. Think Amazon Web Services, but with GPUs. A company buys and maintains an array of high quality GPUs, then rents them out to anyone looking for some sweet graphical computing power.

Well, I'm looking for some sweet graphical computing power to run my games. Are there any services that, in exchange for a small subscription fee, allow me to play games on the best hardware available?

I've found a few similar services like Playstation Now and Steam Link but those only allow you to play games on hardware you've already bought (A PS# or gaming pc, respectively).

I'm looking for something closer to LiquidSky, which doesn't require you to have already bought a piece of hardware. LiquidSky, however, doesn't appear to be production-ready.

Do you know of any services that are production-ready and allow me to play my games on their GPU server farm?

posted by lalunamel to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

This has been tried recently with AWS -- there's an AMI you can use, though you need to provide your own games -- and the issue isn't hardware but network latency. You need good upstream bandwidth, which is rare for home broadband users, and to be close to an Amazon facility.
posted by holgate at 8:49 AM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Bright Canopy specifically does this for Second Life, but Frame might be what you want for general purposes.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:53 AM on October 10, 2015

OnLive went out of business trying to sell this service. As mentioned, the limiting factor is the network. Any game requiring timing or reflexes just won't work well under most circumstances.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:43 AM on October 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

NVidia Shield and Playstation Now both stream from "sweet power" to measly devices (which you own).
posted by tremspeed at 2:49 PM on October 12, 2015

Response by poster: @holgate that AWS tutorial is totally boss. I tried it out over the weekend and it actually worked! I was able to test Fallout NV and Borderlands at the highest video options with reasonable lag. Unfortunately, as you might guess, it was very complicated to set up and run. Really cool, though.

@DarlingBri, will check those out.
posted by lalunamel at 7:11 PM on October 14, 2015