Something is fishy in the press release, TechCrunch is carrying a story claiming where Jason Kincaid says:
"At one point, Jason says "one GPU core per instance." But actually we're told that the technology scales so efficiently and cost effectively that you can allow anywhere from a minimum of 10 users per GPU, up to 100 depending on the application"
10 users per CPU? 100? This sounds like wishful thinking and vast hyperbole to me. GPU's don't really like so much context switching, but more than that, a modern game tends to saturate system performance, not just RAM, but VRAM, GPU cycles, and CPU. The idea that you're going to virtualize a couple of instances of Crysis or Call of Duty onto a single GPU seems preposterous.
So Nvidia can do 25 users per GPU at the moment with their "hypervisor aware" VDI cards. That's first gen.
The real trick will be doing texture swaps in conjunction with compression scaling to account for changes in network latency. That shit will be fucking magic.
But even if you get this perfectly scaled, overall latency/contention will make remote gaming over WAN suck for a mass roll-out with today's broadband and thus limits the addressable market.
I thought the issue OnLive ran into wasn't excessive hype, it was overestimating the market while poorly promoting the service. I recall Perlman stating that the coffin's nails were from investing way too much in infrastructure that went completely unused.
"At one point, Jason says "one GPU core per instance." But actually we're told that the technology scales so efficiently and cost effectively that you can allow anywhere from a minimum of 10 users per GPU, up to 100 depending on the application"
10 users per CPU? 100? This sounds like wishful thinking and vast hyperbole to me. GPU's don't really like so much context switching, but more than that, a modern game tends to saturate system performance, not just RAM, but VRAM, GPU cycles, and CPU. The idea that you're going to virtualize a couple of instances of Crysis or Call of Duty onto a single GPU seems preposterous.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/16/videos-otoy-in-action-you-h...
OnLive had similar problems overhyping the scalability and economics of their service.