Google’s “Yeti” is reportedly a gaming hardware, streaming service beast | Hacker News Reader

Google’s “Yeti” is reportedly a gaming hardware, streaming service beast

arstechnica.com

18 pointsevo_99 comments

This reminds of Shadow (https://shadow.tech/), a service that was launched in France (cocorico) last year and is really excellent. The network induced latency is not an issue. It's a little bit strange when you move your mouse for example but when playing you don't feel the latency.

That small-form-factor Xeon box of theirs[1] would make a very nice little PC...

1: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/blade-shadow-cloud-streaming-p...

Does nobody seriously remember onlive who did this like 7 years ago. There are also companies doing this today like liquid sky.

If it launches I am curious to see how performance is, I have strong doubts that there is a large enough population in North America with enough bandwidth and low enough latency to have a good experience.

The most recent chromecasts are more like mini computers. It wouldn’t surprise me if this product came released with a beefed up version of chromecast.

If you can cache data locally, you can drastically reduce the bandwidth requirements. Of course it’s still a huge challenge due to latency, but there are many tricks google can use to solve that issue. There may also be clever ways to offload some processing to local/nearby android devices.

This type of gaming service, IMO would require a fundamental rearchitecting of how games are developed. I would be more curious to see if Google can run any game on this service, or if they’ll build out their own gaming platform with an SDK that optimizes for the architectural differences between cloud and local gaming.

I can play my home PS4 games from anywhere, with pretty good quality. It feels pretty much local.

Disclaimer: I don't play much, but my kid sometimes do on the go. Perfectly happy with it.

So why would Google need to be any worse?

There's less latency on the network than in many TVs because of their crazy image high latency processing pipelines.

What sort of games are you playing? Latency sensitive genres like FPS, or more RTS / turn-based games?

Also, I find it hard to believe that the refresh latency of a TV is greater than Internet network latency. Do you have a source for that? And even if it’s true, wouldn’t that only exacerbate the problem if you’re playing a cloud game streamed to your TV?

> What sort of games are you playing? Latency sensitive genres like FPS, or more RTS / turn-based games?

Not me really, but my kid likes to play latency sensitive stuff. Platformers and some FPS style.

> Also, I find it hard to believe that the refresh latency of a TV is greater than Internet network latency.

2017 TV models have input latency between 12 and 69 ms in "game mode" according to [0].

The situation seems to have improved considerably, some older models I've tested were up to 100-140 ms.

When I tried to ping google.com, I generally got about 16 ms avg.

  $ ping google.com
  PING google.com (172.217.21.174): 56 data bytes
  64 bytes from 172.217.21.174: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=16.403 ms
  64 bytes from 172.217.21.174: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=15.492 ms
  64 bytes from 172.217.21.174: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=16.880 ms
  64 bytes from 172.217.21.174: icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=16.249 ms

> And even if it’s true, wouldn’t that only exacerbate the problem if you’re playing a cloud game streamed to your TV?

Well, in this particular case I was using a laptop instead when playing remotely. So it kind of offsets it.

[0] https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-lag

This is only interesting if you can pass around the "gamepad" to someone else who is also watching the stream.

Otherwise what's the point? Just buy a console or PC.

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