by Kiva the wanderer Sun Jul 07, 2013 10:53 pmI'm.confused on this, does it let you play PS3 discs on the PS4 if the service is running? It is it a digital thing? Someone please clarify this as it is confuzzling me.
2 posters
What exactly can gakai streaming do?
Kiva the wanderer- Caffeinated
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skarekrow13- Chat Moderator
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It's like a streaming movie but a game. Everything is done by the service in "the cloud" so there's no need for ps3 emulator hardware. Check out onlive, it's basically the same thing. I can run a wii game on my phone. The only worry is input delay
Kiva the wanderer- Caffeinated
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So say I dont own a PS3 but I have a PS4 and I want to play Dark souls 2 which is a current Gen exclusive, an I play it on PS4 using gakai and nit deal with input lag?
skarekrow13- Chat Moderator
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There's going to be a lot of factors that play into that.
The first and most important question is digital release and library based. Dark Souls 2 will need to be a digital release AND be put into the Gaikai library. Sony has gone on record stating they "hope" to have the "entire" PlayStation library on Gaikai at some point but hoping implies they already see some snags. So if they don't do a PS digital release (I bet they will) or they don't put it on the Gaikai library the answer is automatically "no." The bigger question there is if they will be able to add it to the streaming library.
Now, if they do add it to Gaikai the answer will almost certainly be that you can play it with little to no input lag. I should explain that better from my experience as well.
A while back onLive offered Lego Batman (the Wii version) for free for making an account. I downloaded the android app and made my account and bam....free Lego Batman. I was using an HTC incredible at the time. When I say "lag" I mean it was on my end. The hardware I had wasn't able to use onLive to it's fullest. The video component of the gameplay (what onLive sends to my device) runs great. Even on that older phone. No pixelation, screen looks sharp. No problems.
The lag was in my input back to onLive. With the "d-pad" in particular. If I hit attack, there's a barely noticeable delay from the button press to the action. When I try to move there's a significant lag from say, pushing "left" to moving left. It made the game unplayable for me. But it's on my end. My phone and internet router weren't capable of sending the info fast enough to be sharp. The actual "input" is by the onLive service. They do all the computations on their end, at the same speed as the console and send back the video component for you to see.
Fast forward to now. I have a Samsung S3 and I confirm it's on my end because I have the same picture resolution (great) and the same router and internet service. Better phone processor and it's handling the balance of things better and has a significantly reduced lag.
So, what the device is actually doing is acting as a screen to stream the video component of the game. The PS4 has more than enough power to handle streaming the video part of a PS3 game. There's no question there. It should also have enough power left over to send your input (aka the button press, which is where my phone has difficulty) without causing a problem. There's only a small handful of things the PS4 will actually have to "do" to play a streamed game and it won't be an issue I'm sure. There's no contest in power between my phone and a PS4.
So the only other potential problems you'll face are your internet provider and specific router/modem. If for some reason they can't handle it, you could experience lag. But going back to a Netflix/movie streaming experience: if your current setup can handle Netflix and stream in HD you shouldn't worry. It can handle a streaming game too.
The last "if" is if Sony messes it up. If you had Netflix in the early days you might remember the occasional pixelated screens and low res popping up in the middle of a movie or the, god forbid, buffering. Those were all issues Netflix had initially setting up their streaming service. The quality of Sony's hardware pushing the data could be a problem. There's a potential for worse than Netflix as the computing on their end (a game) is more intense than Netflix was doing (movies).
On the bright side, Gaikai was a company that was made specifically for cloud based gaming. That was their goal. They've already shown they can do it with console quality games and have been very creative with what they've done so far. Sony appears to have purchased the company to shore up what was a known weakness in their gaming delivery. The Gaikai acquisition was literally the one thing that immediately made me excited for the PS4. It seems like they're trying to do things the right way.
The first and most important question is digital release and library based. Dark Souls 2 will need to be a digital release AND be put into the Gaikai library. Sony has gone on record stating they "hope" to have the "entire" PlayStation library on Gaikai at some point but hoping implies they already see some snags. So if they don't do a PS digital release (I bet they will) or they don't put it on the Gaikai library the answer is automatically "no." The bigger question there is if they will be able to add it to the streaming library.
Now, if they do add it to Gaikai the answer will almost certainly be that you can play it with little to no input lag. I should explain that better from my experience as well.
A while back onLive offered Lego Batman (the Wii version) for free for making an account. I downloaded the android app and made my account and bam....free Lego Batman. I was using an HTC incredible at the time. When I say "lag" I mean it was on my end. The hardware I had wasn't able to use onLive to it's fullest. The video component of the gameplay (what onLive sends to my device) runs great. Even on that older phone. No pixelation, screen looks sharp. No problems.
The lag was in my input back to onLive. With the "d-pad" in particular. If I hit attack, there's a barely noticeable delay from the button press to the action. When I try to move there's a significant lag from say, pushing "left" to moving left. It made the game unplayable for me. But it's on my end. My phone and internet router weren't capable of sending the info fast enough to be sharp. The actual "input" is by the onLive service. They do all the computations on their end, at the same speed as the console and send back the video component for you to see.
Fast forward to now. I have a Samsung S3 and I confirm it's on my end because I have the same picture resolution (great) and the same router and internet service. Better phone processor and it's handling the balance of things better and has a significantly reduced lag.
So, what the device is actually doing is acting as a screen to stream the video component of the game. The PS4 has more than enough power to handle streaming the video part of a PS3 game. There's no question there. It should also have enough power left over to send your input (aka the button press, which is where my phone has difficulty) without causing a problem. There's only a small handful of things the PS4 will actually have to "do" to play a streamed game and it won't be an issue I'm sure. There's no contest in power between my phone and a PS4.
So the only other potential problems you'll face are your internet provider and specific router/modem. If for some reason they can't handle it, you could experience lag. But going back to a Netflix/movie streaming experience: if your current setup can handle Netflix and stream in HD you shouldn't worry. It can handle a streaming game too.
The last "if" is if Sony messes it up. If you had Netflix in the early days you might remember the occasional pixelated screens and low res popping up in the middle of a movie or the, god forbid, buffering. Those were all issues Netflix had initially setting up their streaming service. The quality of Sony's hardware pushing the data could be a problem. There's a potential for worse than Netflix as the computing on their end (a game) is more intense than Netflix was doing (movies).
On the bright side, Gaikai was a company that was made specifically for cloud based gaming. That was their goal. They've already shown they can do it with console quality games and have been very creative with what they've done so far. Sony appears to have purchased the company to shore up what was a known weakness in their gaming delivery. The Gaikai acquisition was literally the one thing that immediately made me excited for the PS4. It seems like they're trying to do things the right way.
