If you haven’t heard of Gaikai, the system is a streaming game service that will allow you to play high-end PC games with a lower-end computer, similar to the OnLive service.
Below you can watch a video of founder David Perry explaining and demoing the service. Including these aspects:
* No installing anything. (He is running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)
* Using a low-spec server, a very custom configuration, fully virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. They had 7 Call of Duty games running in their E3 demo server recently.
* Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that’s where the server is. They get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. The final delay will be 10 milliseconds as they just added a server in Irvine California, but it’s not added to their grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay you would personally get).
* This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I’m not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.
* According to Perry, “We don’t claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn’t take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don’t need them, and so our costs will be much less.”
* They designed Gaikai for the “real” internet. The video compression codecs change in realtime based on the need of the application (or game), and based on the hardware & bandwidth you have.
* Their bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card, etc.)
* Perry says regarding the video below: “If you hear any clicks, they are coming from my wireless headset microphone. I won’t use that next time I promise.”
* Perry regarding the below video: “I made a few video cuts using Windows Movie maker to cut out dead air. Like Need for Speed has far to many menus with loads & delays between them. So I tried to keep the pace up so you see plenty of demos”
* Perry says, “I keep getting asked what operating system we use. We are completely OS agnostic, some demos come from Linux, some come from Windows and will ultimately support streaming from MAC servers too.”
Their goal is to “remove all the friction between hearing about a game and trying it out, to help reduce the cost of gaming, to grow video game audiences, to raise the revenue that publishers and developers can earn, and (most importantly) to make games accessible everywhere.”
See Gaikai in action with this video from David Perry.