by Jay Garrett on May 13, 2010
If you cast your mind back to the brave new world of OnLive – the streaming games service that promised you the possibility of playing the likes of Crysis on a netbook – listen up gadgety UK readers!
BT has only gone and bought a chunk of OnLive with plans to bring the streaming on-demand gaming service to Blighty.
If you’re a bit hazy about the details – OnLive streams games over the interwebs straight to your PC, Mac or even TV. The cleverness is that most of the tricksy graphics work is tackled back at OnLive’s server farm.
This means that you could get your game face on via your mobile blower: Steve Perlman, OnLive’s CEO says games will be “playable instantly on almost any video capable device attached to the internet.”
June is the date when our stateside cousins will get to see OnLive but BT seems to be digging the broadband streamed gaming idea to the point of grabbing a 2.6% share in OnLive and confirmed that it’ll be adding it to its BT Vision service later in the year.
It’s all well and good having the major graphics being freelanced by servers but the main sticking point may be the amount of in-game lag – not a great thing to have in fast-paced games. On the up-side, however, you won’t need to download files before you can get gaming 
BT plans to package the OnLive on demand game streaming with its BT Vision service but OnLive also confirmed that it will be available through other ISPs too.
BT Retail CEO, Gavin Patterson says: “Customers will have access to a huge catalogue of games, available instantly on their TV or PC without expensive hardware.”
As soon as I get some pricing details and a fixed date it shall be shared with you all
by Jay Garrett on December 19, 2008
If you opt for a netbook you do so with the knowledge that it will crumble when faced with Crysis, Left4Dead and the likes.
Well, Nvidia plans to introduce “chip technology” that could allow low-cost netbooks run those lovely high-def games and media.
The Ion platform, announced on Thursday, effectively combines Nvidia’s GeForce 9400 graphics processing unit (GPU) with Intel’s Atom chipset. According to Nvidia, this combination will provide “up to ten times the graphics performance” of other graphics chipsets currently used with Atom in small, low-cost PCs.
The GeForce 9400 has 16 processing cores and is more than suited for graphics-intensive apps such as Adobe’s Photoshop CS4.
It’s already chugging under the hood of Apple’s latest MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
“Until now, a high-definition, affordable PC was an oxymoron,” said Drew Henry, general manager of Nvidia’s media communications processor business unit, in Thursday’s statement. “The Ion platform pairs the GeForce 9400 with a truly great Intel Atom CPU and lets consumers surf the Internet, play top games, edit photos and watch videos — all in high definition.”
Nvidia said that the new Ion platform will be designed to support the full Windows Vista user interface, however, and the upcoming Windows 7. That news may be exciting to some of you I guess……….
In addition, it will be capable of running “full-spec 1,080 [pixels]” high-definition video and games as graphically intensive as Call of Duty 4.
According to Nvidia, “the GeForce 9400 GPU does all of this in about half of the space of today’s Atom CPU-based solutions, with minimal effect on battery life”.
The Ion platform will also let netbook users experience full Blu-ray playback on the smallest PCs and laptops, according to Alice Chang, chief executive of optical-drive maker CyberLink, who was quoted in Nvidia’s statement.
A spokesperson for Nvidia told ZDNet UK yesterday that the company expects manufacturers to offer netbooks using Ion sometime towards the end of the first half of 2009.
Portable gaming a-go-go! FTW!
Znet
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