4 research outputs found
A cloud gaming framework for dynamic graphical rendering towards achieving distributed game engines
Cloud gaming in recent years has gained growing success in delivering games-as-a-service by leveraging cloud resources. Existing cloud gaming frameworks deploy the entire game engine within Virtual Machines (VMs) due to the tight-coupling of game engine subsystems (graphics, physics, AI). The effectiveness of such an approach is heavily dependant on the cloud VM providing consistently high levels of performance, availability, and reliability. However this assumption is difficult to guarantee due to QoS degradation within, and outside of, the cloud - from system failure, network connectivity, to consumer datacaps - all of which may result in game service outage. We present a cloud gaming framework that creates a distributed game engine via loose-coupling the graphical renderer from the game engine, allowing for its execution across cloud VMs and client devices dynamically. Our framework allows games to operate during performance degradation and cloud service failure, enabling game developers to exploit heterogeneous graphical APIs unrestricted from Operating System and hardware constraints. Our initial experiments show that our framework improves game frame rates by up to 33% via frame interlacing between cloud and client systems
A network analysis on cloud gaming: Stadia, GeForce Now and PSNow
Cloud gaming is a new class of services that promises to revolutionize the
videogame market. It allows the user to play a videogame with basic equipment
while using a remote server for the actual execution. The multimedia content is
streamed through the network from the server to the user. This service requires
low latency and a large bandwidth to work properly with low response time and
high-definition video. Three of the leading tech companies, (Google, Sony and
NVIDIA) entered this market with their own products, and others, like Microsoft
and Amazon, are planning to launch their own platforms in the near future.
However, these companies released so far little information about their cloud
gaming operation and how they utilize the network. In this work, we study these
new cloud gaming services from the network point of view. We collect more than
200 packet traces under different application settings and network conditions
for 3 cloud gaming services, namely Stadia from Google, GeForce Now from NVIDIA
and PS Now from Sony. We analyze the employed protocols and the workload they
impose on the network. We find that GeForce Now and Stadia use the RTP protocol
to stream the multimedia content, with the latter relying on the standard
WebRTC APIs. They result in bandwidth-hungry and consume up to 45 Mbit/s,
depending on the network and video quality. PS Now instead uses only
undocumented protocols and never exceeds 13 Mbit/s
Distributed Cloud Gaming Pipeline
Since the rise of Cloud infrastructures and the increased accessibility to platforms capable of playing video games, Gaming as a Service (GaaS) has been growing steadily. The aim in this field is to give the players the possibility to play video games anytime anywhere on any device through a streaming service. A lot of effort is being put in the research of new methods to overcome the limits of current Game Engines, built as monolithic entities, and of the QoS of the streaming. This TFM aims to address the former problem by researching and implementing (a part of) an alternative to the monolithic architecture, focused on splitting the engine into independent services. These would then be able to be distributed along the whole cloud continuum depending on the required QoS