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| Games and movies on the cloud | |
| Priyanka Joshi / Mumbai June 25, 2009, 0:58 IST | |
Imagine if you could play a first person shooter game, typically very graphic intensive, on your mobile phone without ever having to download or install any software. And what if this computer-intensive game would neither eat up the valuable storage space nor the battery life? You could even watch a movie on your mobile phone while on your way to home and later switch the same movie from exactly where you left off on to a high definition TV. Sounds ambitious? Not exactly, says AMD, promising a seamless delivery of games and movies to any device that is connected to the web. The first device that will support cloudgaming is expected to debut in the second half of 2009.
AMD’s Fusion Render Cloud or cloudgaming is projected as a technology that can transform movie and gaming experiences — by essentially storing visually rich content in a compute cloud, compressing it, and later streaming it in real-time over a wireless or broadband connection to a variety of devices such as smartphones, set-top boxes and ultra-thin notebooks. By delivering remotely rendered content to devices that are unable to store and process high definition content due to such constraints as device size, battery capacity and processing power, AMD’s cloud computing technique can bring high definition entertainment to mobile users virtually anywhere.
Sample this. With an installed PC base of over 36 million, which translates into one personal computer for every 30 Indians and not to forget the 400 million people who own mobile phones in the country, India is a hotbed for the gaming industry. The current gaming market — that includes mobile, PC, console and online gaming — is pegged at Rs 940 crore by FICCI-KPMG. Expectant to cash on the budding gaming industry, which is expected to touch Rs 27 billion by 2013, AMD with its Fusion Render Cloud supercomputer is all charged up to change the market dynamics. The company has joined hands with Otoy, a California-based software firm that creates high definition movie quality 3D graphics, to deploy games over cloud. Other partners include Lucas film, Dell, HP and Electronic Arts (EA) who are testing the technology with AMD.
Senior technical manager of AMD, Vamsi Krishna says, “India has an increasing number of mobile phone users, but these devices are not built to deliver processing power to compute intensive graphics during games. The Fusion Render Cloud can solve this issue, by rendering the complex scenes at a remote facility and then sending a live video stream to the mobile phone in real-time.” On an Apple iPhone, the time lag in sending the content to a display device is as low as 0.25 seconds from LA to Mumbai, claims AMD.
Deepanshu Sharma, GM (Marketing, Strategy & ISV Alliances) AMD India claims the company's cloudgaming technology can put an end to game-piracy too as users don’t have to download the gaming content on their computers and since there is no physical media to save the content one cannot create illegal game CDs.
Cloudgaming, where processor-intensive graphic rendering is done in the clouds and streamed to a home computer, also means that gamers will be enjoying high-quality games without purchasing a dedicated gaming machine or content. Vishal Gondal, CEO of Indiagames believes in cloudgaming too. “We are keeping our eyes open to technologies like cloudgaming that promise to transform the casual Indian gamer to a new level of graphic-rich content but we must watch out for the commercial viability of the medium.”
The downside, as he points out, is that the consumer might have to bear with upfront costs like a high-speed bandwidth of minimum 1MB to access content from clouds. This would be followed by a subscription-based access to gaming content from content provider. “Details are sparse at the moment but it seems likely you will be able to pay for individual games or choose a monthly subscription, which means you won’t actually ‘own’ the games you pay for,” adds Gondal.
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