Remote rendering

I gave it a little try when playing with a pathtracer over the network, you can get it here -> http://0x3a.com/projects/NDP/NDP_14_05_2011.rar
Read my blog http://blog.0x3a.com/ about the pathtracing stuff if you want to know more about what its doing. Guess this sorta what you want to know more about, the biggest issue indeed would be retrieving the video as well as getting a quick response from user input. I don't think, right now, its feasible to get 30fps with full input and video over the internet with some render server on the other side of the globe.

Here's some numbers I've estimated / googled:

- iPad screen resolution: 1024x768
- Decent quality lossy compression for one frame: 100k JPEG
- 30 FPS X 100KB / frame = 3MB/s bandwidth required.
- Uncompressed CD quality stereo is 150KB/s extra.
- Latency should probably aim to be under one frame, which is 1/30 sec or 33ms.

With a good connection to a local server that sounds possible to me, and that's not using modern video or audio encoding technology which should be able to cut that bandwidth requirement down significantly. However note that most standard video and audio codecs will inherently add latency - it takes many frames of input before they start creating output data, which is why I picked on a really simple encoding system here.

Of course all of this network latency is on top of any latency already in the game itself, which is probably 1-2 frames worth.

A few people are already working on exactly this.

Here's an article written yesterday, http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/30/otoy-cloud-video-games/ also about what you were wondering.