Jinn

I see a market for server-side rendering in places like gaming internet cafes where they could have a render farm in the back and a lot of cheap thin clients in the cafe itself. The hardware cost of replacing 20-30 high end desktops has caused a few gaming cafes around here to shut down. In this situation the latency is guaranteed to be peak, as it's LAN speed over a guaranteed distance and number of hops.

I could also see a market in the high-end home market. You have some sort of rendering server in your house, garage, basement, etc, and a lot of high bandwidth thin-clients around the house. That way you could play a graphically intensive game on your table, your microwave, tablet PC, etc. without the huge rendering and heat overhead for all of those devices. In this situation the latency is again guaranteed to be peak, as it is LAN speed over a guaranteed distance and number of hops.

I just don't see Internet-based server-rendering as feasible or desired, not the least being that I remember our bandwidth being MUCH higher than 250KB when we toyed with it in University. They must be using some sort of compression algorithm, which defeats a lot of the gain by forcing a compress/decompress step ON EVERY FRAME - 60 times a second, at least..

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel