This looks cool, however it's very similar to a service I've been using for the past month called Parsec[0].
I've successfully managed to play Fortnite (don't judge :)) on an AWS g2.2xlarge (via Parsec) with an acceptable level of latency. Apart from the occasional artefacting (most notably when starting), it's been an enjoyable experience and a real insight into the potential power that cloud gaming really could hold.
What's so great about Parsec is that they allow you (at a somewhat marked-up rate so far as I can tell) to rent an AWS server directly from the client and get started.
That being said, my Parsec credit is running a little low now so I might have a go with Rainway :)
I would like to know what the difference — if any — between Parsec and Rainway is? As far as I can tell, Parsec was first, so it'd be interesting to know if their tech is superior.
We're clientless, this means you can open any web browser like Chrome and start playing on any number of devices -- both inside and outside your home.
We use common web traffic to prevent being blocked by most networks, this allows us to have a higher chance of connecting even on lock downed networks (schools, office).
We are aiming to release on every major platform we can. Phones and game consoles alike.
We constantly give back, through open source releases or community fixes -- we really believe in the principle of supporting the community that supports us.
For the more technical questions, Rainway can run on Intel, AMD and NVIDIA systems and we're highly optimized for all three and test on all ranges of hardware from those providers. Our biggest weakness right now would be our lack of native mobile apps, but that isn't slowing us down. (https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009852188724625408)
I'm the CEO of Rainway, so of course, I like our product and I'd encourage you to join our discord (https://rain.gg/discord) and ask users for their opinion.
Thanks for your feedback. I did find a verbatim copy of your response in a reddit thread[0] while I was waiting — but I guess it serves me wrong for not doing my research :)
As this is a canned response, it doesn't really do a great job, in my opinion, of comparing Parsec and Rainway directly. I can look into the tech myself and make a comparison that way.
For a more direct question: do you have any plans to sell customers cloud rack-space directly through Rainway?
Currently, we have no short-term plans to offer cloud services -- we see more than enough people installing Rainway on existing providers, so we are focusing on building a solid consumer offering. There is no telling how that changes down the line.
If my gaming PC has an UWQHD display and I want to stream to a standard MacBook 15" display, do you have any advice to avoid extreme letterboxing/super-small UI?
Scenario 1 - You build a GPU+ gaming PC in the cloud, play for 35 minutes, have a 10 minute shut down policy, come back 5 days later, play for 45 minutes, and delete your cloud gaming PC.
35 minutes of playing + 10 minutes of idle time - This will cost $0.30 because Paperspace charges per minute rather than per hour.
5 days of storage for 500 GB - Storage is $10/month. For 5 days of storage, this will cost $1.67.
45 minutes of playing - This will cost $0.30.
Delete your cloud gaming PC.
Total cost for 1.33 hours of gaming in the cloud will be $2.27.
Scenario 2 - You build a P5000 server, play 1 hour and 15 minutes 3 times a week for 2 months and then delete your cloud gaming computer.
1 hour and 15 minutes of game play - This will cost $1.16. If you play 3 times a week for two months, this is about $30.16 (1.16 per day * 3 days * 4.33 weeks per month * 2 months).
Storage will cost $20 for two months of saved data for a 500 GB hard drive.
Total cost of two months of gaming for about 32 hours in the cloud will be $50.16.
Its a really fine number of people who can benefit from cloud gaming right now. Even Parsec advertises:
> We know, however, that cloud gaming is not right for everyone today. If you play more than 8-10 hours of games each week and you want the best experience possible, you should still build/buy your own gaming PC.
And that's the number I'd say; ~8 hours per week. Less than that and cloud gaming might make sense. But any more and you'll save money by just building a desktop. Because let's say you're charged $0.60/hr; that's roughly $20/mo @ 8hr/week. A typical gaming PC might last 3 years, especially nowadays with the tremendously powerful GTX 10-series cards and the lack of innovation across both the CPU and GPU spaces. That'll cost lets say $700 (targeting 1080p60, low-range i5, GTX 1050Ti, etc). That's $20/mo averaged out.
My hope is that Nvidia/AMD can continue to make 10x jumps in graphics card tech, because we've already hit 1080p60 and that's enough for most people for a while. So if the next generation GTX 11-series (or more accurately, the Tesla V-series) cards can fit more 1080p60 streams on each card, that should lower the price of cloud gaming. And on and on. But I think, as far as technologies today go, it doesn't make much sense.
An upside to cloud gaming (the same for any cloud use) is that you can take advantage of the providers upgrades for little extra cost. So if AWS upgrade to Tesla V-series you don't have to spend the money to buy that new card, just spend a relatively smaller amount extra each month for the cloud usage. So if I buy a GTX 10-series today and AWS (magically) used Tesla tomorrow, I haven't lost out.
Obviously the amount of hours you spend gaming is still very much the leading factor in whether you cloud game or not, but for the "casual" 8 to 10 hours per week gamer, cloud is possibly still the best option.
> And yes, even Overwatch in the browser on whatever system you’d like.
"On whatever system you'd like" versus "you use your own" seems to fly in the face of meeting system requirements.
Lots of other requests for more info here. This is a "Show HN" after all. How does it work? Are you translating the binary into wasm? Whatever it is, how you did it is more of your secret sauce than what you did. Please share.
Rainway is game streaming. We take the game running on one system (say your home PC) and stream it to the other device. You can read about the tech here: https://rainway.io/technology/
BTW latency still matters here, so an even awesomer future "Show HN" might include some great analysis on how you got your product from X ms peak latency down to Y ms peak latency.
Can I use it to stream the display to another system, but continue using the mouse and keyboard from the gaming PC?
I want to see my PC game on my Mac, but my gaming PC has way better input devices for gaming. (My gaming PC is near my Mac...it is just that the way my desktop is arranged the PC monitor is in a place that is not good for long term viewing, but I can easily put the PC mouse and keyboard in front of the iMac).
Also, it wasn't quite clear from your site. Does this only work with games that you have to specifically include support for, or is it more general?
You could, yes. We don't take over the controls and simply pass input to the system mouse and keyboard or to the controller we emulate on the machine. So you could stream to your mac and play using your PC's keyboard and mouse.
It works with all games you own through all digital game sellers.
"Play Your Favorite Games on Any Device
Rainway makes game streaming so easy you'll be playing in just a few clicks. Download and join our beta today!"
I would make it way more obvious.
Also what's a good use case? I can play games on my powerful home PC from the crappy laptop at the office?
> Also what's a good use case? I can play games on my powerful home PC from the crappy laptop at the office?
I'm interested because a 27" iMac is front and center on my desk, with a 24" second monitor to the right. My gaming PC is hooked up to the second input of the second monitor.
Playing a game either means turning my head to the right while the rest of my body faces forward (to have good keyboard and mouse position), or turning my whole body right, and then having to reach left for the keyboard and mouse. Can't do whole body right with keyboard and mouse inf front of body, because that would put the mouse in free space and the keyboard right side sticking off the desk. Neither of these is comfortable.
Moving the gaming PC to its own space with its own monitor would take major rearrangement of the living room.
Something that lets me use the Mac as a display for the games on my PC would make things much much nicer.
>Also what's a good use case? I can play games on my powerful home PC from the crappy laptop at the office?
Fits my use-case pretty nicely. I have one decent gaming machine, and six landing spots in the house where I want to game from. Longer hardcore gaming sessions from the main spot, but that's an occasional thing. Most days/evenings I have half an hour, and need to be wherever my partner and parrot are hanging out. If I can properly deliver streamed gaming to those points on basic hardware connected to a TV and wireless joypad, I'm happy.
Steam in-home streaming gets me most of the way there already though. Gonna give Rainway a test run when I get the home network wiring finished.
If it's that good, I may end up also brokering it outbound for some mobile gaming.
I remember thinking OnLive's pitch of letting you stream games to low-end hardware was a very good idea, but it never took off. I think nVidia SHIELD offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is.
So, this is essentially those services, but allowing you to use a web browser as a client, right? I would only find this valuable if there was any performance gain in doing so, or if those services didn't make a client for the device I wanted to game on, both of which seem unlikely.
Unless I drastically misunderstood what is happening, and the game is actually running on your hardware in the browser, in which case that is very impressive...but then I would have to question the performance.
Rainway is fast and clientless. Our vision is all about letting you use your existing hardware (home gaming PC, cloud provider) to enable the gameplay experience. So you installed our software and then the web app takes care of the rest.
We curate all of the games you have installed on your machine and enable a click and play experience.
> I think nVidia SHIELD offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is.
The Shield itself has been fairly successful from what I know, especially if you consider its fairly high price compared to other Android TV boxes. I have one and can say I really like it, Nvidia has been really committed and provided constant updates on top of a pretty stable hardware platform. Game streaming on it works pretty well and has been moderately successful. It works smoothly and latency is low enough to play all but the twitchiest of games. The biggest advantage is that for all the games I've seen you can play them as long as you already own them on Steam, you don't have to purchase them twice (in addition to supporting native Steam in-home streaming now I think). The selection of games available to play on Nvidia's streaming service isn't colossal, but they have a constant trickle of popular games so there's plenty of things you'd actually want to play (and you get a pretty generous range of older-but-good games to play for free with the Shield). I bought mine as a media player, but the game streaming is a very nice perk.
OnLive’s pitch was great but latency ruined the experience. If you had a terrible computer with a superb internet connection it was ok (not great). And that is not a common combination.
Ages ago I spun an aws instance w/ Grid, setup VPN and used Steam in-home streaming to accomplish a similar result. Using spot-instances resulted in something like $0.06/hr if memory serves (which it seldom does).
Biggest caveats at that time were setup time and latency; since I was too cheap to preserve the instance volume and too lazy to split the steam save folder to a smaller separate volume, and had yet to secure gigabit fiber.
It was more of a dalliance for me since I don't game often anymore, and if I'm honest with myself I enjoyed setting up the infrastructure more than I did playing Fallout 4. Please note this has more to do with how little fun I am in my old age than any problems with the game.
Pricing and capabilities have probably changed over the years. The cheapest GPU spot instance you can get on AWS today is a p2.xlarge, which will run you $0.45/hr. And also, p2-class instances run Tesla K80 GPUs, which are Kepler cores, an architecture running on 6 years old now (think GTX 600/700). Fine for 1080p60 most games, but I doubt many modern titles would hit the 60fps mark.
Google Cloud can allow you to get the cost lower (closer to ~$0.15/hr) by cost optimizing the instance CPU/Memory and attaching a GPU to it.
But you've got three problems with both of these setups:
- Spot on AWS/Preemptible on GCP will kill your instance with about 2 minutes of warning. I'm not sure what AWS's policy is on how often this happens, but on GCP, its guaranteed to happen at least once every 24 hours. So that could be annoying if you're in the middle of an intense game of Overwatch.
- Storage costs. You're paying per hour for your instance, so you don't want to have to download all your games every time you spin it up. But, then you shift the cost to the SSD, which is expensive and must be maintained 24/7/365 for that quick startup time. You could alternatively store it in S3/GCS then hot-load it when the instance starts, which would be fast due to the fiber interconnect all these datacenters are wired with. So, plan for this bullet to add at least $10/mo/TB of storage.
- Network costs. A 1080p60 stream is, conservatively, 10Mbps? Add on an extra ~$0.25 per hour you want to game, just in bandwidth.
It was closer to 0.50 an hour fwiw. And in practice that wasn’t realistic as the gpu spot prices would often spike to tens of dollars per hour, presumably as someone else ran some really large jobs.
A friend and I tried to systematize/automate this exact thing. And we were relatively successful in building it. But it turns out that spot prices are incredibly volatile and steam streaming is still pretty buggy so we abandoned it.
Can you explain what this does on the technical level?
nvidia has this similar product but the game runs on their servers, you have to sign into your accounts on their machines. Playing Destiny you login into battlenet using some kind of teamviewer app and then launch the game.
steam link just (poorly) pushes video from your PC to your living room.
Where in this spectrum does Rainway stand? Please be technical for us here
Rainway is software you can install on your local gaming rig or cloud provider of your choice. Once you've installed the Dashboard on your PC, we establish a P2P connection between it and the connecting client.
Then we utilize your existing computer hardware and games, and you can play them instantly inside of a browser via low latency, high fidelity stream.
We make use of a custom version of WebRTC (default) (https://github.com/RainwayApp/spitfire) and WebSockets as a fallback with low latency implementations.
Rainway will always be completely free to use with no hidden cost. You can stream all your games, whenever you want, wherever you are, for as long as you want.
/endquote
So where's their income coming from? The blog post from the OP mentions they're hiring.
My own silly analysis: monetisation can come at a later stage. Since the server is running on the customer's Window machine they won't have much infrastructure costs to support even if they get very popular. If the main product is free then revenue can be added through extensions like hosted service or parnership (eg: integration with Twich or another video game streaming service).
"Play games you already own using your own hardware for $0.00 for the next 1 year."
"We've noticed frame drops while you're playing Skyrim, click here to upgrade to a premium stream from a premium computer using your own cloud saves! (only $1.99/mo!)" ...or pay $1000 for a new video card.
"We've noticed you don't own Skyrim, click here to instantly start playing from our computers instead of your computer for $1.99/hour or $10/mo, or $100/mo for unlimited access to all games, etc, etc.!"
just a total guess on my part, but they are basically inserting themselves in between a game and a stream.
the product might also be targeted to be acquired by any of the market players, but i can't see anyone outside of twitch and mixer (being a microsoft product) would be interested.
maybe they will have access to their own set of gaming stream content, which allows them to be an streaming platform in general, which would allow them to be a competitor to twitch/mixer.
also... "selling" access streamers (i.e. the streamers are the content and advertisers/publishers can reach them through rainway), so more of a complementary product to the streaming sites.
there's also the alternative of having premium services on a subscription model. most likely idea here would be some sort of premium model that bumps you higher up in content discovery somehow, or just free games.
https://play.rainway.io doesn't work. Console logs a bunch of CORS errors for seemingly unnecessary services, but the site still fails to load. Disabled PrivacyBadger/uBlock/HTTPS Everywhere but still no luck. On Firefox 61.1/Mac OS X High Sierra.
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).
<script> source URI is not allowed in this document: “https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js”. play.rainway.io:8
[Show/hide message details.] ReferenceError: Raven is not defined[Learn More] bundle.js:110:144069
Source map error: request failed with status 403
Resource URL: https://play.rainway.io/bundle.js
Source Map URL: bundle.js.map[Learn More]
Very cool! But, as others said, I'd want to look at the latency. Some animations in Dark Souls 3 are 8-10 frames long (ie, about 300ms). Reacting to such quick animations may completely fall apart depending on the latency introduced by network. Are there any videos of action games being played on this?
Advertising Overwatch is an unfortunate choice and makes me think they haven't fully done their homework. Blizzard recently changed their terms of service to include a clause stating that they will ban any accounts that use cloud gaming services like GeForce Now.
Rainway is not cloud gaming, it utilizes your computer hardware and is one of the most played games on the platform. None of our users have reported issues, and we've been tracking it for weeks.
That's good to hear! If it doesn't use any third party servers, then it might be good to even advertise it as an alternative to people who foermerly used the banned services.
They didn't give any reason for doing so that I'm aware of. Maybe they have ambitions of their own for streaming thier games as a paid service and don't want competition.
An interesting alternative is Moonlight[0], an open source implementation of nVidia's GameStream protocol. While it does require an nVidia graphics card, it severely cuts down on latency as all the video encoding is done in hardware on the host PC. Essentially it gets you P2P low-latency video streaming with controller/keyboard+mouse input
Just a heads up this guy has been known to do sketchy things in the past. A simple reddit search of his previous products will bring up some questionable practices
Do you mean the near-piracy of Aurous [1]? It looks like they didn't realise that re-hosting publicly-available music makes them liable under copyright law. Borderless gaming and Netflix Roulette don't seem sketchy. It's not clear what else you might mean. Do you have examples?
I see nothing here that talks about latency. What type of FPS on the thin-clients are we talking here? Bandwidth? Delays?
This is purely a numbers piece of software. When you talk about streaming real-time things, things that require input sequences on the order of <16ms, these numbers are super important: they're literally make or break figures.
The experience could be almost great, but maybe just 5% of a perf hit might kill the experience... I hope that as they mature Rainway can speak more to these figures.
Very cool stuff here, and I really like that a little of the tech is on GitHub!
Not really. It is just a streaming service, you pretty much have to setup your own server. If you want to access it from outside of your home you would need to have a public IP (most ISP's will only give you a dynamic IP unless you get a business account, which means your IP will randomly change on you), setup and configure appropriate firewall rules. You have to leave the "server" up all the time.
Your IP address is unlikely to change that often. My personal experience with Verizon, Spectrum, and Comcast is that it never changes. They're free to do so, and if you completely disconnect for a few days, you'll probably lose your DHCP lease, but I've never seen it happen. Of course it can, but it's not that big a deal in reality. Use a dynamic DNS server and you'll never have to worry about it.
There's a few of other similar services: Parsec/Paperspace and Shadow
Latency with a good connection is usually sub 20ms roundtrip.
I use Parsec/Paperspace to game until Shadow gets unveiled on my region soon. I play Paladins (team-based multiplayer shooter) semi-competitively and I have no issues.
Yeah. The reality is that latency on the order of 50ms doesn't matter in games like Overwatch or Paladins until the very highest levels. Even Top 500 players suffer 80ms RTT to the server and they're still better than the other 30 million players. The game smooths over the latency by agreeing with your client when the state has diverged too much. Console players play fine at 30fps, even though "the pros" (often sponsored by manufacturers of gaming hardware) say that you will lose unless you get a 240fps and the PC to run that.
I personally think it's all pseudoscience. You can absolutely see that 60fps looks like a slideshow, but if you showed a game at 250fps and just used interpolation that didn't understand the game state, I bet the pros wouldn't even notice. For some reason, the monitor manufacturers aren't running those tests, though, so I can only speculate ;)
How this ties back into game streaming... yes, you will be supplying input based on the game state two frames ago. You'll be fine.
I played semi-professionally at one point in my life. A 20ms difference could be the difference between a head-shot and a miss. I used to work at an ISP and when I had matches or practice I would haul my computer to work and hook right up to our backbone to get that extra 20ms-40ms advantage.
One thing people who never played at this level don't realize is it's not just what you see. Your brain is always running heuristics and your body has muscle memory. You brain is also predicting where things will be and what you need to do next. The crisper and more responsive the game is, the more these things will line up and a quick flick of your wrist will put you in the right location before your eyes can even verify that this has happened.
To say you can't see more than 30fps or feel 20ms of latency underestimates how our brains and bodies work.
It depends on the game, of course, but in some games it really does matter. It's very hard to simplify things down to a pithy metric. That's the real problem, it's not pseudoscience, it's just very complicated.
It depends on the game... Overwatch has such generous hitboxes on weapons (other than hitscan) that it doesn't matter if you clicked where they were two frames ago... you still hit their hitbox.
Obviously there is benefit to reducing network latency, but it's really about the edge cases (being hooked out of ice block, dying after you translocate). While true that having your video delayed means that the game can't compensate for lag effects, I doubt it matters... if you had 0ms video latency you'd be hooked out of iceblock and die. With the video latency, you were dead before you ice blocked. Either way, you died.
In the end, I doubt people are reacting to anything within 20ms. They used information from 100ms ago to decide what to do, decided what to do and when, and then did it. A video delay won't prevent you from doing that. (More Overwatch examples: use Sombra's translocator to not die to the D.va bomb. You only have a few frames of invulnerability, but you have so long to make the decision to do it that even very low rank players can do it 99% of the time. When you switch to having video lag, you will still be able to do it, but you'll have to re-learn how. The latency doesn't matter, the fact that the game changed a little does.)
If you delay input for two frames, it's very noticeable. Mac OS X had 32ms mouse latency for years, and it was awful. It was annoying while using the desktop and obnoxious in games like Team Fortress 2.
I played a bunch of Arkham Asylum and DiRT 3 while using OnLive streaming, and the input latency definitely made some parts of the games harder than they would have been otherwise. I'd be hesitant to use streaming technology for any competitive game; you're handicapping yourself if you're playing against people who aren't streaming.
To be perfectly honest, it depends on the game. There are very few twitch games now where 2 frames would make a difference in competitive outcome. E.g. games like overwatch, paladins, smite aren't really twitch games so that delay doesn't make a huge differences. Or rather, other elements of skill far outweigh whatever small difference that delay makes.
You might have a case if you're talking about esports teams at the top tiers, but if you're that good, then you'd likely be able to make a living from it and would have your own gaming machine.
OnLive seems to have failed in part because of it's terrible latency, in the 150-200ms range. That's a far cry from 20-80ms which you can get on these newer systems.
Connection log
Connecting over WebRTC first.
Failed to connect with WebRTC
{"Error":1}
Attempting to connect by socket.
Failed to connect with socket.
Failed to connect to j3gv720k7hwez.cya.gg, please try restarting Rainway
Gaikai [0] had this in 2010 for free. You'd log on to their website and play — in a browser — games on a remote server. They got bought in 2012 by Sony.
This is not going to be appropriate for fast reflex twitch gaming until the internet has some fundamental technological shift that allows for super low latency. Unhits are one thing but having your viewport affected by it will just be awful.
Could this be used on a local network? I have a pretty beefy PC but I like the comfort of sitting outside with my chromebook. Is there any way to host this service myself, so it doesn't have to go through any servers first?
I've used Steam and PS4 Remote Play fairly extensively in my home so I have some experience with the concept. I think it really it depends on the game.
Fallout 4: Works great.
Dark Souls 3: The latency is immediately obvious. You might as well be torturing yourself, the game is already hard enough.
God of War: somewhere in the middle. It's playable, but it feels crisper without the extra latency.
I don't see how this product will be any different.
Our stack is HTML5 (React/Typescript), C# and C++ for the most part. A lot of our cloud is also written in .NET Core. It is just a powerful language that we can build highly optimized systems for.
I think most people who need to stream games are those who have a Windows box but run other operating systems for all of their other machines. I can't imagine a scenario where you'd want to host on a Mac or a Linux machine for games, only one where they are the client.
I don't own a personal Windows machine and have games on my Mac. I wouldn't be able to use this service to play games through my browser at work or when not at home
At the risk of detracting from the admittedly cool technology: Yay, yet another freaking terms of service that's 8 miles long and includes a mandatory, binding arbitration clause.
I'm getting so sick of these. It's to the point now where I actively seek out companies based in the European Union or Canada since those countries' laws don't permit such shenanigans.
(Also, at the risk of sounding bitter or hostile, if someone's about to reply to me and say "well, everybody's doing it" or "the lawyers make us," save it. If you're an executive in your company, you can make the choice to not have one of these and you didn't. I genuinely don't care if you personally don't like it.)
I've successfully managed to play Fortnite (don't judge :)) on an AWS g2.2xlarge (via Parsec) with an acceptable level of latency. Apart from the occasional artefacting (most notably when starting), it's been an enjoyable experience and a real insight into the potential power that cloud gaming really could hold.
What's so great about Parsec is that they allow you (at a somewhat marked-up rate so far as I can tell) to rent an AWS server directly from the client and get started.
That being said, my Parsec credit is running a little low now so I might have a go with Rainway :)
I would like to know what the difference — if any — between Parsec and Rainway is? As far as I can tell, Parsec was first, so it'd be interesting to know if their tech is superior.
[0] - https://parsecgaming.com