Interposing Open GL and sending that across the wire

[blazespinnaker]

You can do native OpenGL on android.

Why not just communicate all the opengl commands across the wire and re-render that on the android device. You might even be able to get away with that in wireless.

[MSat]

That would require significantly higher bandwidth, not to mention the poorer performance of a mobile GPU vs a proper gaming GPU on a PC.

[cybereality]

Yeah, you would not gain much from doing this.

The OpenGL API calls themselves would be quick to send wirelessly, but then what about loading resources (like textures).

You could say the textures would be stored on the mobile device, but then what is the point of running the game on a PC?

[Attreyu]

Give it a couple of years. The mobile GPUs of today are very capable. I think it's only a matter of time before being capable of rendering 2008-2010 era games natively.

And PC rendering will get obsolete anyway, once the bandwith issues are resolved. Nvidia GRID server farms doing all the work then.

[the_wretched]

Bandwidth is not the main Problem, latency is.

[Attreyu]

Bandwidth is not the main Problem, latency is.

Latency time = screen capture (memory copy) + RGB(A)-YUV conversion + encoding + packetization + transfer + decoding + rendering.

If you have solid GPUs on both side, the only thing remaining is the transfer part - bandwith. Which is why we are still using cables to deliver the video feed.

[MSat]

Bandwidth is not the main Problem, latency is.

Well, if you're trying to shuffle large amounts of data around, then a decrease in bandwidth is an increase in latency.

Consider this:

A two channel Thunderbolt interface (AFAIK the fastest consumer-level serial port) has a bandwidth of 20 Gigabits/sec

On the othe hand, the PCIe 16X 2.0 interface used by most GPUs has a bandwidth of 8 Gigabytes/sec, or 64Gigabits/sec
A GPU using a PCIe 3.0 port has nearly double the amount of bandwidth as one attached to a 2.0 port. Either way, both are substantially higher than Thunderbolt, so I would say bandwidth is still very much a big problem.