Vidock Alternative

I was thinking about this for some time and I was wondering if somebody can tell me if this work. I read up elsewhere and they say "can't work" but I done my maths and find it quite workable. This is my theory:

The setup:
1. You have a desktop with a powerful graphic card.
2. You have a laptop.
3. Assuming your desktop is powerful enough for fraps to record off your screen with your desktop gpu at 60 fps at 720p (1280x720). (This means that screen capturing with gpu can achieve high fps even though your game is running)

You connect a cross cable to form a reliable 100mbps LAN.

If you build a custom software which uses the gpu to record off the screen just like how fraps does it. Your desktop will do the capturing of the game with its powerful gpu.

Then you send each images in sequence, real time over the reliable 100mps. I did a manual screen cap on my 1024 x 728 screen, and save the file in mspaint, bmp format, the size is about 2.13 mb, let's assume and cap each screen capture at 2.5mb.

Given the speed of the LAN connection is 100mps, then in one second, 100 / 2.5 will achieve a framerate of 40 fps.

The custom software on the laptop will use the laptop's gpu (You must still have a decent gpu to quickly render images with your gpu) to render and display the received images at 40 fps. Say the rendering and processing give a 20% drop (Assumption) in performace on your laptop, we get around 32 fps.

That framerate is quite playable I think. On bigger screen we could reduce the game to window mode 1024 x 728 screen size, capture the screen with gpu (not window api), send it over, render with laptop's gpu, get 32 fps. And that's assuming we are using bitmap, which from what I read, is a boon to gpu rendering. The custom software should also process keyboard and mouse input (these shouldn't have much lantency issue usually).

What do you guys think of my theory?

 

So the theory involves being directly connected to a gaming desktop to run games on a laptop? Or, in other words, running the games on the desktop, but going through a convoluted process of transferring the images, and apparently the control to a laptop? Sounds kind've pointless if you really want my opinion.

Besides, OnLive is already building a cloud-gaming system that does something like this. While I admit it might be cool to be able to set up your own system so you can cloud game off of your own gaming server with your own games, I don't think your method would be particularly functional - presumably OnLive's service uses a much more streamlined method of delivering content to the user.

I'd wager that we'll see software within a couple years that will actually make personal cloud gaming like this a reality, but it's probably much more complicated, and much better streamlined, than delivering a series of bitmap images to a laptop. Also, 100 Mbps is 100 MegaBITS per second, so, if I'm not mistaken, it should only deliver 12.5 MegaBYTES per second at full efficiency - you'd need a gigabit ethernet connection for your theoretical system, though that wouldn't be a big problem as it's fairly common these days.

 

I see, so in other words it will be extremely slow 12.5 mb per second.

 

Anyway, what is the secret behind onlive low lantency?

 

They have a custom chip made to compress video quickly to be sent out using as little bandwidth as possible for a specific resolution.