Steam Box: Valve working on gaming console

[PrincessFrosty]

Just a quick note, but that may change in the near future. Intel is currently experimenting with using knights Ferry/Larrabee servers to produce ray cast video games for cloud computing. For slower paced games like Sims more photo-realistic graphics could become a huge selling point and provide a unique niche market for onlive that won't be possible with desktop computing for another twenty years.

RUBBISH!

There's no way someone is going to build a server farm that's pumping out enough graphical rendering power to be 20 years ahead of current mainstream GPU hardware and then rent that out to consumers as an entertainment service.

Onlive is trying a similar model and ignoring compression artefacts of video streaming they can't max out all their games graphics anyway because they're simply not throwing enough hardware at the server side of things. Because that's very expensive!

Hardware is hardware, the only way you get more bang is with more buck OR by subsidising costs, like with consoles the hardware is offset by royalties for developers, but that's only passed back to the consumer in the form of much more expensive games, in the end the consumer pays for it all.

 

[KeithP]

Ars has a story up about Valve looking for hardware people:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/...re-hardware-engineers-for-unknown-project.ars

-KeithP