In spite of the rapid increase in power of computers and the broadening of the Internet pipeline for many, latency still remains an issue for gamers. Every time frames on a screen are dropped, making a game run like a badly animated flipbook, it can cause a gun to misfire, a spell to be cast 15 seconds later than it should have been, or a player to run into a wall, because the wall “suddenly” appeared. Gaikai and Bigfoot Networks have announced they’ve teamed up, from the client-server and hardware perspectives respectively, to help solve the latency problem, at least in cloud gaming.
A cloud gaming company, Gaikai, focuses on remote high-end servers delivering high-powered games as data streams to a wide range of computers, even lower-end ones. Although Gaikai can deliver inexpensive instant play and high-quality gaming experiences to even modest PCs, the bandwidth requirements can be pretty steep. Bigfoot Networks focuses on the end user’s hardware side of the equation of latency, reducing latency and effectively speeding up and stabilizing the Internet experience for an online gamer. Bigfoot Network offers, among other hardware, Wi-Fi hardware adapters, plug-and-play and internal NICs, and gaming motherboards featuring its integrating networking technology.
“Gaikai has the fastest interactive proximity network in the world, but we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our users’ experience,” said David Perry, CEO of Gaikai. “Bigfoot Networks Killer technology will make any cloud gaming system perform better right now, and we look forward to developing joint technologies that bring those benefits to an even wider audience.”
For now, Bigfoot Networks’ technology will automatically recognizes the Gaikai service, but beyond that announcement, no further details about the partnership are available.
[Source: VentureBeat]
