LOCAL CLOUD GAMING SOFTWARE

Of course given systems will use more or less than these averages. That's the reference point we compare against to see how much more energy, in aggregate, these systems use when connected to cloud services. 'NonCloud' is energy use when no cloud services are being utilized. The red strip in the bars is the network component of energy used when in video-streaming mode. 'Streaming' in the figure above refers to video streaming. We also break down the market and 'fleet' of gaming devices into several user types (reflecting intensity of use). These modes are more fully defined in our reports. We're interested in total energy use of the equipment, across all it's modes of use. Our project consistently looks at all uses and modes of gaming devices, so we consider gaming (local and cloud) but also modes such as video streaming, web browsing, idle, off. For laptops, the variation is almost 17-fold. 'Light' users of 'Entry-level' systems consume 287 kWh/year while 'Extreme' users of 'High-end' consume 2,111 kWh, which is more than a 7-fold variation. These values are averages, and are weighted by the proportion of 'light', 'moderate', 'intensive', and 'extreme' gamers in the user base for each system type. There is currently no cloud-based gaming option for PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo devices, or Apple TV. Lower values for Entry-level systems reflect the relatively high proportion of “Light gaming” user types (fewer hours spent gaming). Cloud gaming and video-streaming values include network energy and energy used in the data center. The chart on the right shows the effect of cloud gaming at the individual system level of cloud gaming versus purely local gaming.Ĭaption: Values shown include all user modes for gaming devices: gaming, non-gaming, video streaming, web browsing, idle, off. the 'Frozen Efficiency and Market Shares' scenario.

These are book-ended by the dotted green line (low case) with high efficiencies across all platform types, and a transition to greater market share of consoles, and no improvements at all in efficiencies or changes in the mix of systems people use to game, i.e. The on the left shows the 'Strong Uptake of Cloud-based Gaming' scenario, in context with other possible scenarios. Note that this is in isolation from other changes that may be happening in parallel (e.g., shift from consoles to PCs, or visa-versa). It results in gaming energy demand rising 17% above baseline in the five years between 20.

Our 'Cloud-gaming' scenario for the entire United States assumes 75% of all gaming hours are on cloud (vs 20% in Baseline).

LOCAL CLOUD GAMING SOFTWARE

We took a long look at this in our lab, running scores of tests with different hardware and software configurations, and different games. One of the topics that attracts the most interest in the 'green gaming' space is cloud gaming.

Local cloud gaming