MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: MAME is one of the few emulators that can't work at all with this app

> In all honesty I'm not sure where you got the idea that you could use Remote Desktop
> Protocol for something like this, as efficiently streaming a game's video one way and
> the inputs the other way with as low latency as possible is a problem that has
> literally had hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of people looking at it -
> just look at the likes of OnLive, Gaikai, what NVidia are doing with game streaming
> these days via the Shield, and what Microsoft are looking at with their planned
> Xbox-on-PC tech. You're not going to manage to solve this problem using off-the-shelf
> tools like Microsoft Remote Desktop, that's for sure.

As an addendum to the above: trying to stream gaming over VDI / PCoIP deployments (which are about as fast as you're likely to get for these sorts of things outside of a lab these days) also sucks for similar reasons. It likely won't be as crap as trying to do it over RDP, VNC, X, etc. but it's still going to hurt to some extent.

My experience with gaming has been that you can take a zero client or similar, attach it to the exact same switch in the datacentre that your VDI environment uses for client delivery, and see nowhere near a 100% usable improvement in performance over having the same zero client at a remote site with good connectivity back into the datacenter.

That's not to say that there won't be a noticeable performance improvement in the above scenario: there likely will be. But whether it's a useful enough improvement for the desired end result (completely smooth and responsive gaming in this case) is probably going to fall into the 'no' category.

PCoIP has essentially the same issues as VDI, except by way of an add-on card in a PC instead of using a sealed box and calling it a zero client. However, because it's a card in a PC, you also get to deal with PC system performance issues on top of those imposed by your PCoIP card and network infrastructure.

In fairness to Teradici (who make the majority of the VDI / PCoIP chipsets in use these days) and others, their hardware does a pretty good job of getting the video stream out onto the wire efficiently. But the process of getting that stream onto the wire is always going to add overhead in terms of the time that it takes to process the video, send it down the wire, then reprocess and ultimately display it at the other end. It's a maths problem, and one that can't be avoided since time is always a factor in making this happen.

Don't invest effort in trying to do this over remote displays. Just put together a decently powerful machine, give it a monitor and controls, and enjoy gaming on it.