Understanding GPUs in the cloud: A deep dive
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(6-minute read)
A common question around cloud gaming is, don’t you need way too much hardware to offer a cloud gaming service? Well, let’s see it from the following perspective. The last generation of consoles manufactured, distributed and sold 165M console units worldwide. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to centralize those gaming machines in 7M servers instead and offer the same experience regardless of where you are? Didn’t WeWork disrupt the office real-estate market or AWS the computing market by centralizing, optimizing and sharing resources? Cloud gaming will not only change how users play, but also how efficiently hardware is utilized.
But, what has prevented cloud gaming from booming and disrupting the market in the past years? Simply put, semiconductors technology didn’t allow the optimization of resources until recently, and that’s what you are going to learn on this drizzle. But first, let’s get into some history about GPUs.
For the last 25 years, Graphic Computing Units (GPUs) have been part of every PC gaming setup since ATI (now AMD’s) and 3dfx (now Nvidia’s) launched the firsts GPUs ever made. The goal of these first pieces of hardware was to offload all visual tasks in the computer from CPUs. Since then, the GPU market has significantly grown, and consumers are now even more familiar with the specs and expected performance of an end-consumer GPU than the mechanisms of a washing machine. Two main questions arise around GPUs:
- Are GPUs the focal point of all the hardware needed to play a game? The answer is yes, because they are specifically created to portray what you see on your screen and, in most cases, they can be the bottleneck when executing high-demanding visual software, such as video games.
- Ok then, when did GPUs really make the leap onto the cloud and how have their costs evolved over time? Long story short, GPUs take into account several variables, as opposed to their PC neighbors, the CPU, RAM and Hard Drive. In addition, in spite of 25 years of developments, it was not until 2012 that GPUs tackled the cloud market, as you will see next.
If you’ve read up to this point, you have seen that cloud gaming businesses are finally becoming sustainable, and we will see a significant upraise of the space soon. All of this has happened in these past few years, almost at the same time as the upraise of other trendy ecosystems, with the difference that cloud gaming is materializing by overcoming its past and most critical challenges.
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Daniel Olmedo — Co-Founder & CEO
Begoña Fernández-Cid — Co-Founder & CMO
