Phillip Presley

Cloud Gaming and Virtualization Technologies are Expanding

Cloud gaming as well as virtual desktop environments are rapidly gaining attention in the IT world. Find out what the future may hold for these new technologies.

Cloud gaming is a concept that is quite new and has been virtually unheard of just a year ago. Normally, when you would play a game on your PC, whether the game is one that you install or simply one that you would play in your browser, all the data processing as well as the graphics rendering would be done on your PC. But with cloud gaming, things are much different. You would still use your own PC or mobile device to control the game, however all of the processing will be done on cloud servers rather than on your local device. Companies such as OnLive have appeared and are pioneering this form of Remote Access technology. However, that technology still has a long way to go before it is accepted into mainstream gaming. Since gaming requires a lot of bandwidth and processing power, there are still few gaming companies that would want to risk developing products for cloud gaming. However, OnLive now features more than 100 games, all of them playable in the cloud, that people can buy or rent. This could eventually lead to the creation of a new business model in the gaming industry, where users can rent certain games either for just a few hours or for a month or so.

However, there is another kind of Remote Control Software that is in rapid expansion too and is getting adopted by users much more quickly than cloud gaming. Cloud remote desktop use is rapidly increasing in the business world, due to the convenience provided by this new form of technology. It is now possible to run various applications remotely, which are actually stored and executed on a cloud server rather than the user's local PC. All the actual “computing” is done on the remote server, rather than on the user's PC, which only acts as a client.

There are a few reasons as to why this new use of cloud computing is expanding a lot faster than cloud gaming. First of all, business applications are not as resource intensive as many of today's games. Therefore, running a word processing program will not require much in terms of CPU power or graphics. Now that broadband internet is everywhere, using a remote desktop environment like this will not feel much different for the user than if they were running all the applications on their local machine. What also makes this Remote Desktop Software use interesting for businesses is that it can help cut down on the cost of hardware. There are many software applications, especially those that require powerful systems such as video editing software, or programs that perform scientific calculations, which could easily be run on cloud servers. As such, businesses would no longer need to worry about whether all of their workstations are powerful enough to run all of their software. 

Article Tags: Cloud Gaming

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