Now This Is What Ponder(Creator Of GGPO) Says
To be 100% clear, my goal is to have these games to be played competitively at as high a level as possible online. If someone else finds a way to do it that’s better than GGPO, by all means I believe we should adopt that technique. Right now GGPO on the whole is a better solution than fixed or variable input delay, which is what most games use.
GGPO uses the CPU to compensate for the latency in the network by executing the game state for a frame several times. If you are using a very large percentage of your CPU to calculate the game state, then this can be an issue. My argument is that using a large percentage of a CPU to calculate the game state for a fighting game is unnecessary. Clock-for-clock 1 core of an XBox 360 (3.2 Ghz) is 200,000 times more powerful than the processor used for Super Street Fighter IV Super Turbo (16 Mhz) and over 100 times more powerful than the processor used for Tekken on the Playstation (33.86 Mhz). The differences in gameplay between ST and SF4 or Tekken 1 and Tekken 6 are not so dramatic as to require a 100x increase in CPU, IMO. It therefore stands to reason that you can use 95% of the CPU to increase the visual fidelity of the scene and still have plenty of CPU available to execute the game and run GGPOs rollback frames. If you design your game in such a way that you burn 20% of the CPU executing the game state, then you will have a problem, but it’s not necessary to design the game that way, especially a 2D, hit-box based game like Marvel or Street Fighter.
AND
In case anyone is wondering, I do not believe the technical considerations raised in this interview are very relevant to whether or not GGPO could be applied to a 3D game like Soul Calibur or Tekken. GGPO’s techniques do not require more bandwidth, and people currently play on GGPO all over the world, including areas like eastern Europe and South America which have notoriously narrow and high latency pipes.
Fundamentally, the rollback techniques used in GGPO use excess CPU power to compensate for latency in the network. Though no technique can completely eliminate the effects of latency, the ones employed by GGPO generally provide a better user experience to the input delay techniques used by most online fighting games.
..I think you are the one who broke many bones in Team Battle during meetup at HiOctane???
Necrokiller:
XPremiuM:
SolitarySoldier:
