It’s the same grift that every cloud provider does. The “You’ll save money because you’ll eliminate CapEx and only have OpEx instead of both!” And then they present you with numbers that look reasonable, hoping you don’t do the math.
CapEx - Capital expenditure = the cost of buying the things (ownership)
OpEx - Operating expenses = cost to run things
So, yeah, you don’t have to buy their overpriced $2000 GPU… you could just rent it! But renting it means you never own it, and the contract will state that the SLA will change. So they get you to sign up and then the prices change. And when your money is being dumped into the monthly bill, you are now constantly short what you’d need to buy the hardware and get yourself out of that hell. Ask anyone who’s accidentally left something running in AWS and got a MASSIVE bill. Or made an API but didn’t put rate limiting on it.
northernlights@lemmy.today 2 days ago
Basically you rent NVIDIA’s GPUs, they render the games, stream to you. This way you “save” money by not having to, heyoooo what a surprise, buy cards that have been getting more and more expensive over the years.
webkitten@piefed.social 2 days ago
Thanks! That seems wild, I never knew that existed.
IdleSheep@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Ignoring the GPU pricing issue, It was a really good option for Mac users to play games that don’t run on MacOS. One of my friends uses it to play with our friend group.
Imo, if you ignore the surrounding context, it’s a great option if you don’t want to pay exorbitant prices for GPUs just to play a modern game.
The real issue is that this problem was artificially manufactured by the companies offering the solution and is guaranteed to enshittify in the name of greed, as seen here.
As per usual, we can’t have nice things because of capitalism.
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 2 days ago
You need at least better than average internet and even then it’s not the best experience.