[donaldo]

Not sure if this is sarcasm or not but I completely agree. It’s ridiculous that for housing and cars (the most important assets), leasing and renting is quite common but it’s suddenly taboo when it comes to something almost just as important like my video games. Also less wasteful for the environment to rent and play from a central supercomputer than have to buy my own computer and buy games.

So whenever people express the point you were mocking, I just tell them about the environmental impact and they agree.

[Bancakes]

I can afford to buy the latest 7nm components, with TDP no more than I need, undervolt them to my performance specifications, use them their entire functional lifetime or sell them to someone. Either way, these are components fully utilised and easy to run on green energy (500W is enough for a beast gaming rig, 250W for most people). There is minimal waste and no overhead to speak of.

Compare this to generations old server farms that require maintenance, extreme cooling solutions, run virtualisation layers on top of virtualisation layers, necessitate 5G equipment and increasingly high internet costs and middlemen, on top of a user device in the first place.

My computer can also be used as charity for Folding At Home, run my homeservers, and train my AI models. All this instead of purchasing different subscriptions for different servers. In effect, I can optimise the hardware exactly to my needs and use it efficiently to its full extent, reducing waste completely.

Not to mention game streaming will never look as good as native rendering, and "negative latency" is physically impossible. I also don't lease cars.

[mekkkkkk]

That all sounds good. Maybe you personally can make it work. In reality, for most people it's a cycle of buying new big hardware (consoles, desktop, laptop) every few years, using them very sporadically and then turning them to e-waste. I don't see how a centralized solution could be more wasteful than that.

The latency part is true though.

[donaldo]

Good points, I completely agree with everything you brought up. Can you try to find data on electrical usage per hour of a series of centralized RDPs vs your computer?

[gruez]

Random result: https://www.dataspan.com/blog/data-center-cooling-costs/

>According to research, anywhere between 30 and 55 percent of a data center’s energy consumption goes into powering its cooling and ventilation systems

Meanwhile the cooling cost for a computer in a home is probably zero.

[krageon]

> leasing and renting is quite common

Leasing is common because people don't quite understand they're always worse off with it (though you could make the argument that it saves hassle and could therefore be worth it).

Renting is as common as it is because for a large amount of people it's literally impossible to buy a house where they'd need it (or even at all, without significant moving distance). Renting is always a terrible idea and most people understand this, they just don't have a choice.

[Bancakes]

It's not letting me reply to your second post but you can find me some RDP, and I'll compare it myself.

[FpUser]

Housing - I did not have enough money to buy it outright so no choice for me here. For cars I do so would never lease one. As for environmental impact - go preach to bitcoin miners and other heavy users. I would suggest starting with 3 percenters.