Video Game Overlay

摘要

A video server is configured to provide streaming video to players of computer games over a computing network. The video server can provided video of different games to different players simultaneously. This is accomplished by rendering several video streams in parallel using a single GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). The output of the GPU is provided to graphics processing pipelines that are each associated with a specific client/player and are dynamically allocated as needed. A client qualifier may be used to assure that only clients capable of presenting the streaming video to a player at a minimum level of quality receive the video stream. Video frames provided by the video server optionally include overlays added to the output of the GPU. These overlays can include voice data received from another game player.

主权项

1. A game delivery system, comprising:
game logic configured to provide a video game environment based on game rules and game commands received from one or more game players; a graphics processing unit configured to render the video game environment to video data; an encoding pipeline configured receive the rendered video data and overlay data, the encoding pipeline configured to combine the overlay data with the rendered video data, the encoding pipeline configured to encode the combination of the overlay data and the video data into a data format compatible with a codec present at a client computing system for transmission over a network to the client computing system, wherein the encoding pipeline is dynamically provisioned in response to a signal received from the client computing system, the signal identifying the codec present at the client computing system; and an output configured to provide the encoded combination of the overlay data and the video data over the network to the client computing system.