March 21, 2022 · Concurrents
A new type of stream for interactive content
Streaming, as we know it, sends pre-rendered video over the network. Netflix sends frames. Twitch sends frames. Cloud gaming services like Stadia send frames. The cost of "frames" is what shapes the entire economics of streaming: GPU servers per user, bitrate ceilings, compression artifacts, latency floors.
What if streaming meant streaming the engine itself?
That's the bet we're making with GPEG (Geometry Pump Engine Group). Rather than sending pixels, we send the subassets the game engine needs to render the next moment locally. The player's device — phone, console, headset — does the rendering. We just feed it the right data, in the right order, just in time.
The result is a new kind of stream: lossless quality, no compression artifacts, latency bounded by local rendering, frame-rate bounded by the device itself, and a fundamentally different cost structure for the streaming service.
This is the foundation that makes Slice — playable game content delivered as a stream — possible.