One of the banes of being a hardcore PC gamer is the constant hardware upgrade treadmill. Last year a new startup company promised to change that! OnLive technology promised the ability to run the latest adn greatest games over a high-speed internet connection using a modest computer on the client side. The innovation is on server-side processing of all the challenging graphical information. Now OnLive is preparing to enter beta testing and has opened up a site as discussed on their official blog.

According to CEO Steve Perlman,

One of the key challenges that OnLive technology addresses is providing a high-quality, fast-response gaming experience over a wide range of situations: different speeds/locations/types of broadband services, a variety of different PC and Mac configurations, several kinds of input and display devices, etc. So, a major focus of OnLive Beta is to test as many of these different situations as we can.

When you sign up for OnLive Beta, you tell us some general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location. We use this information to organize Beta testers into test groups so that our engineering team can focus at different times on testing different situations. If you are a potential fit for a particular test group, we’ll send you an invitation email, asking you to run a detailed Performance Test on your network connection and your computer configuration. The results of the Performance Test will then feed back up to OnLive, and if you are a fit for a test group at some point during Beta, we’ll let you install the OnLive plug-in into your browser. Then, we’ll ask you to spend some time playing…um, I mean…testing games OnLive.

I have already signed up, and if you are serious about putting a significant time investment into helping test and improve this innovative service, then I encourage you to also sign up. Keep in mind, though, that beta testers play a critical role, and it can be a very challenging and time-consuming process.

Source: Onlive Beta Program