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Comment by ses1984 | Hacker News Reader

ses1984

The speed of light is really fast, Google has fiber connecting all of its data centers, I think viable data centers for game streaming overlap more than you think, it's limited by how much bandwidth Google can spare between data centers.

The reason most services need to be located close to clients is because you want to avoid data transit over the open internet. You want as little open internet as possible between you and the client. Traffic that's internal to Google's networks doesn't have that problem. You can use compute / gpu in US-west and transit that data to you via US-east and the additional latency would be measured in nanoseconds.

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With a straight shot, latency from one coast to the other is at least 50 ms [0]. A more typical route is on the order of 80 ms.

That's definitely noticeable for latency-sensitive actions. I recently switched a server from Oregon to New Mexico, and I notice the latency increase with mosh.

Moreover, there's not a lot of timezone difference between the east and west coasts of the US. Going someplace like Europe is more like 180 ms.

I've played games with a ping like that, but a lot of the ping was my wifi. Doubling the latency would not make the game a better experience.

This could work well for certain types of game, those that are a little less latency-sensitive. But in general the latency is still a big issue.

[0]: speed of light in fiber is ~ 100e6 m/s, around 3000 miles between coasts

Exactly. And 60fps (which is not that high for many games) gives you 16.67ms per frame. at a 50ms delay you're already 3 frames behind.

Not all games are that latency depending. If I am playing civilization I probably won't care that much where the server is.

Neither, will you need to rent an expensive gaming rig by the hour, though.

Wow, I never realized my intuition was off by so much. Speed of light in vacuum is still about 16ms between coasts, which is orders of magnitude worse than I thought. I thought most latency came from routers and switches but a significant portion of delay is indeed speed of light.

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