Hacker News Reader

Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a gamer, and this is an honest question. Isn't streaming now just as good as local - assuming you have performant internet? If so, what's the attraction of running locally? Just to ticker with hardware? Running offline? Don't most all games now require an internet connection?

View on HN

No, not yet, and probably never.

I signed up for Stadia and was really impressed with it. I played dozens of hours of Destiny 2 and really enjoyed my time.

Then I installed Destiny 2 on my home computer and streamed it to my work computer. (I got permission, it was during lunch, etc.) The lag was noticeably less.

Likewise, I had the LOTR Lego game installed on my home PC, and streamed it to a laptop in the same house. The lag on the timing-related events was absolutely noticeable.

Sure, you can play from the cloud and have a lot of fun, but it's definitely not as good as playing locally, and can't be because of the lag.

To further elaborate on your "probably never," many people like myself live quite a distance from the usual locations of both cloud servers and game servers. If you're not in the east or west coast of the US, it's probably thousands of miles. You can have the fastest gigabit fiber connection and it won't matter. Response time will never be acceptable simply because of distance and the limits of the speed of light.

I imagine that many people think internet latency is better than really it is due to the sophisticated predictive technologies currently used in games.

Input lag will likely always be a differentiator between streaming and local. Most games are generally not designed to handle input lag at all, especially input lag at network speeds. The streaming services today have put in extraordinary work into this by using things like input prediction and "input smoothing" and those tools make games more playable than not, but it's certainly not an exact match in play to how the games were designed to be played and sometimes it shows, even when you have performant internet and good quick ping to your nearest streaming server.

Of course, it especially shows as network performance degrades. (I tried streaming a game the other week on cell tower tether from a hotel with bad wifi and the input prediction was a bit like trying to semi-blindly navigate a PowerPoint or HyperCard deck of the game. Felt like classic Myst nodes with a worse game play user experience.)

>Isn't streaming now just as good as local - assuming you have performant internet?

No and it's not really close, especially for first person shooters. That few milliseconds delay makes a HUGE difference in the feel of the game and ultimately how well you perform.

It's not. I demoed Google's beta of assasins creed oddyssey on a fiber connection. It basically works like a youtube video. One second its working pretty well, the next most inconvenient second it boggs down to 144p and you get stabbed in the face and can't ready any text.

One example: Geforce Now's streaming machines skimp on CPU strength, so certain CPU-intensive games like Planetside 2 run poorly. There is no way for an end user to solve this problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com