I've always been bearish on game streaming because it's just not practically, physically possible to solve the problem of input lag. Even an extra 10ms is going to be noticeable and unacceptable for many games.
I like to play Spiritfarer and some other family games with my partner on Stadia, and we’ve never noticed any significant problems - even when using non-stadia controllers.
Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that. There are new handheld consoles coming out focused on the cloud gaming market, and even the Switch supports “cloud version” games now, like Resident Evil. Also, Amazon’s Luna service continues to grow and improve.
- Controller buttons caused CPU interrupts, so basically 0 latency
- No OS getting in the way
- N64 era would be double buffered and then straight to the CRT
- NES era would literally calculate the pixels in real time as the CRT beam moved across the screen
- CRTs have virtually no latency, same with the analog signal chain because there is no buffering
So when people try to play them in modern systems, things that were easy back then are quite hard now.
There's a reason anybody speedrunning SM64 will play on a CRT.
I bought a Japanese copy of Super Mario World on ebay (Japanese copies of games were peanuts at the time, I assume they're more now), and found an old CRT for cheap on a local used site. I continued to play SMW many times over the years on various platforms and emulators, and I'm pretty damn good at the game.
But man, did it blow my mind feeling as little input latency as I did the first time I booted it on a CRT after all those years. It actually took a little bit of time to adapt to. It's like that phenomenon where if a button activates a light with low enough latency, people think the light is predicting when they'll hit the button, i.e. turning on before the button is pressed. People don't realize the latency we started dealing with when everything went from analogue to digital!
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_interrupt#Nintendo_Ente...
My previous TV had about 150 ms of video latency. Even if I enabled Game Mode, it was 75 ms, which was still noticeable.
With my current TV, I have no idea what the latency is because I stopped gaming on console and so I'm not playing Rock Band which had a calibration option to compensate for video and audio latency.
If you don't configure your TV correctly sure, you could get massive amounts of lag. Even with an OLED display if you turn on all the post processing you're going to have problems. That's not really a fault of the TV though. I disable almost all post processing on my TVs and get a better picture without the downsides.
With digital receivers adding lag is minimal at best. Especially with newer models that don't draw on top of the source signal.
For example, my LG OLED tv is regarded as one of the best for gaming. Game mode latency is about 9ms. Cinema mode is about 90ms.
If you take a look at the 25 games with the most current players[1] I would argue at least 20/25 would either be annoying to play with increased input lag, or outright highly disadvantageous.
Something like Stray that doesn't really require "hundreds of dollars regularly". Stray plays fine on a 8 year old PC that was definitely < $1000 on its day. Probably not 4K but then also not on the cloud...
On the other hand, it's highly likely that you won't be able to play Stray on the cloud within the next 8 years as providers will drop it down (or outright close...).
At 20 hours a month you would have to play for 50 months (4 years) on your machine before you pay off the machine. Alternatively, you could spend that same money on the streaming service. I think the math doesn't hold up if you are a casual gamer. Building a PC and maintenance just isn't worth it.
That being said, if you play a lot more, maybe even 15-20 hours a week, I think it makes a lot of sense to build your own machine (I have one and it was very worth it when I was a serious LoL player).
But, personally, I find the experience much less enjoyable as the latency goes up. It's not about being competitive either. (I don't play games online.) It just feels sticky and sluggish and I don't enjoy it. I miss the crisp responsiveness of older consoles. :(
I agree with your disagreement here. For me streaming game services don't have a lot of technical hurdles.
> Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that.
I disagree here. I hate the idea of streaming/cloud gaming. I will never sign up for such a service. I don't want a monthly bill, I enjoy building computers. I want to have the content on my local machine thank you very much.
The subscription model I think has already proven it self be consumer hostile. I don't want to subscribe to Adobe, I don't want to subscribe to Office, just let me buy the damn thing outright.
I totally think this is fair - and I think the market can support both models.
E.g.: I like paying for Netflix / Hulu / [insert video streaming service here], but I wouldn't hate on others who prefer buying the DVD. Same thing for Apple Music vs. people who prefer CDs / records.
Consider that a good gaming monitor has input lag of ~3ms, a TV in game mode has input lag of ~12ms, and in regular mode the input lag is >100ms.
I would argue that our brain is just really good at correcting for minuscule timings like that, and less than 1% of the population could even tell the difference between 20ms and 30ms lag.
I’ve used Game Pass Ultimate to stream hundreds of games with 80ms ping, and I can attest that you adapt very quickly. Even first person shooters were easily playable. The only ones that gave me trouble were Forza and GRID, both very fast paced racing games.
But let’s face it: there are many people who are happy to stream Civ, XCOM, and even Elder Scrolls, where input lag isn’t as much of an issue.
The popularity of 120hz gaming would beg to differ, everyone I know who games on a PC has a high refresh rate monitor and can easily tell if their game isn’t running with optimal fps. High refresh rate is certainly something you adapt to, so you might be right about the general population, but were talking specifically about gamers here. And the fact that high refresh rate panels are coming into phones makes me much more doubtful that it’s just gamers. Human beings heavily rely on reaction time just by being bipedal(tripping and not catching yourself can mean death).
Also, Highly responsive systems are just more fun, see also cars.
Agree that many casual people don’t care much, but casual people also tend to rely on more knowledgeable friends, or wouldn’t be in the know enough to try out a streaming game service that wasn’t advertised much.
i tried to play tekken 7 on xbox cloud and it was torture. maybe if you never played it locally youd br ok with the control response times, but not if youd played it running locally.
CRTs were nowhere near that
What's not acceptable is jitter. If it's a constant 10ms delay, it's easy to compensate - for both humans and machines. That's even more so if everyone is subject to a similar delay.
If latency is constantly changing, that's where it can become unacceptable. Your machine better be on a wired network. If it's on wifi, this whole point is moot.
That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher, even with servers scattered around (speed in wires, networking device lags, etc... )
Beyond 60ms, the other devil is packet loss. If your connection starts to become unstable, even if it's a fast connection, it becomes extremely aggravating. I could actually deal with up to 200ms latency, but throw in a tiny amount of packet loss and I'm out.
There are certainly more edge cases and things to go wrong when streaming the entire experience, but the networks are only getting better over time.
Streaming games are also a big answer to many forms of cheating. Not all, but it would make a night-day difference for any competitive game today.
On the other hand, I tried the Resident Evil Village demo first on Stadia, and eventually even bought a full copy for PC. But that game is slow anyway.
That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher.
You're a lay person, you couldn't have known this, you're using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like latency) and you're comparing it to human reaction times, which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of reasoned about from a first principle in a very Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That happens. And you're not the only person doing this, this is a comment section full of people who play games and parrot stuff they seen in YouTube, and don't have a concrete grasp of what it is they're even talking about, so it's understandable when it's laypeople shouting at laypeople that it's just a bunch of blah.
One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll's law than actual journalism.
Even the ~50ms total latency you get from locally streaming over a 1ms wired network (from buffering/inappropriate firmware design) ruins whole genres of high level gameplay. You miss tricky shots in FPS games, you can't confirm/link in fighters, etc.
The word needs to get out
Also 10ms ends up being close to the average input latency of a single additional frame at 60fps, and you just have to look to the efforts that have gone into Super Smash Bros Melee (especially in netplay) to see how far people will go for a single frame.
One absolutely does not need to be a pro to pull it off, and the whole interaction window for that mechanic is based around being able to react within ~32ms (1/30th of a second) to edge guard an opponent. It is exponentially harder to pull off in online play.
When there is fast movement the compression is much more noticeable, worse then the lag. Many reviewers doing graphical comparisons do it with static images. It's quite common for the whole screen to become a blur of compressed and pixelated blocks at the slightest network hiccup.
Also, you are misunderstanding what "reaction time of 100ms" means. It does not mean that any event that takes less time then 100ms imperceptible, it absolutely does not. The sound of a clap lasts 22ms and you are able to hear even shorter sounds. You can see light pulses of arbitrarily short length so long as they are bright enough.
What 100ms reaction time means is that you can't react to a given stimulus in less then that. Here's the important distinction, you don't react to lag, you perceive it.
To experience this for yourself, go this lag simulator webpage [1] and experiment with various lag times. You will quite easily be able to feel the difference in 0ms, 100ms, and 200ms of added latency. Keep in mind this is on top of whatever latency OS layers and browser sandboxing introduce.
Also, I found it kind of scummy how they will not actually tell you what hardware you'll be getting beyond "4c/8t". Mine turned out to be a low-clocked Haswell, a CPU so outdated that Steam downloads were CPU throttled. I used it for about an afternoon and then immediately cancelled.
After doing it several times it let me save the score.
Reaction Time 181ms
74.46% percentile