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Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

I’ve played input-sensitive games with friends on GeForce Now for several months at this point — no major issues with lag.

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I was skeptical on cloud gaming, but I also tried GeForce Now and had a great experience. No time spent downloading and installing, instant access to thousands of games, playable on older laptop without fans spinning up. I do think you need a solid internet connection for it to work well.

Unless the GeForce now servers were co-located to your local ISP, it's hard to believe. Even then, you're adding quantifiable jitter to the equation on the order of a few milliseconds. It's noticeable.

I mean, in the case of multiplayer probably a lot comes out in the wash of optimistic updates and such, but it’s still very playable and I couldn’t personally notice the lag most of the time. Occasionally when my connection got bad it would have issues, but that was more noticeable because the resolution dropped significantly.

I’ve had the same experience. I could not tell the latency for GeForce now, and I’m using a municipal ISP.

I’m not really a casual gamer either. I’m still surprised that GeForce now doesn’t have an app for Linux. I switch to my Mac laptop to play stuff like Fortnite.

> I switch to my Mac laptop to play stuff like Fortnite.

Fortnite is about as casual as it gets. You won't rank very high in a twitch shooter like CS:GO (or keep consistent ranking) using a cloud gaming service.

People have won a million dollars playing fortnite, there’s nothing casual about that…

Ah yes, tell me more about how the exception speaks for everyone. Most folks playing Fortnite are casual gamers.

Most people playing any massive online game are casual gamers. That’s just math.

Just because one game has guns doesn’t make it less ‘casual’, which btw is a dismissive word to use in the context. Why are ‘twitch reactions’ less ‘casual’ than puzzle solving?

I think the point being made was Fortnite tends to have a wider breadth of gamer than other games (casual to hard core). My partner has a group that plays, but it’s more about crazy fun For them. They’ve tried other games but found they just get dropped and lose too quickly to make it fun.

Plus cross platform.

casual is the wrong way to gatekeep it. Someone could be a pro motorcycle racer with better reaction times than most professional gamers and still be a casual gamer. What you're really trying to test for is reaction times so just come right out and say that instead. Unless you're afraid of being beat by a filty casual.

I played CP2077 few days after release date, no issues with input lag. On the other hand my ISP had trouble to keep stable 40Mb/s - so in peak ours it wasn't playable at all. It was a bit surprising at first but makes sense - even a second or two buffer for other streaming services is enough to ignore variations in connection speed - but gaming has no such luxury.

It really just depends how close you are to the data centre and how your traffic gets routed. A couple ms is probably acceptable, 50ms certainly not.

Most people put our ability to perceive network lag at 100-150ms. Human perceptual limits in vision is around 13ms, but that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here. 50ms is very very playable in networked games, I wouldn’t notice personally until 120ms.

50ms works for network games when the input update loop is done locally, and with lots of fancy techniques to correct for the network lag.

50ms of input lag on the other hand is very easily noticeable. And makes games unplayable for lots of people.

I think a problem with cloud gaming is that companies are being very secretive about where they have compute resources. Which I think is the wrong approach. they should partner with Comcast and say Atlanta is a Geforce Now hub. If someone is too far, they should just not let them access the service.

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