Hacker News Reader

Comment by Agingcoder | Hacker News Reader

This certainly doesn’t mirror my experience of cloud gaming (gfn) which is indistinguishable from local gaming to me, incl 4k. By and large it’s a significantly better experience than local gaming: silent, cheap, non configuration/setup, works almost everywhere for me etc .

Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.

View on HN

Cloud gaming has a latency problem that cannot be fixed because the speed of light being a thing. I play many titles that require fast reflexes and any latency is unacceptable.

Also I muck around with mods, emulators etc. PC Gaming isn't just whatever is on the Steam Store.

I used Nvidia GeForce now for some months and must admit that I can't feel a difference most of the time. I tried call of duty warzone and even this was great multiplayer experience. (Game is a mess with GeForce now, can't remember shader cache and must recreate it every GeForce now session)

You don't feel the difference until you play without the lag.

I've got something like 1400 hours in HellDivers 2, playing Level 10 I don't want to experience any lag. I recently changed the configuration of my machine and I've able improve framerates/frame pacing and it make a lot of difference when playing the game i.e. some melee counters I can much more easily perform.

I used GeForce now for the summer as I wanted to avoid a hot pc in my room.

Any game I played with GeForce now I also played local, yes there is a minimal difference, but sometimes I got better feeling with multiplayer as the cloud service had better connection to the game servers than my local provider.

And I will prefer most multiplayer games with my local machine, but it impressed me very much (more than stadia and Xbox cloud)

There is no way that a latency between their servers and whatever you are playing it on would have less latency it isn't mathematically possible.

Bad peering.

If my provider has a bad peering to the gameservers, but a good peering to the cloud gaming servers, you get a better gaming experience with cloud gaming.

Its possible.

No it isn't. You would have bad peering between you and the game server. It doesn't make much sense however you try to explain it away.

You are adding an extra latency between you, the game server and the other players. Playing mental gymnastics about how it could be better when it can't isn't going to convince me or anyone else.

Conversations like these feel like the sort of conversations people were having at the end of days of the Amiga where they were talking about the custom chips and all that jazz being better ignoring the fact that people were buying Voodoos and Soundblasters.

If i get 150-200 ping direct connected to the gameserver, vs 20ping on the cloud gaming vm + 60ms from connection to the cloud gaming, you get a better multiplayer experience.

Never said its the default or that i want convince someone, but it happens to me at least with two games at the evening.

150-200 ping is when you are playing someone on another continent. I used to get a 150-200 ping when playing someone in the US (I am in the UK) on CS.

You aren't going to magically get a better ping because the VM is somewhere else. So I find this hard to believe.

I think gp was providing numbers just to give an example of why it might work, not actual numbers. Their point was mostly that internet routes are noisy and not guaranteed in performance ie you might not go through the best possible path.

While the numbers might differ , I know this is technically possible from my experience in corporate environments buying links to minimize latency. Basically your isp might optimize for a different function ( cost, etc ) than Nvidia ( who wants to make make players happy and subscribe ).

My isp used to throttle Netflix or YouTube ( I don’t remember ), and gfn users occasionally report better performance when using a vpn ( it’s usually throughput not latency though ).

Latency isn't great, but it doesn't matter for many games.

It matters for anything multiplayer shooter and even single player games with quicktime events. Using WiFi, wireless controllers, TVs with frame pacing and bluetooth headsets adds latency already in your own house of around 10-50ms (although it is a combined latency, not network).

I know and I can't use cloud gaming myself in part because of the games I play and because I'm used to 240fps PC latency so no game can feel good, I can barely stand using steam link for couch gaming. But there are loads of people that wouldn't notice the difference if they're used to 30fps consoles and loads of games where the latency doesn't matter.

it matters in every single game i play.

It matters in almost every game I play as well, but for some it doesn't really matter like Baldurs Gate 3, Blue Prince, etc. And I think if you're used to 30fps on console you might not notice a difference in most games, but if you're used to 240hz/fps on a PC any game will feel atrocious until you get used to it.

I'm on 1gb/s and it's still pretty terrible to me

gb/s is a measure of bandwidth, not latency. but thats just the thing, the ping time is too high for any game of interest if its > 0.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com