Let me clarify: We have a certain amount of latency when streaming games from both local and internet servers. In either case, how do we improve that latency and what limits will we run in to as the technology progresses?
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Ignoring any computation, I guess rhe fastest would be dependent on the medium which transport the data and the limit there is the speed of light
I played on Google Stadia from day 1 until it got shut down. I mainly played racing games like F1 and GRID, with the occasional session in RDR2 or The Division 2. Latency was never a problem for me.
The main problem that occured over and over in the community was people’s slow or broken internet connection at home or their WiFi setup.
I would say the technology for cloud gaming is here today, but the home internet connections of a lot of people aren’t ready yet.
Many people don’t understand the continued importance of a home wired LAN. WiFi is, and probably always will be, a fraction of the performance of an ethernet connection.
Yes, I should have mentioned that I’ve always played via wired ethernet connection.
Of course! But anyone on WiFi are going to be subject to more lag, like you said.
I would say the technology for cloud gaming is here today, but the home internet connections of a lot of people aren’t ready yet.
You witness this a lot with video conferencing. People tell one person their audio/video is shitty, and that person just shrugs and says “yeah, I have bad internet.” In my head I’m screaming “Well, what have you tried?!” or “I see you sitting beside the refrigerator there!”
The lag has several components. Input lag between the peripherals and your computer, the network transmissions to the server, the regular rendering of the game, live transcoding the game, the network again, decoding the stream on your device. The rest are pretty much insignificant.
The biggest way to reduce lag I can think of is if the server is literally in your city, and the connection between it and you have the least amount of nodes between you and the server. Some video streaming services will partner with ISPs to put their servers in the same place to reduce overhead and improve the user experience. I’d assume that gaming would benefit from that too, but this is harder to implement since.
Another way to improve networking lag is by prioritising game streaming data over other data, QoS (quality of service), is really important both for the home network and on the ISP side.
This should be obvious, but don’t use a VPN.
For the video transcoding, it can be pretty quick, but having dedicated hardware like NVENC would be faster than using the CPU, not just in terms of FPS, but also in latency if given the same FPS (through FPS cap).
Higher FPS. The more frames per second, the lower the input lag, though it only matters if you eliminate network lag first.
I should mention that I have never used any game streaming service, and I don’t have the equipment to test lag either.
I think we are constantly progressing in that field. One issue for latency was that controllers used to contact your device, and then the server. Now they can connect directly to the server. Things will improve, like it or not.
For right now, I think the biggest hurdle is with ISPs.
- Data caps can be quite common, in many countries. Essentially creating a huge limit on how much you can (if at all) play.
- Most people’s router, and access point hardware needs upgrading. A lot of the stock router AIOs from ISPs are really bad. Creating a bottleneck before the data even reaches the servers.
Another hurdle I can see is companies profit sharing. Everyone wants a large cut, so I’d expect multiple streaming options… and many failures, like what we’re seeing on the movies/series streaming model… just with games it’ll be soooo much worse.
I feel a lot of the responses here are talking about cloud gaming not game streaming.
Game streaming needs to be easier to do for it to become more popular. There’s a bunch of half baked solutions through different hardware and software when you could just physically move the hardware running the game in most cases.
Cloud gaming is a hard sell when the cost to play most games on your own hardware is really fucking cheap compared to most media. Like the QWERTY keyboard people will do the traditional thing because they aren’t forced to change and it’s good enough.
