Re: Gaming in the cloud
Sheer latency kills FPS gameplay, nothing to do with how fast the updates are.
The latency of process input, send over Internet connection, process input into game, render, compress, send back over Internet connection, etc. means that unless you are literally sitting next to the computer it fast becomes unplayable.
OnLive found this out and went bust trying to prove otherwise.
You don't notice 100ms "lag" between pressing pause and your movie resuming. You do notice 100ms lag between your mouse and your viewpoint turning.
And it's not related to "how fast" they render or how many machines they throw at it. It's literally what's the latency of the path. You can get a gigabit line that can transfer 1Gbit/s to everyone you contact, but the latency will not be 1ms between you and the entire rest of the planet.
For me now, on a non-shared leased line, it's 8ms to Google DNS. 34ms to Facebook. 3ms to Cloudflare DNS. Now insert a, say, randomly fluctuating 10ms buffer between your super-duper 9600dpi gaming mouse and the USB cable it plugs into. Not the computer, not the screen, but your input device and the input to the game itself. Just that is enough to hurt your play more than anything to do with what FPS you get or whether you have AA/VSync/HDR turned on or off, let alone the MPEG-compression at their end, de-compression at your end, and display to the screen. 60fps gives you 16.67ms to draw it on the screen. Your local computer is capable of that. A remote computer over the Internet is not... you'll skip frames, lag behind on vision and input, and you will find frame updates delayed even more if they cross that magic 16.67ms barrier until the NEXT 16.67ms vsync. The game will read "120fps" because it's running on their server which is getting that. Your actual vision of that remote terminal could easily be a quarter of that even on the best home Internet connection in the world.
Over wifi, it's worse. On home connections it's worse. On a home connection that's also streaming HD footage of the game back simultaneously, it's even worse (poor QoS is the killer in everyone's connection, not the actual technical capability of the line - if you think your Internet is slow or your girlfriend on Facebook kills your gaming ping, buy a router with QoS control and "wifi QoS", e.g. Draytek Airtime Fair Sharing, and watch those problems disappear).
Streaming games might happen at some point in the future, but at that point we'll be expecting transfer of full 3D voxelised VR imagery or somesuch, and the problem will rear its head again even worse.
Latency is a difficult-to-understand problem, and is strangely pretty unrelated to frames-per-second, connection speed, or how much you do to the data along the route.