3 ms·
It's the tradeoff between local computing power and bandwidth/latency. It flips back and forth every couple decades based on what's expensive and what the last
by geoelectric 6y ago
It's the tradeoff between local computing power and bandwidth/latency. It flips back and forth every couple decades based on what's expensive and what the last big advance was.
Even within the current era, render on server, render on client, ajax (the mix), etc.
We're seeing it now in gaming. Vidcards are the cost of a whole system now, games have become huge, and fast storage is still expensive; but bandwidth is increasing along with A/V streaming being perfected, so someone figured out how to minimize apparent control latency and now games are streaming. Once vidcards get cheap and SSD storage capacities catch up to 150GB games it'll flip back until the balance tips again.
- Firehawke 6y agoNot enough to make even moderately latency-sensitive gaming worthwhile, though. I don't see that getting better unless there's widespread building of data centers all over the place to keep the services right in your neighborhood.
- geoelectric 6y agoI’ve been pretty happy with PS Now, Shadow and GeForce Now. I show maybe an extra 50ms of latency max, more like 30ms avg. I wouldn’t play really competitive shooters that way but it’s low enough to not bother me even in mouse/keyboard FPS (for the PC services). For controllers it’s completely negligible, like playing with a Bluetooth device or on a 2015 TV. That said, I’m in Santa Clara County near one of the major Shadow datacenters, probably the others too, and I have gigabit. I am in the ideal situation you describe. So is a lot of the world though. US is super rural for its economic weight but that’s not the norm. Most developed countries have much higher density and better networks. I think we’ll probably just end up dragging behind the curve until we mesh the flyover states better.