7 ms·

You know it's gonna be bad news when you see a title like that. I've always been bearish on game streaming because it's just not practically, physically possib

• anthonybsd 4y ago
  I disagree. The fastest human reaction time is something around 100ms. (https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime). I've just measured, and mine is 230ms. As such 10ms lag wouldn't make any difference. I've used Shadow Tech PC for a while during pandemic. With good upstream and downstream bandwidth it was a fairly decent experience, even for playing something like competitive Overwatch. I noticed the difference with normal gaming PC due to some other factors (quality of sound, etc.). Standard accessories worked seamlessly for USB-over-UDP.
  • Veuxdo 4y ago
    100ms times are cheaters; 200ms is probably closer to the absolute lower bound of human reaction time.
    • dsissitka 4y ago
      I don't know about that. I'm off form and this was my third try after going wired. https://imgur.com/a/8inHYSf https://imgur.com/a/8inHYSf
  • infecto 4y ago
    Agree. I used Shadow for a bit something like 2 years ago and it was pretty seamless. Sure, not as good as having a PC but it was pretty darn close.
  • adamsmith143 4y ago
    Pro gamers can definitely feel +/- 10ms of lag. It makes a difference at that level.
  • bitcharmer 4y ago
    Maybe not 10ms but anything above 50ms is known and proven to degrade pro players' performance in competitive FPS games
  • natdempk 4y ago
    Humans can detect 10ms of latency easily. The problem is more than just reacting slightly later to events, its also how quickly the game/system responds to your inputs because its a round-trip interaction. This ends up usually being where the latency becomes more noticeable to most people. People can generally adjust for consistent latency, but any latency gains are pretty noticeable once you get used to looking for it. Also 10ms ends up being close to the average input latency of a single additional frame at 60fps, and you just have to look to the efforts that have gone into Super Smash Bros Melee (especially in netplay) to see how far people will go for a single frame.
    • slfnflctd 4y ago
      Practiced musicians begin to feel discrepancies in time starting at latencies as low as 10ms. I learned this when investigating whether bands could practice live over the internet (spoiler: most of them can't). Turns out that due to limitations of physics, even absolutely optimal connections still have enough lag/jitter to ruin it for professional instrumentalists.
  • sascha_sl 4y ago
    I tried Shadow and, well, you could really tell they host in a budget datacenter with how often there was stutter or missing keyframes (they host with OVH in Europe). I never had such issues with GeForce Now. Also, I found it kind of scummy how they will not actually tell you what hardware you'll be getting beyond "4c/8t". Mine turned out to be a low-clocked Haswell, a CPU so outdated that Steam downloads were CPU throttled. I used it for about an afternoon and then immediately cancelled.
  • npinsker 4y ago
    You're definitely right for most people, but even 10-20ms is noticeable by experienced players and can be very impactful at pro-level -- e.g. some high-level LoL players feel 35ms ping is unacceptably high for competitive play: https://afkgaming.com/esports/news/ls-talks-about-why-35-ping-in-msi-2022-is-horrendous https://afkgaming.com/esports/news/ls-talks-about-why-35-pin... (though it probably doesn't matter much for Stadia's use cases)
    • anthonybsd 4y ago
      Doubtful. Pro gamers are known primadonnas. If anyone ever tested them and added synthetic lag with double blind study I suspect they wouldn't identify it more accurately than what a random chance would dictate. Sorry, but pure speed of electrical signals/chemicals traveling in the body puts a constraint on that.
      • ProfessorLayton 4y ago
        It's not even just "pro gamers", the most popular fighting game in the world (Smash Bros U.) is enjoyed by casual players and pros, and has an entire mechanic based on "two-framing" for edge guarding. One absolutely does not need to be a pro to pull it off, and the whole interaction window for that mechanic is based around being able to react within ~32ms (1/30th of a second) to edge guard an opponent. It is exponentially harder to pull off in online play.
      • avereveard 4y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4&t=90s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4&t=90s you can literally see the difference.
  • philliphaydon 4y ago
    Wow, this site is cool. I consistently get ~188, best was 176ms. I wonder what some of the esport gamers get! After doing it several times it let me save the score. Reaction Time 181ms 74.46% percentile
    • arc-in-space 4y ago
      Top level players don't tend to do better on these than slightly above average, because reaction time is something you train for a specific task.
  • streamingbro 4y ago
    You can easily observe how significant latency is in videos like this: https://youtu.be/vOvQCPLkPt4?t=80 https://youtu.be/vOvQCPLkPt4?t=80 (Microsoft Research presenting its ultra low latency displays for touch interactions). Many mobile games have you drag and drop things, so it's not like it's just first person shooters that suffer from latency. You're a lay person, you couldn't have known this, you're using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like latency) and you're comparing it to human reaction times, which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of reasoned about from a first principle in a very Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That happens. And you're not the only person doing this, this is a comment section full of people who play games and parrot stuff they seen in YouTube, and don't have a concrete grasp of what it is they're even talking about, so it's understandable when it's laypeople shouting at laypeople that it's just a bunch of blah. One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll's law than actual journalism.
    • kbelder 4y ago
      This is the most factually true comment that I've ever downvoted.
      • Firmwarrior 4y ago
        That comment should be sent out as a blanket text message to everyone who commented on this post about latency IMO The word needs to get out
    • anthonybsd 4y ago
      Wow. Condescending much?
      • redox99 4y ago
        A bit condescending yes but he showed a really good example of how input lag is noticeable.
      • gilrain 4y ago
  • 10000truths 4y ago
    The bigger issue is jitter. People can compensate for consistent delay (e.g. by leading shots in an FPS game). But when the delay is inconsistent and varies quickly, it becomes much more difficult to anticipate movements and execute time-sensitive maneuvers.
  • arc-in-space 4y ago
    This is confused. Reaction time is irrelevant, you can still notice very short delays between two events. The fundamental issue is that when you make an input that corresponds to an action in a game, you expect that to action happen near-immediately, and anything else feels terrible.
  • least 4y ago
    Human reaction times have nothing to do with perceived input latency. There is a latency budget that is different for every individual that determines whether or not something will be an acceptable experience. This budget is divided between everything in the signal chain like the input devices, the computer/console, the monitor/tv, and any other processors along the signal path. Streaming games adds additional latency to the signal chain. Generously if your target is 60fps and you have a round trip latency to their server of 8ms, that's a half frame of added latency. On its own it's almost certainly imperceptible to most people, but it's not working in a vacuum and most people don't live right next to the datacenter. It can very easily go over the threshold for what is acceptable to most people.
  • foobarian 4y ago
    It matters for MMOs. If there are two pro gamers A and B both with 100ms reaction time, but gamer A has 10ms ping while gamer B has 30ms ping, gamer A has a consistent advantage. This is not strictly a Stadia problem but it may be exacerbated if the display data adds latency on a slower line.
  • KevinGlass 4y ago
    Unless cloud gaming company intend to put servers in every single city across the globe it's not going to work. Even in Boston with good, fiber internet streaming games have too much lag and the compression artifacts are horrible. When there is fast movement the compression is much more noticeable, worse then the lag. Many reviewers doing graphical comparisons do it with static images. It's quite common for the whole screen to become a blur of compressed and pixelated blocks at the slightest network hiccup. Also, you are misunderstanding what "reaction time of 100ms" means. It does not mean that any event that takes less time then 100ms imperceptible, it absolutely does not. The sound of a clap lasts 22ms and you are able to hear even shorter sounds. You can see light pulses of arbitrarily short length so long as they are bright enough. What 100ms reaction time means is that you can't react to a given stimulus in less then that. Here's the important distinction, you don't react to lag, you perceive it. To experience this for yourself, go this lag simulator webpage [1] and experiment with various lag times. You will quite easily be able to feel the difference in 0ms, 100ms, and 200ms of added latency. Keep in mind this is on top of whatever latency OS layers and browser sandboxing introduce. 1. https://www.skytopia.com/stuff/lag.html https://www.skytopia.com/stuff/lag.html
    • mrkramer 4y ago
      Moore's law is our friend and in the future seamless cloud gaming will be possible.
      • avereveard 4y ago
        you cannot reduce streaming latency with smaller transistor, nor with more transistor density. or maybe there's a new more law interpretation I'm not aware of that makes speed of light in the connectivity medium faster?
  • avereveard 4y ago
    a test on a mouse click? really? finger travel time is going to dwarf and eat up whatever reaction time you have.
• throwawaymaths 4y ago
  I think there is an argument that you can level the playing field by making everyone's lag suck equally. I don't know if stadia did that though
  • imbusy111 4y ago
    This logic doesn't apply to single player games. I tried playing a racing game on Stadia and it just didn't feel good. On the other hand, I tried the Resident Evil Village demo first on Stadia, and eventually even bought a full copy for PC. But that game is slow anyway.
    • throwawaymaths 4y ago
      Indeed. Count me as one person who was negative on stadia at the start (worked for a company where the CEO wanted to try to copy the idea, I said don't bother)
• Veuxdo 4y ago
  10ms isn't even one frame at 60 FPS. Modern consoles have more "native" input lag than that.
  • Cyberdog 4y ago
    10ms is an extremely generous estimation of the amount of lag you'd get playing with a device like Stadia at any rate.
    • sascha_sl 4y ago
      Jitter is what really kills it. I found out that my ISP (who own switches in the basement) limits bandwidth based on a rolling time window, so whenever someone in the house starts a download they can briefly saturate the entire link. Wish they'd know how to configure QoS on their very expensive network gear.
  • UncleMeat 4y ago
    Yep if people were bothered by 10ms then everybody would be on CRTs. But... nobody is doing this except some extreme speedrunners and fighting game players.
    • emasirik 4y ago
      Typically, not even fighting game players. The last holdouts are retro enthusiasts and Smash Bros. Melee players.
    • blibble 4y ago
      your typical high end gaming monitor is now 360hz CRTs were nowhere near that
• s3r3nity 4y ago
  I disagree, because for 99% of gamers not trying to play competitive games, it’s virtually unnoticeable. I like to play Spiritfarer and some other family games with my partner on Stadia, and we’ve never noticed any significant problems - even when using non-stadia controllers. Overall I’m bullish on cloud gaming, because I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that. There are new handheld consoles coming out focused on the cloud gaming market, and even the Switch supports “cloud version” games now, like Resident Evil. Also, Amazon’s Luna service continues to grow and improve.
  • AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    > I don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars regularly to update my PC or console hardware just to play games like Stray or something like that. Something like Stray that doesn't really require "hundreds of dollars regularly". Stray plays fine on a 8 year old PC that was definitely < $1000 on its day. Probably not 4K but then also not on the cloud... On the other hand, it's highly likely that you won't be able to play Stray on the cloud within the next 8 years as providers will drop it down (or outright close...).
    • s3r3nity 4y ago
      Maybe? But I’m also ok investing the $10-20 per month in a service that can guarantee 4k @ 60fps on any hardware I’m using.
      • outworlder 4y ago
        It's still $10-20 forever, monthly(assuming they never increase prices). Versus a few larger sums every few years. If you don't buy the latest and greatest, a $200 yearly budget can definitely keep your hardware up to date. If it's a PC, you can even use it for other purposes.
        • darkwizard42 4y ago
          Let's do a little math. Let's say you want to buy a gaming PC and have a budget of $1000. Let's also assume you play 1 hour of video games a day, 5 days a week. That is 20 hours a month. At 20 hours a month you would have to play for 50 months (4 years) on your machine before you pay off the machine. Alternatively, you could spend that same money on the streaming service. I think the math doesn't hold up if you are a casual gamer. Building a PC and maintenance just isn't worth it. That being said, if you play a lot more, maybe even 15-20 hours a week, I think it makes a lot of sense to build your own machine (I have one and it was very worth it when I was a serious LoL player).
• twicetwice 4y ago
  I use GeForce now for singleplayer games and I'm super happy with it as long as I'm on an ethernet connection.
• bob1029 4y ago
  Latency really isn't a problem in many contexts. I've got some prototype streaming solutions running in an azure region near me and I can't perceive any round trip latency compared to localhost. There are certainly more edge cases and things to go wrong when streaming the entire experience, but the networks are only getting better over time. Streaming games are also a big answer to many forms of cheating. Not all, but it would make a night-day difference for any competitive game today.
• KMnO4 4y ago
  I’ll disagree on that. An extra 10ms is not perceptible in 99% (99.9%?) of cases. Consider that a good gaming monitor has input lag of ~3ms, a TV in game mode has input lag of ~12ms, and in regular mode the input lag is >100ms. I would argue that our brain is just really good at correcting for minuscule timings like that, and less than 1% of the population could even tell the difference between 20ms and 30ms lag. I’ve used Game Pass Ultimate to stream hundreds of games with 80ms ping, and I can attest that you adapt very quickly. Even first person shooters were easily playable. The only ones that gave me trouble were Forza and GRID, both very fast paced racing games. But let’s face it: there are many people who are happy to stream Civ, XCOM, and even Elder Scrolls, where input lag isn’t as much of an issue.
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    the 10ms or whatever the real amount is, is in addition to tbe monitor lag, etc. i tried to play tekken 7 on xbox cloud and it was torture. maybe if you never played it locally youd br ok with the control response times, but not if youd played it running locally.
    • kmac_ 4y ago
      Local lag was significantly reduced over recent years, low latency modes of TVs/monitors, 60 and more fps even for console games, etc. So the baseline moved. That affects remote gaming also, but in a much smaller proportion. Remote gaming quality is as good as ISP quality, and most of ISPs are sh*.
  • riversflow 4y ago
    > 10ms is not perceptible . . . less than 1% The popularity of 120hz gaming would beg to differ, everyone I know who games on a PC has a high refresh rate monitor and can easily tell if their game isn’t running with optimal fps. High refresh rate is certainly something you adapt to, so you might be right about the general population, but were talking specifically about gamers here. And the fact that high refresh rate panels are coming into phones makes me much more doubtful that it’s just gamers. Human beings heavily rely on reaction time just by being bipedal(tripping and not catching yourself can mean death). Also, Highly responsive systems are just more fun, see also cars. Agree that many casual people don’t care much, but casual people also tend to rely on more knowledgeable friends, or wouldn’t be in the know enough to try out a streaming game service that wasn’t advertised much.
• outworlder 4y ago
  10ms is completely fine for any game you can possibly think of. Including competitive FPS e-sports. We are not superhumans and your monitor alone probably adds more lag than that. What's not acceptable is jitter. If it's a constant 10ms delay, it's easy to compensate - for both humans and machines. That's even more so if everyone is subject to a similar delay. If latency is constantly changing, that's where it can become unacceptable. Your machine better be on a wired network. If it's on wifi, this whole point is moot.
• ElevenLathe 4y ago
  I think this is right for games that are ported to streaming from a traditional PC or console release, but presumably if some studio cared, they could design games with streaming in mind. As an extreme example, imagine the original NES Final Fantasy, or the SNES Monopoly on Stadia: with mainly turn-based interaction, they would be basically indistinguishable from playing locally.
• stiltzkin 4y ago
  Highly disagree. Seems you have not tested current game streaming as Gamepass or GeForce Now.
• SideQuark 4y ago
  >extra 10ms That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher.
• SideQuark 4y ago
  >extra 10ms That won't even get a signal across the US at the speed of light, so real lag will be much, much higher, even with servers scattered around (speed in wires, networking device lags, etc... )
• sgtnasty 4y ago
  I tend to only play "non-competetive" solo games, so I dont care much about input lag. Wasnt a problem for me in Destiny, Assasins Creed or Cyberpunk.
• Kiro 4y ago
  That's completely false. Streaming works great even for latency sensitive games.
• legohead 4y ago
  I was cloud gaming for 2 years and recently switched to PC. I've been gaming for about 30 years or more. I can confidently say you wont notice anything up to around 60ms latency. I could still twitch aim and play and compete in online shooters no problem. Beyond 60ms, the other devil is packet loss. If your connection starts to become unstable, even if it's a fast connection, it becomes extremely aggravating. I could actually deal with up to 200ms latency, but throw in a tiny amount of packet loss and I'm out.
• gberger 4y ago
  (For context, this thread originally linked to https://blog.google/products/stadia/message-on-stadia-streaming-strategy/ https://blog.google/products/stadia/message-on-stadia-stream... "A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy")