Cloud gaming

[Harrison]

I keep testing cloud gaming on and off occassionally, but for the most part it's still not quite there yet, even if you have a fast connection. And it really isn't great for certain game genres.

I was on my Steam Deck last night and decided to go into Xbox Gamepass on it to see what new games had been added to the cloud gaming section. There are quite a few.

I've played through whole games on their cloud service, such as the adventure game Lake, and that ran really nicely. You wouldn't even know if want running natively most of the time, but you did still get a few stutters and pauses, but for a game like that it didn't effect the gameplay.

I've also played quite a lot of Dragon Quest Builders 2 on it, which is like a mixture of the RPG series mixed with Minecraft building and crafting, and that didn't have any streaming issues, as far as I can remember. So I was thinking at that point that as long as you had a fast enough connection cloud gaming was finally an option.

But quite some time ago I tested Forza Horizon 4 and I had lots of framerate issues, where the graphics would degrade and look blurry or pixelated as it has terrible keeping up with the framerate over the cloud streaming, and it would stutter sometimes. So I didn't play that for long using Cloud.

Last night I gave Grid Legends a play and that was a waste of time trying. It loaded ok, but took ages to load between scenes. Not sure if I've just got used to how fast the PS5 loads, but I seemed to be waiting ages between menus and races. I had the same streaming issues with every race. It loaded and started fine, and the graphics looked great, but when there were a lot of cars on screen the graphics degraded with blurring and artifacts like it couldn't keep up. But it was still responsive and playable. But the biggest issue was that in ever race it dropped the stream and the screen froze for a few seconds, and when it resumed the car was in the wall and I'd lost a few places. It did this every race and I checked my broadband and it was showing 980Mbps so that wasn't an issue.

So in my experience of you try to stream a fast paced game like a racing game it still has issues keeping up, even if you have a fast connection. Whereas a slower paced lower bandwidth game like Lake or an RPG seems to cope better. I might try Halo just to see if it's any better with that and is game specific.

I must say the Playstation streaming has always seemed to be better then Xbox Gamepass, but maybe that's because it's locked at 720p. On the PS4 and 5 every game I've ever played via streaming has run prefectly with no blurring, artifacts or dropped gameplay. So maybe Sony locking resolution with their Now service to the lower resolution was a good idea.

But that does mean neither Xbox cloud gaming or PS Plus Cloud gaming are a replacement for a proper console or PC yet. Will it ever fully replace them?

Have you tried cloud gaming?

[Kin Hell]

Never ever H....

[J T]

I was just thinking that maybe cloud gaming is better suited to slower paced more methodical style games than fast paced speedy action ones. But then (correct me if I'm wrong) isn't part of the appeal of cloud gaming meant to be that you don't have to have to have a powerhouse local device....

[Harrison]

Exactly that. The point is you use whatever device at home just as a terminal. Everything is processed remotely. Just the display and connection speed.

But as I discovered it doesn't seem to be able to cope completely well with fast paced games. Could it be the server technogy? No idea. I've just found it's not there yet.