Updated at: 18-05-2022 - By: Leo Hall

A powerful, industrial-strength PC is housed in a secure data center and is used to run your favorite game instead of running it on your device.

A live broadcast of the game is then sent to your device, allowing you to play the newest games on virtually any device, even if it isn’t capable of running them.

From powerful GPUs in remote data centers, cloud gaming delivers the most recent games to practically every type of device.

Obviously, video games are interactive. A real-time processing and rendering system is required for cloud gaming servers. Games, unlike movies or TV shows, don’t have a buffer — a few additional seconds of information that is transmitted to your device before it’s time to be seen — thus the user’s next keystroke or button press is critical to the success of the game.

The Problems

Although the concept is intriguing, it has four major flaws: poor visual quality, long input lag, inefficient technology, and a few system requirements that must be met.

Since the games you’ll be playing won’t be operating on your device, all of the data you input will have to travel to and from the servers before you see any changes.

Compressing the video is the only way to do this even somewhat quickly. Game streaming services now use just the best video encoding available that maintains the highest quality possible while still being extremely quick. You still get an image that appears like a video, and you still get the impression that this is a game review on YouTube rather than your own personal experience with it.

Compression artifacts and color banding are to be expected, as is nauseating motion blur if you play a fast-paced game with a lot of camera movement. Some of these impacts can be alleviated by using a high-quality monitor. You won’t want to go out of your way to acquire a high-end display simply to stream games if you can avoid spending money on pricey hardware by playing in the cloud.

Input Lag

In addition, there is an input latency. It is impossible to avoid input latency when data is transmitted from the client to the server and back. A data center nearby may alleviate some of the lag, but you’ll still notice it.

While the games would be unplayable, this does not mean they would be unplayable in the first place. Input lag isn’t as bad as some people make it out to be, thanks to the efforts of streaming service providers who are always looking for innovative ways to reduce it.

You’ll be annoyed by the lag whether you’re playing competitively or even just socially in online multiplayer.

Hardware Selection

Utilizing a virtual machine on a server, as we’ve already established, requires a server with server-grade hardware, which is what you’d be using. Examples of this may be seen in how Shadow advertises its GPUs as ‘comparable to the GTX 1080.” This is technically correct, but that doesn’t mean the Nvidia Quadro P5000 is as good as the GTX 1080 in terms of gaming performance.

In order to understand why Nvidia Quadro cards aren’t the greatest gaming cards, you should read this article, but the short version is that they aren’t as optimized for producing graphics quickly as the GTX cards are.

The CPUs are no different. With an Intel Xeon 2620 CPU, a virtual machine hosted by Shadow will have 8 threads. Xeon server CPUs are designed for servers, which means they have several cores running at low clock speeds and excel at multi-tasking rather than single-core performance, despite the fact that this may appear to be a good deal. And when it comes to gaming, single-core performance is king.

There are currently no other game streaming providers that offer CPUs as powerful as the Xeon 2620 used by Shadow, and most of them have clock speeds below 3 GHz.

System Requirements

Despite the fact that cloud gaming is all about being able to play current games on obsolete or otherwise incompatible hardware and software, there are still a number of prerequisites that must be met before you can start streaming games.

First and foremost, you’ll need a high-speed Internet connection. If you’re close enough to your router, 5 GHz Wi-Fi can get the job done, but even that isn’t ideal.

As an example, if you want to run Shadow smoothly, you’ll need at least a 50 Mbps Internet connection. Because ADSL and satellite connections are rarely fast and responsive enough to broadcast a game, you’d need a cable internet connection or a Fibre Optic one in order to do so.

The Cloud Gaming Of Christmas Past

There is a significant probability that Cloud Gaming is unfamiliar to you if you are a casual gamer. With Microsoft and Google only lately becoming interested in this technology, it has never gotten as much attention as it does now. This concept, on the other hand, is by no means original.

OnLive, a cloud gaming service, went live in 2010 after being discussed as long back as 2000. With the Inquirer’s claim that game streaming will’render consoles obsolete,’ headlines predicted the demise of gaming consoles.

Cloud Gaming continues to thrive despite OnLive’s demise in 2012. Soon after PlayStation Now came Shadow, Parsec, Vortex and the likes of GeForce Now.

The Cloud Gaming Of Christmas Present

They aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either because of the CPUs they utilize, which aren’t suitable for gaming. Input lag isn’t as bad as it is with some other providers, but the video quality is still subpar.

Even while Shadow appears to be a top-of-the-line video-streaming service, its price tag feels a little high at the present because it doesn’t meet its promises of delivering games at either 144 FPS inFull HD or 60 FPS in 4K.

Although GeForce Now has the potential to unseat it, we can’t discuss it further at this time due to the fact that it is still in Beta.

That doesn’t even begin to cover the PlayStation Now service. The yearly plan ($60, or $5 per month) gives players access to a large selection of games, but it suffers from the same visual abnormalities and input lag issues as the free version. Because these virtual devices are actually PlayStations, they run at a higher speed.

On the plus side, PS4 owners can download PSNow titles and play them locally, but that’s still renting, not streaming, and only available on a PS4.

Introducing GeForce NOW

For over a decade, we’ve been working to improve every millisecond of the gaming process, from the data center graphics cards to the software running on your local device.

Using the power and flexibility of a GeForce gaming PC, GeForce NOW makes it accessible over the cloud. In other words, you get an always-on gaming system across all of your devices that doesn’t require any patching or updating whatsoever.

Since Steam, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect and other well-known PC game retailers can all be accessed through GeForce NOW, gamers may play the same PC versions of their favorite games as their friends.

Also, if they have many games, they may simply log in and play them. To play the games on their home PC, consumers need to own or upgrade to a gaming setup. You can take your PC games with you everywhere you go thanks to GeForce NOW.

Playing on any device, anywhere, at any time is now possible thanks to PC gaming’s immersive experience and the world’s most popular games and communities.

You can play on PCs with integrated graphics, Chromebooks, and Macs that don’t have access to the latest games, or even on your phone if you have a data plan and an internet connection. More than 80% of GeForce NOW users are using hardware that does not satisfy the minimum requirements for the games they are playing.

Powering PC Gaming from the Cloud

NVIDIA RTX servers are included in the GeForce NOW data centers, which utilize RTX GPUs. NVIDIA’s ground-breaking AI rendering and real-time ray tracing are both made possible by these GPUs, allowing for uncompromised image quality and a higher frame rate to be achieved. NVIDIA Game Ready Driver performance enhancements are available for this hardware.

NVIDIA pioneered video encoding and decoding hardware acceleration more than a decade ago, making it possible to broadcast games at high frame rates with low latency, giving the illusion that the game is being played locally. GeForce NOW data centers render gameplay, which is then broadcast back to the gamer in high-definition H.265 and H.264 video.

When you press a button or type something into the keyboard, it takes less than one hundredth of a second for the action to appear on the screen.

Growing Cloud Gaming Around the World

NVIDIA collaborates with partners around the world, including telecoms and service providers, to put GeForce NOW servers to work in their own data centers, providing lightning-fast connections for gamers throughout the world.

SoftBank and KDDI in Japan, LG Uplus in Korea, GFN.RU in Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, Zain in Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan Mobile in Taiwan are among the companies that have already implemented RTX cloud gaming servers.

We’re scaling GeForce NOW with partners across the world to give millions of players the freedom to play their favorite games whenever and wherever they want.

FAQS:

WHAT IS CLOUD GAMING, EXACTLY?

Today, you insert a disc into your gaming console or download a game’s data to a USB stick. Your game is only as good and as quick as the processors in your box can make it look and perform.

The “box” in cloud gaming is located in a datacenter with a slew of servers located thousands of kilometers distant. The main difference between streaming a video game and streaming a video from YouTube or Netflix is that you’re receiving responses to your inputs instead of just watching static. It communicates your character’s actions to a remote server, which tells the game what you’ve done, and then gives you a fresh video frame showing the result. Creating a video is as simple as multiplying the number of frames per second by 30 or 60.

What is the point of cloud gaming?

Cloud gaming provides players with immediate access to the latest games without the need to download large amounts of data, allowing them to try out a wider range of genres and styles of gaming.

What is the difference between online gaming and cloud gaming?

Video games can be played on remote computers in data centers utilizing cloud gaming…. All that’s different is that the server that’s delivering the video stream can also recognize and respond to any inputs you might provide.

What is wrong with cloud gaming?

Many people complain that cloud gaming eats a lot of data. Only an unlimited package allows regular use of the cloud for gaming. Despite the fact that cloud gaming can be enjoyable even with a slow internet connection, it is nearly difficult to enjoy cloud gaming when you have a bad network connection.

Conclusion:

To sum things up, none of the current game streaming services are capable of delivering on the hyped claims of 4K60FPS gameplay, much less a mid-range PC.

The hardware that these cloud servers employ is primarily to blame. In most cases, Xeon CPUs and Quadro GPUs that may be comparable in power to their GTX counterparts, but were not designed for gaming, are used. It’s clear why cloud gaming isn’t a realistic option for most people when visual compression, input lag, and internet speed requirements are taken into account.

Fortunately, there is another option if you’re curious about game streaming but are hesitant to sign up for any of the services now available. It’s one of the major advantages of game streaming to be able to run high-end games on low-end computers.

Then you can utilize Steam’s in-home streaming to stream games from your PC to your laptop if you already have an underpowered laptop and a reasonably powerful desktop PC. Lag will be reduced than if you had to send your input via server, but it’s still a fun way to get your feet wet before diving in full-force.

It’s also possible to take advantage of PlayStation Now’s free trial period, which is available on both PC and PS4.