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SvennoJ on 22 January 2014
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Machiavellian said:

You are thinking about the solution wrong.  The developer knows where you are at, what you are doing and where you are going at all times within their game.  A lot of stuff can be sent to the cloud before the gamer ever gets to a specific location, perform a specific action.  That info can be sent to the Cloud to be process and streamed back to the user in advance.  Depending on how the developer create their environment and host an instance of their software in the cloud, a lot of complex calucations can be performed which do not require a lot of data streamed to the local machine.  Hell, this is not something new.  You can take the predictive Google search as an example.

 Also another way to take care of latency is to have your game synced with the cloud server.  Both are running an instance of the game or pieces of it, where the cloud service can stream just that bit of info back to the local client.

As an example, think of a game like the latest Assasin Creed.  When you are on the island and walking through a jungle.  All of the environmental effects can be offloaded to the cloud.  Wind, Sand blowing, fog, you name it.  Local things that the user interact with can be done client side. 

I'm very skeptical about your examples for cloud enhancements.

First of all it's pretty expensive to run an entire instance of the same game for every single player game being played out there.
All the predictable things can be precalculated at compile time and put ont he disc, no need for cloud.
More importantly if you look at the specs for NVidia cloudlight, even the most basic light map enhancements are already pushing the 1.5 mbps recommendation MS set for cloud features. (http://www.ppsloan.org/publications/Crassin13Cloud.pdf page 8 table 2) Offloading volumetric fog and blowing sand for a 1080p game is a lot more data, it soon becomes less expensive to simply send the whole game image over a 5mbps h.265 stream, since you're running a game instance in the cloud anyway.