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SvennoJ on 15 October 2018
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Pemalite said:
SvennoJ said:
Server location has influence on your latency

The laws of Physics literally comes into play.

SvennoJ said:
Better compression also asks more from the client and will add more lag. Higher quality visuals require more data which will add more lag and be more vulnerable to instabilities. Offering newer games at higher resolutions requires more and faster hardware, meaning less resources to serve more people at the same time. In the end it needs to be an affordable business. Lower quality, older games, or higher priced subscriptions.

Google and MS can promise a lot but will run into the same limits as any other service.

Depends on the encoding algorithms in use and the hardware support to go with it.

The laws of physics add about 4.8 ms for every 1000 km of glass fibre (light travels about 31% slower through fibre optics) or adds 9.7 ms to ping time per 1000 km. Of course that's the maximum speed on the backbone. The number of hops the signal has to go through to get into your house adds a lot more.

You can test it yourself with Azure http://www.azurespeed.com/
While playing you will have a more stable connection of course, this is just a ping test.
Anyway far above the laws of physics as the nearest server is only 100 km away from me at 50 ms average.

The better the encoding the more expensive the hardware to encode and decode. Yet those will keep getting cheaper over time. When blu-ray came out you pretty much needed most of the ps3 capabilities to decode h.264. The main cost of early blu-ray players was the power needed for decoding. Nowadays h.265 is in newer phones so decoding should be fine. Efficient real time hardware encoding still asks quite a few resources though. And that while people are getting used to 4K60 on their new 65" HDR tvs. My laptop can't handle 4K60 you tube :/ It will be 1080p60 at most I guess. Aiming for 10mbps is decent quality 1080p60.

Streaming will literally lag behind local hardware for quite a while, perhaps indefinitely and we'll reach a point where people won't care about pristine quality and lag free gaming anymore over convenience. Just as Netflix has killed the video store, game streaming could accomplish the same and buying games could become a niche.

I wonder how prices will stabilize for streaming. Netflix went up quite a bit from the early days and has currently 3 tiers for different quality streaming and number of simultaneous clients. The same could happen for games, extra for fast action games, newer games, higher resolution. Commercials in the stream for cheaper subscriptions. Time limited / unlimited. So many possibilities to make money for service providers. That $10 console fee Sony and MS currently get for 3rd party games is nothing compared to that!