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I don't have fiber, but do know a bit about internet infrastructure. Especially the part of it being bound by the speed of light, or rather 70% of that (fibre cable). If you don't live close to a data center, it's never going to be all that great.

When it comes to weaker hardware it's not all that clear cut though.

The cloud can actually have lower latency than a game struggling to reach 30 fps on weaker hardware. Plenty PS3 / 360 30 fps games were measured in the 120 to 150ms input latency range. Good hardware in the cloud can reduce that a lot so it's still faster with the added round trip and image compression.

The cloud can also provide a more stable, stutter free experience than weaker hardware. However internet jitter can add stutters and pixelation. It's not just about how fast your internet is, you need a stable path to the server with enough overhead (ie not too many people competing for bandwidth) to deliver a stable picture.

Load times can also be lower in the cloud, and only the new consoles and PC with nvme SSD can beat Cloud loading times.


So, yes, cloud gaming on Switch can give you a better experience than running the game locally on Switch. Latency, Image quality, loading times can all be better than running a 3rd party port struggling to maintain 30 fps.

However, on good hardware, the cloud will always be behind. MS just updated xCloud to run on Series X hardware. Which means, at best, it will be able to match Series X performance at home, with lower image quality (compression) and added latency (round trip to server). Series S might benefit from xCloud, running the games at Series X settings.