Hi guys, I had a question for you.

We know that for years now Service Providers have been able to stream HD cable TV to homes accross North America (or Europe or anywhere else).

With this graph in mind and the following link, what is causing streaming of video games to be laggy as compared to HD cable TV?

You're no interacting with TV shows. But games need such a low, if not zero lag input, from the controller. Or you're basically screwed.

Right. Not only do you need the signal to appear on the TV, but you need the controller's response to arrive before the next frame can be generated. Would this fit at the beginning of the bar, right before "Game Pipeline"? Or is it included in Capture/Encode-Network-Decode?

Even when you play at home with your console or pc you have imput lag, that's why on the graphic card drivers you have a maximum render in advance frames option. In this "products", you send asynchronally the imput data to the image data, there is always an estimation of the user imput, based on previous data, to try to hide the latency.

If the game had to wait for proper imput data, the perceived lag would be much higher than what you have, even in local play.

Well of course any lag in video is going to go unnoticed anyway as long as it's constant, the only time you might notice if a program is lagging behind is if you are watching the TV while also watching what's on TV in real life (for example watching the new year countdown on a cable TV you are quite a few seconds behind real time... Before the analogue signal was cut off I always used to notice there was a good 2-3 seconds between programs on my bedroom TV and the cable living room TV) Streaming a video game requires data to be sent both ways, and is always going to be more noticeable because your actions are expected to be reflected on screen immediately, but instead you have to wait for your actions to be sent then the next frame to return (as Kynes mentioned games can have tricks that guess the next frames based on what you were doing, but sudden changes in your actions are still going to need time to register)

With a home console game... as mentioned in your graph, any lag is purely due to the hardware in front of you (console time to process your action + TV time to display)

That makes sense TWRoO. But then why do we rarely witness a lag within a stream of frames, why only a phase when comparing, while in a game you will notice that. What causes that loss in QoS?

Everything else you said I was able to follow.

Not sure what you mean... do you mean an extra elongated lag (ie more than a few hundred milliseconds) in an online multiplayer game?

I'm not entirely sure how it works, in fact I think many games will be different, but with a console game that has online, the information sent isn't as large as an image for the whole frame 30 times a second. So ultimately in a perfect environment there would be less latency than a full streaming game, but for online MP matches all that information has to be co-ordinated between players (if not then someone with a poor net connection would be playing as if they are "out of phase" ie to everyone else their character would appear to be slightly behind where they actually are, while that person would view the same of everyone elses characters). When everything is working well you would only get maybe 200-250ms of latency (more than an offline game, but less than streaming the game) but intenet connections aren't stable so things don't always run smoothly. That kind of thing is probably more likely on Wii online games which mostly use peer to peer... which means all the info is being sent to one person's console to co-ordinate player movements, then sent back out to everyone. Wheras a game with a dedicated server uses a machine the dev/publisher of the game owns.

I think (as the graph is suggesting) if a fully streamed game can combat the extra latency derived from sending HD video, then you are less likely to see the kind of elongated lag (ie getting shot by someone who hasn't appeared round the corner yet) you see in console games. You are all essentially playing the game on a powerful machine the developer owns, so the co-ordination between players and all the game computing is done there. You send them the tiny amount of information about your button presses, then it computes and co-ordinates and sends back HD video. Any additional lag is going to be purely down to your own internet connection.

Another thing you do get lag every now and then with cable but there are ways to mask the lag since the customer is not interacting with it. They also give priority to TV feed (cable) during high peeks times, since that is their primary business.

Internet gaming is an entirely different beast. For example MMO games you have the entire client/server setup on your computer (for bigger titles) so you computer does most of the processing itself. And sends updates to the server as to what you are doing and the server processes all the update data and sends back information in particulars that need to updating. So when there is lag and the server update doesn't get to your computer with a great frequency you get the "rubber band effect" or the "warping effect" depending on what type of update/prediction processing they do on site.

For example the prediction processing can be a simple as the last update from player X showed that he is moving at this speed(0/1/2/3 walking/running/mount1/mount2...), in this direction, that was y seconds ago so he should be here. And depending on what weight they give to the client or server depends on which effect you experience. (There are other factors in this)

Now with streaming you are not only getting reliant on the server for the particular data, you now are being sent the graphics, and processing on their side.

Also another thing to consider when you are talking about TV feed vs game feed. Most game feed is handled as generic data, and this data doesn't have priority in a cable setup so this data is first to get "dialed down" when they need the band-width. Plus when talking in the broad terms of things there is a lot of bureaucracy when it comes down to which data is given more priority with which companies.

My beef with the graph is the network time, that isn't going to change drastically, the numbers are more than likely spin, ie they where using dedicated lines between sites for the test that guarantee no outside interference.

Sorry if it doesn't make sense. It about time for me to go to bed and I just finished working a 10 hour shift.

No, that helps alot. Thanks and get some good rest.

Thanks, that helps.