I tried xCloud last night, what a disaster wow!

I put it to the test with FH5 on the Series X (already played native on PC) at 11PM at night. The internet shouldn't be that congested at that time, but still unplayable. The sound kept cutting out, picture micro freezing with pixelation as a result. It does work and image quality is decent from the couch when it works. But I kept ending up fish tailing because of the micro stutters. I did not make it to the end of the intro 'races'... Tried again this morning, same thing.
But this was both on Wifi, unplayable.

So I moved the Series X downstairs where I have wired connections and then it is 'playable'. The sound remains stable, not cutting out, no pixelation although it looks rather soft (max 1080p with lots of motion blur) mostly because it keeps dropping to 20 fps and sometimes maybe even lower. It never got over 30fps, mostly 20fps during the intro races, sometimes it felt even lower than 20fps. And since FH5 adds tons of motion blur for low frame rate, blurry visuals as a result.

I did manage to get through the intro unscathed, staying on the road at high speed and getting to the festival first. But it felt like a challenge mode dealing with added input lag and low frame rate. Still some fish tailing at first due to the extra input lag, but before the end of the intro I was compensating for that and staying on the road without issues. It just didn't feel like fun though, driving on egg shells at 20 fps...

So yeah, too early for casual household use over wifi. And not really compatible with Cable internet (I don't have any fibre options here)

On Wifi I get


Wired test results


Cable internet sucks, not really compatible with Cloud gaming. Slower games will work on a wired connection, yet fps and racers are just frustrating.
I have Netgear Orbi mesh wifi in the home, max bars on Series X and my laptop, but it just doesn't perform.
The Series X network test on wifi reports 154 mbps download with 54ms latency and somehow 3% packet loss. Probably why the sound kept cutting out and the picture stopping. But it did run at 30fps on wifi in between the stutters. Stable but slower on wired.

Anyway, not recommended unless you have fibre and use it wired or have something better than Netgear mesh crap.

Has anyone else tried game streaming?

I hate playing on mobile, so I don't even bother using cloud streaming for that. The only time I've used xCloud is on my PC when I've gotten Game Pass Ultimate vouchers from some deal, otherwise I'll just subscribe to PC Game Pass for a month or two whenever I don't have many games I'm wanting to play on Steam. Which even then, the Xbox app that you use for PC Game Pass has been a terrible experience for years now lol.

But I have not had a favorable experience either. My PC is hardwired with an average of 80-100 Mbps and the longest I've had of it being an actual smooth experience as advertised, was about 30 seconds lol. Audio cutting in and out, frame skipping, dips below 60fps even though we're supposed to be running the Series X versions of these games, and input lag is unbearable. It'd be hard to imagine that we're not at least 5 years away from cloud streaming being consistently decent, and a decade away from it being a viable alternative for the masses.

It's cool the thought that you can immediately start playing console games on any mobile device, web browsers, smart TVs, and even in the Xbox app on PC, but the tech to properly support these kinds of ambitions just don't seem to be there yet.

Havn't tried it, but I suspect shooters/racers/fighters probably arnt the best showcase for it.
You should try something not as twitch reaction based.... like a story driven rpg maybe? A occasional microstuttering there doesnt effect much.

Yeah I expect those to work. I just wanted to see how far along things are and whether driving games are playable now on avg rural cable internet. And surprisingly it is 'playable'. But rather not enjoyable, no clue why it drops to 20 fps with 500+ mbps bandwidth available. Maybe throttled somewhere.

The real shock is comparing wired and wifi next to each other and seeing how bad Netgear wifi is :/
The 'latency during download' plots are eye opening.

I tried it once with some Minecraft game on my phone and it worked OK.

The funny thing is the Switch Cloud game demos I've tried (Control and Resident Evil Village) work pretty well, lol.