Comment by XCSme
5 days ago
Random thought: would a gaming streaming service like GeForce Now achieve a similar result for a lan party? Assuming you have the network bandwidth, I am curious what the difference in input lag/quality would be, and if, when doing a blind test, anyone would notice.
I guess you could even test this, by running GeForce Now on all computers vs native.
Ehh... I'm very skeptical of those streaming services.
I tried Stadia once. Played Celeste. The results were very interesting. I didn't exactly perceive latency, but I did perceive that the game felt wrong. As a result, my favorite game of all time was not fun when playing on Stadia. If I didn't have the local version of the game to compare against, I would probably have blamed the game, because again, it didn't feel like latency was the problem.
I dunno, maybe that experience was skewed by the fact that Celeste is probably one of the most timing-sensitive games out there and I'd played it a lot... but now I'm worried that anything played via one of these streaming services is just going to be subtly less fun. I think I'll stick to local gaming.
You're missing out, definitely give it a go! GeforceNow is a staggering leap over all the other previous cloud streaming services imo. The experience in Austin specifically is amazing, I get ~5ms (!) RTT latency to their datacenter in Dallas. Combine that with h/w AV1 decoding, the difference versus local is almost unperceivable.
That could be the poor's man, on-demand, lan party.
If not for the PCs, you would still need some devices to run the games.