Comment by joseda-hg

2 days ago

I have gigabit, but no servers that are close, it's... rough

Streaming in the same house still isn’t very good. Games are very latency sensitive.

  • Depends on the game. I think I'm more sensitive to latency (less able to compensate) than most people. I couldn't enjoy playing Titanfall until I put my Samsung TV in game mode; I would just get hit and couldn't do anything about it playing League of Legends on my gaming laptop with a 4K monitor, but when I hooked up an external monitor, mirrored the screen, and ran a clock, I took photos showing my laptops' screen was behind by 30 ms. I started playing on an external monitor and started to win. I even found I had a hard time with some 1 player games such as Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet if I didn't run in game mode.

    On the other hand, I went through a phase where I did a lot of streaming from my PC to a NVIDIA Shield and an XBOX. Sometimes through wired Ethernet, something through an airMAX microwave link to my other house. Games like Persona 5 and Orcs Must Die 3 were just fine, but I could not play any Rhythm games, which I have a knack for, High-Fi Rush was no fun at all.

  • My kid plays fortnite using home streaming to an xbox, and says he doesn't notice the latency. I do the same on an Asus ROG Ally, and it's "good enough". I am not a competitive FPV player, but suffer from OCD and notice latency and it tweaks me hard.

  • I'm playing single player games via Parsec and the latency feels fine. Moonlight is tolerable but Steam streaming feels terrible for some strange reason. This is running two Wifi 6 devices so nothing is even wired. I often use a controller connected to my laptop, or even better use the wireless controller, connect that to the physical device then you bypass the controller latency and only the video has a lag, which is kind of a neat trick if you're close enough to the computer you're streaming from.

    The only sorts of games I can't play are things like Binding of Isaac that are super dependent on reaction speeds, but even games like Elden Ring feel fine.

  • Do you expect less than 7ms? Because that's my latency with Geforce Now. Almost unnoticable.

    • 7ms is intra national ping, I have about half a continent to the closest GeForce Now and a bit more to the closest XCloud

      200+ ms

Shameless self-PR: we are building p2p cloud gaming at https://borg.games

You should get low latency as long as anyone in your city joins as a provider.

  • Did clicking on the Rent my PC tab really try to benchmark my GPU through my browser, or did I accidentally click another button on that page inadvertently that triggered that?

    If the former, that's a terrible idea. If the latter, that button really needs a confirmation and explanation of what's about to happen.

    I'm viewing on an Intel Mac and it hung my entire computer for like 15 seconds. I didn't even connect that it was related to viewing your site until I got the error at the end and everything unfroze.

    • It does. Sorry about the experience, we will try to improve it.

      Having user confirm it is not a good option, because every click is a hassle.

      What we could do is first run a very short version of a smaller benchmark, and if that takes too long, don't run the main one. Then the worst case you will have a 100ms lag at this point, which is way better than 5 seconds of reading.

      1 reply →

  • What does utilization look like? I would be interested in running this on a spare machine but it's not clear how large the potential audience of renters may be in my area.

    • Right now the utilization is low (< 10%), but in the effort to prop the providers side the company is footing the bill and paying for availability approximately 50% of what the benchmark on the page tells you. This is a rather common strategy for bootstrapping any two-sided market.