[hex12648430]

I really hope the latency we've seen in the live demo was due to the venue's poor internet connection because otherwise this will make some games unplayable. They mentioned that Doom Eternal will be available and that it would be a good benchmark for the service's latency but I'm waiting to see some independent reviews to believe it.

Also I don't really understand who's the target audience for this, I doubt people who currently own a console or a gaming PC will care unless the prices (of games or subscription) are extremely competitive.

The only thing that got me excited is that the infrastructure runs on Linux and AMD, this could have a great impact on Linux gaming.

[ehsankia]

Latency: Project Stream has been in beta since January, and there are a lot of testimonials out there. Other than fighting games and fast pace shooters, the latency seems to be imperceptible, assuming a good connection.

Target audience: Probably people who used to own consoles/gaming rigs, but no longer do for a variety of reasons. The fact that you can play anywhere and on any device (chromecast, phone, laptop), makes it competitive with devices such as Nintendo Switch of Nvidia Shield.

[dragontamer]

> Other than fighting games and fast pace shooters, the latency seems to be imperceptible, assuming a good connection.

There are certainly games out there which would respond poorly to latency and jitter. Play Hollow Knight or Dark Souls, but randomly jitter your inputs by 10ms to 20ms here and there, and that would make it far more frustrating experience.

Its bad enough that those punishing games can kill you quickly with a single mistake. But when you're fighting the controller and the lag, its that much worse.

I think streaming would be definitely fine for games like RPGs, or slower-paced adventure games (ex: Skyrim). But this will never be acceptable for Cuphead, Overcooked, Hollow Knight, or Touhou (or Jamestown). I'm willing to be proven wrong of course, but I've generally felt that even TV-lag is enough to make me rage-quit some setups when playing these games...

And TV-lag is consistent. WiFi based internet lag is jittery by nature. The question of what to do with dropped packets or delayed packets is an important design choice, and I don't think there's a correct answer for these twitch games like Cuphead.

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Fighting game players are so crazy about latency that they don't even use local Bluetooth controllers (!!) The serious fighting game community will likely never accept something like this solution.

The more casual, but still relatively twitchy, "hard games" players (Cuphead) is what I'm curious about. Whether or not the latency is acceptable for that community.

[Slippery_John]

I can't reliably play Dark Souls via Steam Link over a wired connection that's less than ten feet long. Google may have some special sauce that improves the situation but like you I doubt it would be sufficient for all games.

[fcarraldo]

I hear this a lot, and this is typically a network optimization problem. Networking is hard, and "a cable with enough bandwidth" is only part of the issue. How many hops between devices? Are any devices in the chain wireless? What router are you using? How many other devices are connected to it, and what kind of load are they putting on it?

FWIW, I frequently stream PS4 and PC games, wirelessly, over 802.11ac and it's more than playable. Dark Souls III, and even Overwatch, is playable over my network.

[dragontamer]

Just a hint: TV latency varies between models from 10ms all the way to 200ms (!!) in my experience. 200ms latency TVs completely wreak almost any video game experience, even if it is "smooth" and non-jittery (a "timing" based game like Guitar Hero can compensate to some degree, but few games work at that level).

I would suggest checking your TV against a latency database: https://displaylag.com/display-database/

Its very possible that your issue is in the TV, as opposed to a network issue. If your TV latency is below 30ms, the TV is probably fine.

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For whatever reason, computer monitors consistently score around 10ms, maybe 15ms in the worst case. Its TVs that have all this processing that kicks the latency to 50ms or 100ms+. Especially on larger TVs.

[vbernat]

The PS4 is running on FreeBSD and yet, this doesn't seem to have change anything for FreeBSD gaming.

[hex12648430]

Well AMD will have to keep writing good Linux drivers which will most likely benefit everyone with an AMD card. They're also partnered with Unity and Epic Games which means these engines will make it easier to target Linux as the release platform and maybe port some DX-only features over to Vulkan.

[pjmlp]

Which doesn't mean any of those changes will be contributed back to upstream, just like it happened with many of the PS 4 features in clang and AMD drivers, where only what wasn't business critical from Sony's point of view was contributed back.