[Encosia]

I'd heard of this before, but never tried it myself. Out of curiosity, I just tried playing a game through OnLive, using my relatively high-end (for the US) business broadband connection.

I chose Witcher 2 since it was featured on the OnLive home page.

As the intro video streamed, I was impressed. It was smooth and the quality was good.

After the intro video, it all fell apart. The round trip latency on the menu screen was very jarring. Gameplay significantly magnified the latency issues. I felt like my character was drunk, trying to walk around even in the tutorial phase. I can't imagine how terrible that would be during demanding phases of the game. It really was terrible.

Maybe this would be useful for less demanding games, where latency isn't so crucial, but isn't that the whole point? A low powered device probably wouldn't need to outsource rendering in the first place if the game is slow enough that latency doesn't matter. Maybe I'm missing something.

Ironically, playing a few minutes on the OnLive trial made me interested in buying and downloading the real game via Steam, and made me never want to try anything on OnLive again.

[hershel]

For low latency, That's the sort of problem google likes to have: hard technical problems that require a lot of capital(building plenty of gaming clouds physically close to users).Maybe onlive just didn't had enough money so your cloud is far from you.

BTW: sony will be also offering it , so maybe the tech is ready ?

[Encosia]

If Wikipedia's to be believed, OnLive has a datacenter here in Georgia with me, probably in metro Atlanta. This same machine I used to try OnLive has a 10-12ms ping to my Linode here in their Atlanta datacenter. It's not going to get much quicker than that over the WAN. If they can't give a decent experience to someone like me, I wouldn't want to see the average user's experience.