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Chasing 30 milliseconds across four cloud gaming services

We instrumented a controller and a high-speed camera to measure real end-to-end lag, not the number in the overlay.

Chasing 30 milliseconds across four cloud gaming services
Chasing 30 milliseconds across four cloud gaming services — XENVORA Photograph: Gaming Table, clevelandart / Rawpixel (CC0) · Licence

Services report network latency. Players feel button-to-pixel latency, which includes input polling, encode, transport, decode and display — usually two to three times the advertised figure.

Where the milliseconds hide

Encoding and display accounted for more of the total than the network on every service we tested from a wired connection. The cheapest improvement available to most players is a display in game mode.

The video shows all four side by side at 1,000 frames per second, with the frame counter visible, so you can see the gap rather than take our word for it.

Tarek Nour
Software & Platforms
Tarek Nour

Tarek writes about developer tooling, build systems and the unglamorous work that keeps platforms alive.

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