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Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

If Stadia and xCloud really do solve the latency issues inherent in client/server computing - and show that it's economical - one could almost imagine Microsoft launching a consumer version of this with a "terminal" that was little more than a screen, keyboard and network connection... Like Sun Microsystems reborn.

The whole concept would, of course, enrage certain sections of the populace including most of HN's readership, but I can see it happening.

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How do you beat the speed of light? That's ultimately what we're up against here. High-frequency traders lay down special fiber lines between the exchanges to get the absolute fastest possible ping times, at enormous expense[1]. That gets a 13 ms ping time from NYC to Chicago.

My experience with a Steam Link, hardwired on a local ethernet makes me skeptical that any of these cloud gaming platforms will really be practical.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfin...

13 ms is not noticeable and almost everyone is much closer to Google or Microsoft machines than NYC is to Chicago. The bigger but more tractable issue are the steps between your machine and your ISP.

A lot of traders are actually switching to wireless links since RF travels faster than light in a fiber. But some fun stuff happens then https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-03/this-heat...

It travels faster because it travels "as the crow flies" instead of snaking through all the conduit for a fiber connection.

If nothing else, those dedicated services are going to have specialized video encoding that is very, very fast, and possibly even integrated into the game render pipeline. Maybe Steam Link is better on a really beefy PC, but I tried the remote play built into my PS4, and it was pretty bad, even over wired LAN.

I have to imagine at that point that at least some of the latency is the cost of encoding the video.

Even pretty hard core gamers seem to think that 40ms or less is good for gaming. So that leaves some leeway to work with I guess.

Tried steam link on local eth too with same conclusion, but later realised that was probably cause I had x264 not 265 which apparently makes a massive diff

Stadia isn't for shooters or esports though, it's for Age of Empires and Civ.

You know, I’d pay for that service. For example like $4.99/month if they give me say 200 hours per month. (I haven’t done the math or the research if that is economically sane).

Some idea.

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