SidViscous
Member
I've been stuck mid house move for almost 12 months now, due to, well, one issue after another and 2020 generally being completely shite. As a consequence, all my non-essential stuff has been shoved into long-term storage on the other side of the city, including my arcade boards, the shelf of 80s nostalgia tat and my tower gaming PC. so I've been living out of a box of clothes, with an Oculus quest and an old MacBook for entertainment.
Gaming (or attempting to) on a 2014 Macbook isn't really an option. But the place I'm at happens to have decently fast internet, so I bit the bullet and signed up for Geforce Now and Shadow PC to give them a try, the prior lets you stream a limited selection of opt-in games for £4.99, the latter lets you stream an entire windows PC, so you can throw Steam or whatever on it for £14.99
I expected it to be pretty shite, but as it turns out - game streaming is pretty fucking neat, and completely viable on 2020 internet. I'm seriously considering ditching big power-hungry PCs even when I get my boxes of stuff back.
But the latency..
There are two types of latency, the delay from my Crapbook to the streaming service, and for multiplayer games - the delay from the streaming service to the game server. The latter is practically non-existent in most games, as it's going from one data-centre to another via a big fat cable. with Dota 2 for example, the latency added between Shadow PC to the game server was something like 4ms, I'm so fucking old I can't even hit a button that quick.
Then you have what I was worried about, the latency between my device and the streaming server. My ping hovers around 20-35ms, which compares to around a single frame of latency for a 30fps title, or almost two frames at 60fps; so not great, but not the worst.
I remember mouse lag back from when Bluetooth gen 1 came out, and that was utter shite - constantly misclicking everywhere, but with mouse cursor games you don't spot any lag, as both Geforce and Shadow cheat and render the game cursor locally, which makes complete sense but I didn't think it was possible. So for old man strategy games, there is barely any indication you are not playing on a local machine. It's been a fantastic way to play Dota, Civ, CK3 etc. If you are an old geezer who just wants to play these games, Geforce Now for a fiver a month is a no brainer.
But for games where you control the camera, so first-person games, it is noticeable. It's a strange sensation as it's not a low frame-rate, and it's not a long enough that you can "see" the delay, it just makes the games feel a bit, well, different. Like going from Overwatch on PC to Overwatch on Switch; you can tell something is a little off and your aim isn't as good anymore.
But this got me thinking, my monitor is pretty shite and adds 6ms, so what if I tried it on my Oculus Quest? as VR headsets have crazy low frame persistence. I guess that 6ms was the difference between my brain feeling it or not, was able to play Overwatch just fine, if I felt like a plonker wearing a VR headset to play non VR game.
VR + Shadow PC = Awesome
I kept hearing that Shadow PC + Virtual Desktop (an Oculus Quest app that lets you remote desktop into a PC virtually) was the dogs bollocks, and you could stream PC VR titles wirelessly just fine. bullshit right? the moment you add a wifi connection into the mix you must be looking at 40 to 50ms of latency at least.
So I gave it a try and fucking hell, it's like magic. VR has a neat trick called Async Reprojection which was developed as a way of preventing VR games from dropping into low frame-rates and making you feel sick, it basically renders the scene at whatever framerate into a virtual sphere around you, but then your head movement just spins this sphere around at whatever the native refresh is for the device. So when I turn my head on Quest, it's always 72fps, but the actual scene rendering can be much lower and doesn't cause any lag to my movement of vision.
If you've read everything so far (congrats, I waffle on) you've probably twigged where I'm going with this, but the async reprojection feature of VR completely eliminates the latency added Shadow PC, even when I shake my head like a lunatic to try and spot the delay.
So I've been living out of a box, but somehow playing Half-Life Alyx on ultra-high settings absolutely fine, and using Google Earth VR to stay sane during the isolation. It's honestly been such a benefit these last few months as I'm having to self isolate due to being high risk. Would really recommend it, even over buying the link cable so you can hook it up to a PC.
Has anybody else been forced to try streaming during lock-down, what are your impressions?
Gaming (or attempting to) on a 2014 Macbook isn't really an option. But the place I'm at happens to have decently fast internet, so I bit the bullet and signed up for Geforce Now and Shadow PC to give them a try, the prior lets you stream a limited selection of opt-in games for £4.99, the latter lets you stream an entire windows PC, so you can throw Steam or whatever on it for £14.99
I expected it to be pretty shite, but as it turns out - game streaming is pretty fucking neat, and completely viable on 2020 internet. I'm seriously considering ditching big power-hungry PCs even when I get my boxes of stuff back.
But the latency..
There are two types of latency, the delay from my Crapbook to the streaming service, and for multiplayer games - the delay from the streaming service to the game server. The latter is practically non-existent in most games, as it's going from one data-centre to another via a big fat cable. with Dota 2 for example, the latency added between Shadow PC to the game server was something like 4ms, I'm so fucking old I can't even hit a button that quick.
Then you have what I was worried about, the latency between my device and the streaming server. My ping hovers around 20-35ms, which compares to around a single frame of latency for a 30fps title, or almost two frames at 60fps; so not great, but not the worst.
I remember mouse lag back from when Bluetooth gen 1 came out, and that was utter shite - constantly misclicking everywhere, but with mouse cursor games you don't spot any lag, as both Geforce and Shadow cheat and render the game cursor locally, which makes complete sense but I didn't think it was possible. So for old man strategy games, there is barely any indication you are not playing on a local machine. It's been a fantastic way to play Dota, Civ, CK3 etc. If you are an old geezer who just wants to play these games, Geforce Now for a fiver a month is a no brainer.
But for games where you control the camera, so first-person games, it is noticeable. It's a strange sensation as it's not a low frame-rate, and it's not a long enough that you can "see" the delay, it just makes the games feel a bit, well, different. Like going from Overwatch on PC to Overwatch on Switch; you can tell something is a little off and your aim isn't as good anymore.
But this got me thinking, my monitor is pretty shite and adds 6ms, so what if I tried it on my Oculus Quest? as VR headsets have crazy low frame persistence. I guess that 6ms was the difference between my brain feeling it or not, was able to play Overwatch just fine, if I felt like a plonker wearing a VR headset to play non VR game.
VR + Shadow PC = Awesome
I kept hearing that Shadow PC + Virtual Desktop (an Oculus Quest app that lets you remote desktop into a PC virtually) was the dogs bollocks, and you could stream PC VR titles wirelessly just fine. bullshit right? the moment you add a wifi connection into the mix you must be looking at 40 to 50ms of latency at least.
So I gave it a try and fucking hell, it's like magic. VR has a neat trick called Async Reprojection which was developed as a way of preventing VR games from dropping into low frame-rates and making you feel sick, it basically renders the scene at whatever framerate into a virtual sphere around you, but then your head movement just spins this sphere around at whatever the native refresh is for the device. So when I turn my head on Quest, it's always 72fps, but the actual scene rendering can be much lower and doesn't cause any lag to my movement of vision.
If you've read everything so far (congrats, I waffle on) you've probably twigged where I'm going with this, but the async reprojection feature of VR completely eliminates the latency added Shadow PC, even when I shake my head like a lunatic to try and spot the delay.
So I've been living out of a box, but somehow playing Half-Life Alyx on ultra-high settings absolutely fine, and using Google Earth VR to stay sane during the isolation. It's honestly been such a benefit these last few months as I'm having to self isolate due to being high risk. Would really recommend it, even over buying the link cable so you can hook it up to a PC.
Has anybody else been forced to try streaming during lock-down, what are your impressions?
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