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more latency or lag is the delay between
an action and the resulting reaction such as in gaming the pressing of a
button on a controller and the corresponding animation of a character
on the screen this latency is an enemy of game it makes controls feel less
responsive and makes it more difficult to among other things time jumps and
land head shot there are many smaller contributors that make up the total
latency in the example I just gave ranging from ones small enough to not
matter such as the delay between pressing a button on your wired keyboard
and that action being registered by your computer all the way up to image
processing delays as high as 68
milliseconds or 3 to four frames of action on a 60 HZ TV today's
investigation is not a detailed look into the contribution of every single
one of these leg factors but rather a look at the current state of local game
streaming technology and whether it's a feasible alternative to plugging
directly into a PC or game console now
when I say local game streaming I am not referring to subscription-based cloud
services like on live that's internet game streaming and has a whole different
set of challenges because it relies on your internet connection that means
latency is higher and beyond your control and it also means that like
Netflix it will use your monthly bandwidth quota if your internet service
provider has one local game streaming by contrast uses only your own networking
equipment which can be as cheap or as fancy as you want does not require
subscription since your games belong to you already and does not use your
internet connection because both the game serving PC and the client PC or
device are within your own network so
here's our setup our streaming computer for all the tests is using a core i7
3770k CPU with 8 gigs of RAM and a GTX 780ti it's a very high-end machine but
in order to reduce the variables in our test it was important to use a gaming
computer that is easily capable of powering these inhome streaming
solutions for networking we're using an ASUS rtn 66u which is the best consumer
grade router that I've personally used for game stream and of course uh it has
gigabit connectivity for our wired examples for our clients we're using a
Steam OS machine as well as an Invidia Shield to show off those two different
streaming Solutions so to get started we're going to plug both a CRT Monitor
and an ASUS pb278q into a PC in cloned
display mode for a local gaming session we're using Counterstrike sources in
game Benchmark to simulate our local gaming session because it's really quick
to launch and it has an explosion that changes the color of the whole frame
very suddenly and predictably we were able to consistently measure a 10 to 11
frame difference when filming at 480
frames per second between the first bright flash of fire on the CRT and the
first appearance of it on the LCD that gives us about a 22 millisecond delay
this methodology unfortunately doesn't give us the exact input leg of the
monitor but since most people won't notice the
difference between a CRT and an LCD it does allow us to make relative
comparisons between the contenders while giving us some context for the following
numbers first up we're going to test
steam's inhome streaming you can find more details about inhome streaming in
the link in the video description and to do that we're going to take our LCD and
run it off of our steam machine a normal PC that is connected via a wired Gab
Ethernet connection to the same network as our gaming PC the gaming PC keeps the
CRT so that we can measure the additional delay that is caused by the
h264 video encoding being done by the server PC the network transfer and then
the decoding being done by the client PC it looks like it adds about 74
milliseconds compared to a CRT monitor which is about equivalent to seeing your
game with a 4 and 1/2 frame delay on a
60 HZ monitor not bad when you consider that there are TVs that can add as much
as 68 milliseconds or about 3 to 4
frames but you also need to remember guys a leggy display will further
increase the perceived latency so while it's playable in this situation there's
still a lot of room for improvement and one to two frames would be ideal just in
case you hook it up to one of those extremely laggy TVs in scenario 2 we're
going to use NVIDIA's proprietary gam stream technology
with a shield handheld Android gaming system to see how close it comes to
valve's more open solution NVIDIA's
Advantage is that due to its closed ecosystem they can keep tight control
over the data chain and fully leverage their own Technologies such as the
built-in Hardware h264 video encoders and decoders on their Graphics
processors however NVIDIA's disadvantage here is that they're running wirelessly
that's how they advertise game stream uh NVIDIA also has the benefit of tightly
controlling the settings at which games can run and they allow only a maximum of
720p 60 FPS compared to the 1080p 60fps
that we were able to run with a wired connection on a steam inhome streaming
setup so gam stream ads about well about
the same 74 milliseconds compared to our CRT which seems pretty good considering
that it's wireless because it's wireless though it is subject to interference and
you won't get that 74 Mill second delay
consistently since you won't always be right next to the router the way that we
are for our controlled testing scenario 3 addresses an imbalance in the previous
two examples by taking our steam machine and turning it down to 720p 60fps than
running it wirelessly so it's more equivalent to the shield the ASUS 87i
Deluxe motherboard that's running in here has onboard dualband AC Wi-Fi which
should be basically equivalent to the Dual Band n Wii on the shield because
we're connecting to an N access point going Wireless with steam in home
streaming adds about there's that number again 74 milliseconds compared to our
CRT so performance was pretty much the
same as the shield in terms of lagginess and very playable but not something that
I would actually recommend doing Shield runs on a small built-in display we only
used the HDMI output to go to our bigger one to control the variable of the
displays input legs so that we got comparable results so compressed 720p
images will normally still look really good and really sharp on that tiny
little display but for something bigger like you'd be running on a steam machine
like a TV or a monitor I would really recommend a wired connection so you can
game at 1080p scenario 4 is an
open-source streaming app called Limelight that keeps getting brought up
to me whenever I talk about inhome streaming
Solutions it works yes but I hope this
video serves as a demonstration of why I don't talk about it much yet and why I
don't care about it much yet it works on pretty much any reasonably powerful
Android device which is really cool but it's just not even in the same ballpark
as the others and in my experience does not provide a playable experience on
either of the supported devices I own an NVIDIA shield and an HTC1 our measured
latency was about 98 milliseconds but
unfortunately the image quality was lower than any of the other
Solutions with more frequent unplayable stutters in my testing so in summary the
best streaming Solutions we have are tripling the delay that you experienced
when you upgraded from a CRT to a good quality LCD but in that time they're
encoding an image sending it over a network then decoding it 74 milliseconds
of display lag is noticeable but it's definitely playable for most genres of
games I actually beat the first couple worlds of Super Meat Boy streaming on my
shield I'll be it not as easily as I can when hooked up directly with a wired
controller but I was able to do it 100
milliseconds becomes too much to deliver a satisfactory game experience for
anything but slow paced perhaps turn-based gaming for me and while your
sensitivity may vary the takeaway today is that gaming on the machine you're
directly attached to is still better we're talking 22 milliseconds compared
to about 75 so we're talking about a 3X
betterness Improvement even with an LCD monitor compared to a CRT versus
streaming it's still the best but
quality local game streaming Solutions are adding about another 50 milliseconds
of leg which means that we can achieve very playable results today if we
control the additional latency introduced by other parts of the chain
such as wireless gaming controllers or leggy TVs and in a generation or two if
encoder and decoder Hardware can be improved we could be able to get pretty
close to the performance of sitting in front of the device which is extremely
exciting the future is going to be awesome folks I hope you enjoyed this
video like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and
let me know what's your sensitivity like did you really notice when you went from
CRT to LCD do you notice the difference from one LCD to another cuz I certainly
do and have you tried in home streaming or inidia shield with its gam stream
technology and did you find it very playable would love to hear from you
guys and uh I'm sure I have a standard
intro but I've completely forgotten it now don't forget to subscribe peace
n