But for the average gamer, spending a couple bucks a month to play a few games on the weekend is way cheaper than buying a PC, or even a console.ДЇor most people stuck on a laptop, cloud gaming can be an excellent middle ground between not being able to play at all and spending hundreds on a PC. Since most services, charge by the hour, a 40 hour per week gaming habit can get expensive fast. Granted, this is way higher than youвЂ™d get with an actual computer, and if youвЂ™re playing super-competitive multiplayer games, you might find them not quite as enjoyable.ДЇor hardcore gamers, the price can also get out of hand quickly. However, with a good connection, most services can get your overall input delay down to just a few frames-usually less than a twelfth of a second. YouвЂ™re also going to have a much better time on ethernet than on WiFi. If youвЂ™re close, you could be looking at only one or two frames on a good connection, but if you live in a rural area far from datacenters, you could be looking at over 50ms of extra delay. Location to the datacenter the game is running on also contributes to latency.

In practice, everyВ 16ms of additional ping time on your connection is another frame of lag, and thatвЂ™s on top of the native latency due to processing on the server end.

While checking your speed, make sure also to take a look at your ping value, which is the amount of time it takes your computer to send a packet out to a server and get a response. If your internet lags, your entire connection will be cut off for a few seconds. In addition to speed, youвЂ™re also looking for consistency here. You can check your internet speeds using OoklaвЂ™s Speedtest service. Having two people playing games at the same time, or having someone else streaming video in the other room, eats into that speed. Ideally, youвЂ™ll need a consistent 50 Mbps downstream speed, and thatвЂ™s if youвЂ™re not sharing that speed with others. You need a fast, stable internet connection to take advantage of cloud gaming. The most important thing holding back cloud gaming isВ internet speed. Microsoft, EA, and even Google are working on their own services, so the market is definitely headed that way. Instead of paying hundreds for a console or a PC, you can now rent your games similar to watching movies on Netflix. Now that theyвЂ™ve had time to improve, and especially with the rise of high speed fiber internet, itвЂ™s a very real option for people who canвЂ™t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a gaming PC.Д¬loud gaming isnвЂ™t just another amalgam of buzzwords itвЂ™s an increasingly popular service thatвЂ™s trying to change the way we play games. So it doesnвЂ™t matter what specs you have on your laptop, as the server can run any game in perfect quality, so long as you have a connection good enough to play 1080p60 video.ДЄ few years ago, the technology was in its infancy, with very high latency and major compression holding it back significantly. The host app on your machine sends your mouse and keyboard inputs back up to the server on which the game is running.

In cloud gaming, the gaming provider runs the game on its servers and then streams the display back to you.

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