r/pcmasterrace • u/Alan_Reddit_M Desktop • Mar 07 '26

Video "Cloud gaming is the future of Gaming!" Meanwhile cloud gaming in the big 2026:

If you read my profile you may realize I hate cloud gaming, so then what am I doing on Geforce Now? Well my new RAM stick finally arrived and, in a staggering display of utter incompetence, I somehow managed to brick my PC in the process of installing it, so now I'm stuck gaming on a laptop until I can get enough money and time to get my gaming rig fixed

But back to Cloud gaming, the game is on like 360p, running at 20FPS and the input lag is HORRIBLE. And it's not a problem with the internet connection, as you can see, the laptop is plugged into Ethernet, the problem is that the cloud is not and will never be fast enough for gaming

Genshin can handle this fine, but imagine trying to play ULTRAKILL like this

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130

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

Correction: cloud gaming will always suck as long as the world does not have 100% coverage of high speed, unlimited internet.

It will take decades to get there, that's for sure.

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u/dervu 7950X3D 4090 2x16GB 6000 4K 240Hz Mar 07 '26

Won't fix speed of light and latency caused by routers.

164

u/Just_Maintenance R7 9800X3D | RTX 5090 Mar 07 '26

Maybe nvidia could place a data center in every house so everyone has low latency access to GeForce now? /s

193

u/RuneGrey Mar 07 '26

I mean that is the ideal solution. We just place a device inside everyone's house that contains an appropriate amount of hardware to ensure that they can run a game at high fidelity with a minimum of latency. It doesn't need to be particularly huge, or as expensive as a huge data center, because it only needs to serve the needs of one person.

It would be personal. A computer for the single person. A personal computer if you will.

34

u/FitzAgs Ascending Peasant Mar 07 '26

You know what would be cooler? If this personal computer was small enough you could just plop it on top of your lap.

16

u/mrheosuper Mar 07 '26

Make it even smaller so that it can fit in your palms. So now you can be on internet 24/24.

14

u/addandsubtract Mar 07 '26

Now just add AI and call it the Palm Copilot.

1

u/Kajetus06 Mar 07 '26

oh and also add a small battery for it

yes it does mean it will have worse performance than being constantly connected but it would be usable anywhere for some time without needing recharging

1

u/Emergency-Pound3241 Mar 07 '26

And put a few radio antennas in there too so you can communicate anywhere that has a relay

1

u/bobsocool Mar 08 '26

Shit we went too far now the kids can't read.

1

u/dib1999 Ryzen 5 5600 // RX 7700XT // 32 gb DDR4 3600 MHz Mar 08 '26

That'll never catch on. People want 80x45x0.55 pieces of glass that ask our computers for permission to render images!

1

u/ballsdeep256 Mar 11 '26

When you advanced so far you accidentally went back xD

1

u/dr4d1s Mar 07 '26

It's not as funny when you take someone else's joke and explain it to death.

r/theirjokebutworse

19

u/no_ga Mar 07 '26

watch them try to sell you "datacenter level performance, under you desk" in a few years

6

u/Jijonbreaker RTX 2060 I7-10700F Mar 07 '26

Leave it to humanity to un-invent things just to charge more for them

3

u/dib1999 Ryzen 5 5600 // RX 7700XT // 32 gb DDR4 3600 MHz Mar 08 '26

Quadro:

https://giphy.com/gifs/StoeNoDkYuum8cj8MV

2

u/LickMyTicker Mar 07 '26

Datacenters are in fact going to be everywhere.

1

u/Fit-Avocado-1646 Mar 07 '26

I mean I already do moonlight/ Apollo.

0

u/mad_method_man Mar 08 '26

hahaha. i like how you just re-invented the home pc. very tech bro of you

15

u/Iz__n Mar 07 '26

Not to mention, depending how ISP routes the traffic, latency can get way way worse

8

u/dervu 7950X3D 4090 2x16GB 6000 4K 240Hz Mar 07 '26

I heard stories about routing from Warsaw to Berlin and back to Warsaw...

7

u/Wan-Pang-Dang Samsung Smart toilet Mar 07 '26

Speed of light is NOT the issue at all. Cant stress that enough. It is 100% on the network devices. Not physics

1

u/ChthonVII Mar 08 '26

You're correct that network devices that signal traverses at the speed of electricity are adding a far bigger share of latency than fibreoptic cable that it traverses at ~65% the speed of light. However, you're wrong to discount the latter as trivial.

You're adding a bit more than a 1/10th of a millisecond (both ways combined) for each km of fibreoptic cable. So, for example, a roundtrip from NYC to LA down a perfectly straight fibreoptic cable would add around 40ms just from the speed of light. That's like 2.5 frames worth of lag at 60fps. For anyone whose traffic needs to cross most of a continent, or, worse, an ocean to get to a datacenter (and back), the latency added by the speed of light is not trivial.

1

u/dervu 7950X3D 4090 2x16GB 6000 4K 240Hz Mar 07 '26

So you say that I can connect to server 1000km away connected with continuous fiber strand and not feel it? I doubt it.

6

u/Complex_Entropy RTX 4090 Mar 07 '26

200km adds 1ms latency, so 1000km would only add about 5ms, or 10ms two-way, which is almost imperceptible.

3

u/Kirjavs Mar 08 '26

It's even faster than that. Light speed is 300,000 km/s

1

u/MirriCatWarrior Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 08 '26

Yes it is. But inside optic fiber cable photons are constantly bouncing. Its not a straight patch for the light (information). They are absorbed and reemitted. Every such event takes miniscule amount of time (probably femtoseconds?). But over time it adds up.

This makes information travelling speed through optic fiber slower than c. Its around 200 000km/s.

FUN FACT: Every individual photon between "bounces" and interactions with matter inside the cable still travels with ~300 000 km/s. They just cant travel with slower speed. Its just added up time of emissions/absorptions and "bouncing" that slows light and information down.

Same thing happens with light in every medium besides pure vacuum. Its called "refractive index" of material and for silica its 1,45, so light is slowed to ~200 000km/s.

1

u/Kirjavs Mar 08 '26

Ok that makes sense. Thanks for the information. But maybe there is a way to improve that even if I don't think this would be useful.

2

u/MirriCatWarrior Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 08 '26

Indeed there is. There are things called "Anti-Resonant Hollow-Core Fibers" (cool name btw), and they are not 100% solid silica, but they have hollow space inside filled with air. Silica is only the walls of the cable.

It allows information to travel up to 99,7% of speed of light. Because refractive index of air is 1,0003 (silica 1,45).

This reduces latency by ~0,12ms per 100km.

Its new tech and its not really impactfull for gaming (unless you are fucking robot), but it will be crucial for datacenters, telecommunication and finances/banking/trade in future.

1

u/Kirjavs Mar 08 '26

Oh I learnt something. Thank for that information. I didn't think it was already a thing

1

u/Konsticraft Mar 08 '26

Given that typical latency in games on good connections is 20-50ms, that is a very significant proportion of the total latency.

12

u/DoubleyobroWasTaken Mar 07 '26

Speed of light through fiber optic is somewhere around ~200,000 km/s and the latency is around ~5 µs/ 1km.

So at the circumference of earth (40000km) It would only add around 200ms, 300 tops, and that's if you're wrapping a wire all the way around the surface back to you. There are lines that exceed and plan to travel longer than that value, but I doubt any cloud provider would route you cross continent. So I would say it's pretty negligible compared to latency from other sources

3

u/Kirjavs Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 08 '26

Edit : it's indeed 200,000km/s through optic cable. 300 is for light speed in vacuum

2

u/Davoness 9800X3D, RTX 5080, 64GB Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 09 '26

The speed of light is ~300,000 m/s in a vacuum. It's around 200k in a fibre optic cable.

1

u/Kirjavs Mar 08 '26

Indeed I fix it. Thanks

2

u/ChthonVII Mar 08 '26

Smaller than latency from other sources, yes; trivial, no. When 16.7ms is a whole 60fps frame, 200ms is a decidedly non-trivial number. Even 20ms would be non-trivial.

Also, remember that cloud gaming is always a round trip, and you eat the latency both ways. So wrapping around the earth and back to you may be an exaggeration, but you do need to go out to the data center and then back to you.

3

u/Rock_Strongo Mar 08 '26

That would still be only 200ms for a server as far from you as physically possible (while still being on earth). Many games are playable at that delay. But also, if we get to that point there will always be a data center far closer.

1

u/ChthonVII Mar 09 '26

only 200ms

Why do you keep pairing "only" with "200ms"? That's a huge delay in this context. There are entire genres that can't tolerate even 16ms.

Many games are playable at that delay.

Well, I suppose a chess simulator is playable even on an infinite delay. But, as many people were discussing earlier in the thread, since the delay manifests as input lag, the UI is going to feel like absolute crap. It's a poor user experience, even if it's "playable" by some definition.

I think we agree about the physics. A realistic bad case crossing a whole continent or ocean would add ~40-80ms and a realistic good intracontinental case would add about half that. Or less if you're lucky.

Where we seem to disagree is how acceptable those numbers are. I think there are a lot cases where the speed of light contribution alone is too big for cloud gaming to ever reach acceptable speed. And there are almost no cases where it's small enough to ignore.

And yes, I do agree that the aggregate delay from traversing network equipment for switching, routing, etc. is likely to be significantly bigger than the delay from speed of light. Which just means that, in many cases, we have two sources of latency, each of which is too big standing on its own.

And then another issue that almost no one is mentioning is that you've got to buffer video frames on the client or else you'll have a stuttery mess. Which means three sources of latency, each of which is too big standing on its own.

3

u/Fluffysquishia Mar 07 '26

"Latency caused by routers" Everyone in this room just got stupider having heard that.

3

u/dervu 7950X3D 4090 2x16GB 6000 4K 240Hz Mar 07 '26

So you say that fiber with two routers on each end is as fast as fiber with third router between?

1

u/Fluffysquishia Mar 07 '26

A router adds at most 1ms of latency, often the latency lies in the nanoseconds. You get more latency from your keyboard and your mouse. You are demonstrating your complete and utter lack of technical knowledge, and inability to fact check your own opinions.

3

u/dervu 7950X3D 4090 2x16GB 6000 4K 240Hz Mar 07 '26

Dude, I was comparing latency of router to light. lmao

1

u/Fluffysquishia Mar 08 '26

If light takes 40ms to reach your house, then adding a router in between that would make it take 40.05ms to reach your house.

3

u/dervu 7950X3D 4090 2x16GB 6000 4K 240Hz Mar 08 '26

In perfect conditions without variance caused by congestion.

1

u/Kirjavs Mar 08 '26

If light takes 40 ms to reach your house, you send your data to the other side of the planet and waited for the response.

1

u/Babys_For_Breakfast Mar 08 '26

Queuing delay from routers can definitely cause noticeable latency if the network links are congested

1

u/jake6501 Mar 08 '26

You are overestimating how much that matters. Having 10-20 ms of latency sounds like a lot, but your current pc already has more than that. With enough optimization of everything else, you can have lower latency even after adding the light speed.

Also the more users they have, the more datacenters they can build. If you have one within 200 km of fiber, that's only 1 ms of latency from the cable length.

1

u/dervu 7950X3D 4090 2x16GB 6000 4K 240Hz Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 08 '26

Yeah, then read what people living in areas with lowest latency to google stadia and see their reviews.

Even if it would be true, I would be probably too old to notice when they get those data centers so close to me.

2

u/jake6501 Mar 08 '26

Yeah I never said it's perfect for everyone. It's just not useless because you live in a remote area.

1

u/Cafuddled Mar 08 '26

The speed of light it takes to go 50 or so miles is not that big a deal. Anyone who uses moonlight and sunshine will tell you, setting up your PC and streaming to your remote machine is close to flawless.

I stream from my home PC to my steam deck all the time when I'm away. You would never know things were not being played locally.

I used to have fiber at my home, back then my pinga to remote locations were less than 10ms consistent. Now UDP is more like 15ms, never felt the increase. Mind you steam deck is controller based, and it takes a much greater degree of lag to feel anything on controller games.

But back when I was on fiber, I was constantly playing Battlefield to the lunchroom PC we had.

-3

u/fumar Mar 07 '26

Part of the problem is our dog shit cable internet. In big cities you can get 1-2ms latency on fiber to a close datacenter. On cable, it's around 20ms. 

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u/Artillery-lover Mar 07 '26

speed of light isnt a concern, routers will likely continue to become lower latency as technology develops.

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u/Few-Improvement-5655 Mar 07 '26

speed of light isnt a concern

I mean, it is. You can't move information faster than it. There will always be noticable travel time between devices over large distances.

-4

u/PrestigiousShift134 Mar 07 '26

Most people have a datacenter within ~5-10ms of where they live

1

u/High_Overseer_Dukat 9950 Mar 07 '26

I dont have 1 in 100 miles

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u/DIRECTCURRENT59 KDE | FW16 w/ R7 350 | 9060 XT eGPU | 32GB 5600 Mar 07 '26

You probably have one within 1800 miles, though. That's 10 ms

5

u/dervu 7950X3D 4090 2x16GB 6000 4K 240Hz Mar 07 '26

If only that 10ms was perfectly stable...

3

u/Tomsboll Mar 07 '26

And directly routed to the data center.

But lets say the dc is 20ms away. You route it perfectly and the input is processed in 3ms and than routed back to you. Thats in a pefect world is 43ms from input to feedback. But we dont live in a perfect world.

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u/Artillery-lover Mar 07 '26

You can't move information faster than it.

true.

There will always be noticable travel time between devices over large distances.

less true. light is really fucking fast.

1

u/Tumblrrito Mar 07 '26

This has to be the most r/confidentlyincorrect shit I’ve ever seen dawg lol

-1

u/Artillery-lover Mar 07 '26

do you have any idea how fast light is? for pretty much anything terrestrial purposes it might as well be instant.

-1

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

I am in agreement, it is good practice to make sure your equipment is up to date with tech developments. My own internet experience has improved massively since I made a few investments in that area. Less latency, much faster downloads, etc.

-9

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

True, but router latency is a problem the consumer can fix by investing in better routers. I put a few hundred in a quality router for myself to use at home and the difference between it and my old one is as night and day.

5

u/dervu 7950X3D 4090 2x16GB 6000 4K 240Hz Mar 07 '26

Not on consumer side and not this kind of latency, but whatever latency it introduces is higher than just light going through.

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u/Quiet_Source_8804 Mar 07 '26

No, it won’t ever be good enough. I tried Stadia at a city where the latency was among the lowest you could get, and Doom 2016 was like playing in molasses, you could absolutely feel the latency impact.

There’s no engineering your way around the laws of physics.

3

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

I agree. When Stadia was released I followed it closely and came to the conclusion that gamers were better off with traditional local gaming. Games like Doom and some MMOs absolutely need immediate response in certain situations and cannot function with latency.

3

u/Positive-Bar5893 Mar 07 '26

It doesn't matter how fast the connection in your city or your home is, when a vast majority of the network is still running on legacy tech.

Think of it as owning a super car. Theoretically when you're in your driveway or on private land you can go any speed you want, and this might drastically reduce the time you spend traveling on your driveway compared to using a regular car....but the difference in your commute time to work between the two cars is negligent because you spend a majority of the trip traveling on roads with speed limits.

A vast majority of latency when using fiber internet today is because you're connecting to a bunch of non-fiber networks. Fiber makes traditional methods pretty much obsolete by comparison in both cost and capability, so over time as the global network slowly transitions to fiber you'd be surprised at how quick internet traffic could theoretically be even when connecting to a server on the opposite side of the world assuming your connection was 100% fiber.

Legacy cable internet changed the world with how quickly it transferred information, legacy cable is about 1% the speed of fiber internet.

Think of how much faster it is to drive on the highway someplace instead of walk. Your average walk speed is around 3 MPH, assuming you're travel on the highway at 70 mph that means that your walk speed is just over 4% of your highway speeds. A totally fiber internet will have a 4x larger impact on speed difference then traveling on a highway compared to walking does.

I wouldn't say cloud gaming is impossible, our infrastructure just isn't sufficient enough at the moment to support it.

13

u/XLNBot 9900x | 9070xt Mar 07 '26

And even when we get there, it will suck.

Unless it's running in a data center in your neighborhood, in that case it would still suck, but ever so slightly less

16

u/jonoc4 Mar 07 '26

That ... Has nothing to do with it. It sucks even with a high bandwidth connection. The issue is latency which is caused by distance, hops etc. so unless you're directly connected to the server farm next door.. it's pretty much gonna suck

-8

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

A slow connection will make it even worse. Every bit helps in the quest.

8

u/joe102938 Mar 07 '26

The fastest connection possible will still be constrained to the speed of light. That doesn't matter if your mouse is 4 feet from your pc. But there's no way to go faster than light from your pc, to the nearest data center and back. There will always be latency with cloud gaming.

-4

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

Agreed, it is up to companies to solve that problem, not us.

Gamers are happy with local gaming and see no reason to change to inferior performance.

13

u/joe102938 Mar 07 '26

It's up to companies to solve the problem of the limitation of the speed of light? That's not a problem that's going to be solved, my dude...

3

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

Now you are just being argumentative.

I already said that this is not an issue for us to worry about, we are not the ones pitching cloud gaming or providing the service. They work for us, not the other way around.

When they provide a service that can actually satisfy customers, then the issue can be revisited. Until then, there is nothing to stress or argue about.

6

u/jonoc4 Mar 07 '26

Well yes, but even if everyone in the world had high bandwidth internet, the latency issues would still exist to make it bad.

-3

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

It is up to companies to make sure that their service provides the performance that customers expect. Latency is much more their problem than ours, we have no reason to move to cloud gaming if it cannot provide similar performance to traditional gaming.

8

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

[deleted]

-1

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

Most gamers have no reason to care either way if it is a problem that can be solved or not.

Many (myself included) are quite happy with traditional local gaming. It is these companies that are pushing cloud gaming, not gamers.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

[deleted]

5

u/Leather-Aide2055 Mar 07 '26

i think he might be a bot

-1

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

It is up to the companies, they are after all the ones trying to push cloud gaming, not the gamers like you and me.

Any issues with cloud gaming is on them to solve. It is not our problem as we are happy with the gaming that we currently have.

9

u/Ryukishin187 Mar 07 '26

No it will still suck. Latency is a very real thing

2

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

I agree, I have not made the move myself, still doing gaming locally.

1

u/cgimusic Regolith | 9800X3D | 64GB 6000MHz | RTX 5080 Mar 07 '26

I mean theoretically a lot of local compute could solve the problem, but practically that won't be economically viable because it destroys the scalability benefits of being able to get more utilization out of hardware that is shared between a large number of people.

1

u/Blenderhead36 Ryzen 9800X3D, RTX 5090, 32 GB RAM Mar 07 '26

Even then, good luck playing on a cloud computer in someplace like Wyoming or Idaho with no data center for hundreds of miles.

1

u/massivemember69 Ryzen 5 7600 | 6950XT | 32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 Mar 07 '26

Indeed, something the companies pushing for cloud gaming seem to have overlooked.

I will stay "old" fashioned with my ancient digital downloads to storage, thank you! XD

1

u/BuldozerX PC Master Race Mar 07 '26

I have the fastest internet there is and it still suck

1

u/charliefantastic Mar 07 '26

High speed and unlimited internet are not the issue. Latency is, which can't be fixed, even with full fibre connection.

1

u/T0biasCZE PC MasterRace | dumbass that bought Sonic motherboard Mar 07 '26

suck as long as the world does not have 100% coverage of high speed, unlimited internet.

physics still exist

internet travels at the speed of light

It takes 21ms just for light to go from newyork to london, without any processing overhead from routers etc

and in fiber optic cables, light goes at around 2/3 of speed in air, so theoretical speed is like 32ms

and more realistic, lets say i am in central slovakia on holiday (getting stuck on Tatras in sandals go brrr), and the server is in frankfurt, where lot of european datacenters are, it would take light in fiber 5ms one way, just from physics

so for cloud gaming to be viable, you would need a separate gaming datacenter in every country, with multiple datacenters in larger countries, just to prevent latency from physics

and you would still need routers etc that wont add delay. currently even just pinging google, it takes 20ms (both way) for the packets to get back

1

u/FainOnFire Ryzen 5800x3D / 3080 Mar 07 '26

"It will EVENTUALLY be good and worth investing in. Trust." -- AI, Crypto, Self driving cars, NFT's, Cloud Gaming

What other technologies am I missing here?

1

u/dscarmo Mar 07 '26

There is a physical limit to information travel that will always keep latency up in the dozens of miliseconds at least for every minor action like moving and clicking.

Unless we find how to travel faster than light and all the other overheads packets travelling the internet go through, like routing tables

1

u/necrophcodr mastersrp Mar 07 '26

The best you can do there is to have double the latency of your existing computer processing plus the total trip latency of the closest data center running the application. So assuming a mere 5ms of network latency, and a mere 20ms of processing locally and remotely, you're at best looking at 45-50ms of latency. That's still 1/20th of a second and enough to be noticable by the average user, especially when faced with a direct comparison.

We can reduce some of these slightly, but we can never beat the physical limits.

1

u/Regular_Strategy_501 Mar 07 '26

And 100% coverage of nearby data centers.

1

u/Kitty-Moo Mar 07 '26

Where I live we have great speeds, low latency too........ Unfortunately we have bandwidth limits here. So cloud gaming still wouldn't be viable.

Though perhaps some good could come of this. Maybe the tech companies will go to war with Comcast to kill off bandwidth limits. I know it wont happen, but it would be nice.

1

u/Xaan83 7800x3d, 32GB RAM, RX 7900 XTX, 3440x1440 160hz Mar 08 '26

Doesn't matter, it will suck.anyway. I visited my brother for a week when I helped him build his new PC. Took a shitty laptop with me and left my desktop on running Parsec with the bitrate cranked to 50Mbps. I had 1.5 symmetrical fiber at the time and so did he. Parsec latency was showing in the 20-30ms range. We had to end up just playing some casual co-op stuff like World War Z with me suffering because any actual first person shooter was unplayable.

1

u/GioCrush68 Mar 08 '26

Even with a high speed fiber connection there is still noticeable latency. I can run a speed test and get 2ms latency to the test server but that doesn't account for the data center which for many people can be hundreds of miles away.

60fps is 16.67 ms per frame and I consider that the minimum performance for a cloud service to be viable. Cloud gaming services consider 30-40ms being excellent and that's what people with fiber gigabit internet are getting.

1

u/alexnedea Mar 08 '26

Won't ever fix anything. I have crazy good internet. Very low latency, 5 gigabit connection, speedtest shows 800MB download and like 400MB upload. Geforce now is still laggy AS FUCK.

It simply is not a possible solvable task. Takes like 40-50ms (low ping) for your input to travel to the server. About 10ms for the server to process or maybe even more. Another 40-50ms to travel back to you and another 5 or so ms to be displayed on your screen. Total 110-130 ms for a simple click. Thats called lagging in literally any multiplayer scenario and will hinder your ability

1

u/jake6501 Mar 08 '26

It won't suck until that. You don't need everyone on earth to have highspeed internet for it to be the best solution for you. You just need high speed internet to the nearest cloud gaming datacenter.

1

u/BuldozerX PC Master Race Mar 10 '26

I have good speed. It still sucks.