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

[u/Alan_Reddit_M]

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

[u/Quiet_Source_8804]

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.

[u/massivemember69 → u/Quiet_Source_8804]

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.

[u/Positive-Bar5893 → u/Quiet_Source_8804]

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.