this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Internet speeds are already fast enough. The problem is latency and it's impossible to fix. You can't beat the speed of light. You just can't have a 200ms delay between your controller and something happening in the screen.
You can beat the speed of flight, by moving the data centers closer to people. Edge routing did this for content delivery networks and likely if this is ever to work it'll need to happen for streaming. But that means data centers that can stream in every built up area in a market which is pretty tricky.
What is likely not going to be fixed is users home networking. Home networking in 99% of users homes is going to be using consumer routers, and those consumer routers are all just terrible and lead to endless problems around anything real-time.
Don't kid yourself: data centers are easier to have closer to many locations, but ones with hardware that works for cloud gaming, less so. And even in a best case scenario, it's still too big a delay to comfortably play anything apart from casual games.
Even streaming a game from your PC to living room box, such as Nvidia Shield, even wired, makes it nigh impossible to play racing games well, or anything that requires aiming. It's not far, almost playable when streaming in LAN, but any WAN in the mix and it's just not feasible.
Networking has a long way to go before streamed reactive games are even close.
I was playing Hollow Knight on Gamepass streaming the other day. It's a game that would be just awful to play with any real latency, and it was absolutely fine. There was no perceivable latency.
"can't beat the speed of light", according to Terry Pratchett the speed of dark does so quite handily.
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man