The State of OnLive’s Internet-Streamed Gaming

During last spring’s Game Developers Conference, a company by the name of OnLive took the stage and intrigued many with promises of high-end gaming on low-end PCs, or on no PC at all. The service was touted as being a service in the cloud that would allow you to play the latest games with little more than a broadband Internet connection, with either the service’s PC client, or module that you hook up to your TV.

The service, to my knowledge, still doesn’t have a set launch date, but it’s been in beta ever since the announcement, and because it’s a closed beta, not much information has trickled out since then. But, PC Perspective found its way into the closed beta, and since no NDA was flashed in front of it, it’s published a great look at the service from where it stands today.

One of the biggest issues that most people worried about when OnLive was first announced was latency, and it’s easy to understand why. On our desktop PCs, our mouse latency is well under 1ms, and where there’s online play, which tends to hover around 50ms at a minimum, an obvious issue of input lag rises. From Ryan’s tests, he mentions that it’s a problem on a per-title basis. Fast-paced game? It’s a problem. Slower-paced? It’s sufficient.

To be fair, Ryan was further from the data center than is preferred, but even so, it sounds like latency is going to be problematic for a lot of people. The article notes that there’s going to be a WiFi feature added later, and to be honest… I couldn’t imagine adding even more latency like that on purpose. Not unless you actually enjoy lag, I suppose.

The other potential issue is that the games through OnLive don’t look near as good as they do on a regular PC, installed locally. It’s hard to explain, but through OnLive, the graphics look kind of hazy, as if there’s a filter of some sort over top of it. On the PC, lines are smooth, colors rich… just an overall much better experience. Still, we’re likely early in OnLive’s life, and I’m sure there’s a reason it’s still in a closed beta, so I’m still hopeful we may see some real improvements before the service goes “Live”.

Having never played Burnout: Paradise on the PC before I was a bit surprised to find how much BETTER it looked than what I was just playing using OnLive. For my testing, I setup the local game to run at the highest possible image quality settings (8xAA, etc) at 1280×720 – the same resolution that OnLive uses. Because we are running it at such a low resolution, I thought it was fair to assume that any GPU of $90 or more today would allow you run at these maximum settings.