 The Cooler Master Glacier 240L CPU cooler delivers the convenience of an all-in-one and the performance of a custom water cooler. Click now to learn more. Latency, or lag, is the delay between an action and the resulting reaction, such as in gaming, the pressing of a button on a controller and the corresponding animation of a character on the screen. This latency is an enemy of gamers. It makes controls feel less responsive and makes it more difficult to, among other things, time jumps and land headshots. There are many smaller contributors that make up the total latency in the example I just gave, ranging from ones small enough to not matter, such as the delay between pressing a button on your wired keyboard and that action being registered by your computer, all the way up to image processing delays as high as 68 milliseconds, or 3 to 4 frames of action, on a 60Hz TV. Today's investigation is not a detailed look into the contribution of every single one of these lag factors, but rather a look at the current state of local game streaming technology, and whether it's a feasible alternative to plugging directly into a PC or game console. Now, when I say local game streaming, I am not referring to subscription-based cloud services like OnLive. That's internet game streaming and has a whole different set of challenges because it relies on your internet connection. That means latency is higher and beyond your control, and it also means that, like Netflix, it will use your monthly bandwidth quota if your internet service provider has one. Local game streaming, by contrast, uses only your own networking equipment, which can be as cheap or as fancy as you want, does not require a subscription since your games belong to you already, and does not use your internet connection because both the game-serving PC and the client PC or device are within your own network. So here's our setup. Our streaming computer for all the tests is using a Core i7-3770K CPU with 8GB of RAM and a GTX 780 Ti. It's a very high-end machine, but in order to reduce the variables in our test, it was important to use a gaming computer that is easily capable of powering these in-home streaming solutions. For networking, we're using an ASUS RTN66U, which is the best consumer-grade router that I've personally used for GameStream, and of course, it has gigabit connectivity for our wired examples. For our clients, we're using a SteamOS machine as well as an NVIDIA Shield to show off those two different streaming solutions. So to get started, we're gonna plug both a CRT monitor and an ASUS PB278Q into a PC in cloned display mode for a local gaming session. We're using Counter-Strike Source's in-game benchmark to simulate our local gaming session because it's really quick to launch and it has an explosion that changes the color of the whole frame very suddenly and predictably. We were able to consistently measure a 10 to 11 frame difference when filming at 480 frames per second between the first bright flash of fire on the CRT and the first appearance of it on the LCD. That gives us about a 22 millisecond delay. This methodology, unfortunately, doesn't give us the exact input lag of the monitor, but since most people won't notice the difference between a CRT and an LCD, it does allow us to make relative comparisons between the contenders while giving us some context for the following numbers. First up, we're going to test Steam's in-home streaming. You can find more details about in-home streaming in the link in the video description. And to do that, we're gonna take our LCD and run it off of our Steam machine, a normal PC that is connected via a wired gigabit ethernet connection to the same network as our gaming PC. The gaming PC keeps the CRT so that we can measure the additional delay that is caused by the H.264 video encoding being done by the server PC, the network transfer, and then the decoding being done by the client PC. It looks like it adds about 74 milliseconds compared to a CRT monitor, which is about equivalent to seeing your game with a 4.5 frame delay on a 60Hz monitor. Not bad when you consider that there are TVs that can add as much as 68 milliseconds or about 3 to 4 frames. But you also need to remember, guys, a laggy display will further increase the perceived latency, so while it's playable in this situation, there's still a lot of room for improvement, and one to two frames would be ideal just in case you hook it up to one of those extremely laggy TVs. In scenario two, we're going to use NVIDIA's proprietary GameStream technology with a shield handheld Android gaming system to see how close it comes to Valve's more open solution. NVIDIA's advantage is that due to its closed ecosystem, they can keep tight control over the data chain and fully leverage their own technologies, such as the built-in hardware H.264 video encoders and decoders on their graphics processors. However, NVIDIA's disadvantage here is that they're running wirelessly. That's how they advertise GameStream. NVIDIA also has the benefit of tightly controlling the settings at which games can run, and they allow only a maximum of 720p 60fps compared to the 1080p 60fps that we were able to run with a wired connection on a Steam in-home streaming setup. So GameStream adds about, well, about the same, 74 milliseconds compared to our CRT, which seems pretty good considering that it's wireless. Because it's wireless, though, it is subject to interference, and you won't get that 74 millisecond delay consistently, since you won't always be right next to the router the way that we are for our controlled testing. Scenario 3 addresses an imbalance in the previous two examples by taking our Steam machine and turning it down to 720p 60fps, then running it wirelessly. So it's more equivalent to the Shield. The ASUS Z87i Deluxe motherboard that's running in here has onboard dual-band AC Wi-Fi, which should be basically equivalent to the dual-band NWi-Fi on the Shield because we're connecting to an N access point. Going wireless with Steam in-home streaming adds about, there's that number again, 74 milliseconds compared to our CRT. So performance was pretty much the same as the Shield in terms of lagginess and very playable, but not something that I would actually recommend doing. Shield runs on a small built-in display. We only used the HDMI output to go to our bigger one to control the variable of the display's input lag so that we got comparable results. So compressed 720p images will normally still look really good and really sharp on that tiny little display. But for something bigger, like you'd be running on a Steam machine, like a TV or a monitor, I would really recommend a wired connection so you can game at 1080p. Scenario 4 is an open source streaming app called Limelight that keeps getting brought up to me whenever I talk about in-home streaming solutions. It works, yes, but I hope this video serves as a demonstration of why I don't talk about it much yet and why I don't care about it much yet. It works on pretty much any reasonably powerful Android device, which is really cool, but it's just not even in the same ballpark as the others and in my experience does not provide a playable experience on either of the supported devices I own, an Nvidia Shield and an HTC One. Our measured latency was about 98 milliseconds, but unfortunately the image quality was lower than any of the other solutions with more frequent unplayable stutters in my testing. In summary, the best streaming solutions we have are tripling the delay that you experienced when you upgraded from a CRT to a good quality LCD. But in that time, they're encoding an image, sending it over a network, then decoding it. 74 milliseconds of display lag is noticeable, but it's definitely playable for most genres of games. I actually beat the first couple worlds of Super Meat Boy streaming on my Shield, albeit not as easily as I can when hooked up directly with a wired controller, but I was able to do it. 100 milliseconds becomes too much to deliver a satisfactory game experience for anything but slow-paced, perhaps turn-based gaming for me. And while your sensitivity may vary, the takeaway today is that gaming on the machine you're directly attached to is still better. We're talking 22 milliseconds compared to about 75, so we're talking about a 3x betterness improvement, even with an LCD monitor compared to a CRT versus streaming. It's still the best, but quality local game streaming solutions are adding about another 50 milliseconds of lag, which means that we can achieve very playable results today if we control the additional latency introduced by other parts of the chain, such as wireless gaming controllers or laggy TVs. And in a generation or two, if encoder and decoder hardware can be improved, we could be able to get pretty close to the performance of sitting in front of the device, which is extremely exciting. The future is going to be awesome, folks. I hope you enjoyed this video. Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment and let me know what's your sensitivity like. Did you really notice when you went from CRT to LCD? Do you notice the difference from one LCD to another? Because I certainly do. And have you tried in-home streaming or Nvidia Shield with its GameStream technology? And did you find it very playable? Would love to hear from you guys. And I'm sure I have a standard intro, but I've completely forgotten it now. Don't forget to subscribe. Peace.