DECEMBER 2019 PCWorld 91(go.pcworld.com/xbin).
LET’S PAUSE TO TALK
ABOUT LAG
In both cases, a pleasurable gaming
experience boils down to one factor: latency,
or the time it takes for you to react to a given
scene and input a controller movement or
button press, and for the game to respond
accordingly.
On a “local” console or PC, that latency or
lag is almost nothing. Though some
professional gamers will use wired mice to
minimize the lag that can occur between the
wireless connections on a PC, lag is rarely
noticeable on single-player games if you’re
running on an up-to-date machine. It
becomes somewhat worse if you’re playing a
multiplayer match online, even if you’re on a
high-speed wired connection. OnLive, which
pioneered cloud gaming before flaming out,
succeeded technically (go.pcworld.com/oliv)
but failed as a business operation (go.
pcworld.com/fail).
It becomes even more pronounced if
you’re playing games remotely, over a
wireless connection. Microsoft implemented
game streaming on Windows 10 (go.
pcworld.com/gs15) in 2015, where you
could take a Windows PC and play games
streamed to it from a console elsewhere in
your home, over a wireless connection.
(Xbox Console Streaming is essentially an
extension of this.) Over a wireless LAN, lag
increases even further.
Theoretically lag should be the worst of all
over a cellular connection. On Project
xCloud, it was surprisingly not too bad.Project xCloud is Xbox: if there was anything different about what I saw on my phone’s screen versus on my
console, I didn’t notice it. But keep in mind that you’ll need to squint at some of the tiny bits of type, too.