OnLive boosts quality: is cloud gaming now viable?

April 12th, 2013, 02:04 Posted By: wraggster

Even with Sony's confident $380 million buyout of Gaikai and the upcoming PlayStation 4 tie-in, cloud gaming remains a dubious prospect for core gamers. The performance of tech pioneer OnLive highlights the hitherto unresolved challenges: video compression kills image quality and input lag remains an issue. But what if we told you that OnLive has recently transformed significantly - for the better?A recent update to the service - which arrived without any kind of fanfare - brings about serious enhancements to the service, for the time being available in the PC client only. There are new options including the ability to scale up image quality bandwidth up to 12mbps, plus there's a v-sync toggle and low-latency screen modes. The former is a huge boon to gamers with faster connections especially, but are these extras truly enough to put the image quality and latency issues to rights?With this higher bandwidth setting open for use, we thought we'd see just how much of a leap it represents over the standard 5mbps rate. A 12mbps connection should go a long way towards alleviating macroblock artifacting issues common to OnLive, but considering the h.264-encoded stream is relaying a full 60FPS signal for most games, is this enough to produce a consistently smooth image? Utilising a fibre-optic line offering a download speed of 60Mbps, we play through a range of fast-moving shooters, fighters and racers to get an idea of where the changes come into effect.The upgrade is considerable, with textures and distant details coming across with a far greater degree of intricacy on the 12mbps cap. The clarity still doesn't hold up to the real deal (video compression pares back colour depth significantly, resulting in a washed out image) but the threshold for making this a passable gameplay experience is now far more tolerable, especially in living room conditions where the player sits some distance away from the screen. Strangely, the performance test readings available in the client's configuration menu only rate our connection at 8.2mbps, regardless of whether we're set to the lowest or the maximum bandwidth setting possible. Running a bandwidth monitor in the background reveals that this is far from the truth, where booting OnLive with 12mbps selected accurately reflects the actual download rate.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...-image-quality

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