This week’s Digital Foundry Direct Weekly delivers yet another content coverage ‘war story’ as we tried to do our best to cover Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, despite no PC code arriving until the day before release and no console review code at all until launch day. Attempts to source it earlier via retail stores helped, but from a creator point of view, I can’t help but feel a touch disappointed that we didn’t have more time with the console versions of the game. However, it’s the second topic on the docket that I’m going to focus on in this blog – the CMA’s blocking of the Microsoft/Activision deal owing to a perceived unfair advantage it would give Microsoft in the cloud space.
There’s been plenty of analysis on whether the CMA’s reservations are valid are not, but there was one piece of information contained in the documentation that intrigued me – that ‘a rival’ – likely Sony – contacted the CMA to tell them that the latency challenges facing cloud gaming have been overcome. The CMA was rather lacking in terms of detail here, only saying that ‘more powerful graphical processing units (GPUs)’ can solve the problem. The immediate reaction online was to dismiss the idea because you cannot overcome the laws of physics. Latency will always be a problem that cannot be conquered.
I speak as a journalist that has covered ‘the power of the cloud’ right from the very beginning, when OnLive claimed to be delivering an ‘as good as local gaming’ experience way back in 2011. It couldn’t possibly work, I said. It did work, of course, in that a functional gaming experience was possible, but the lag was terrible and the image quality even worse. By the standards set by OnLive, it would never replace local gaming – and that’s still the perception even today.
The thing is, assuming the CMA has paraphrased Microsoft’s ‘rival’ correctly, I think this opinion has some weight.
00:00:00 Introduction00:00:45 News 01: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor impressions00:23:57 News 02: Microsoft Activision purchase hits roadblock00:34:30 News 03: Microsoft pushes for Xbox energy sustainability00:48:21 News 04: ASUS ROG Ally chips benchmarked00:55:50 Supporter Q1: If RT becomes a big rendering focus, could future GPUs regress in rasterization performance?01:00:36 Supporter Q2: Are 8GB GPUs DOOMED to muddy textures on PC?01:07:33 Supporter Q3:How did Don feel about his first video?01:11:15 Supporter Q4: Will you make a GTA5 retro time capsule video when the title hits its 10th anniversary later this year?
A lot has changed since 2011 and of all the cloud gaming start-ups, it’s only really Nvidia that has delivered a system that can be said to have addressed the issues. And yes, a lot of that is down to ‘more powerful GPUs’, alongside an incredibly robust and dogged approach to relocating and mitigating latency along the end-to-end pipeline. Check out Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive on the GeForce Now RTX 4080 tier and not only are you seeing an experience that may well represent the next generation of consoles, you’re also getting perfectly reasonable latency. With a mouse and keyboard, you can feel the difference in response – but it’s subtle. Move to a controller – an inherently laggier form of input – and you’d be hard-pressed to tell.