Surprisingly low latency, considering what they're doing. The technology is impressive. I played through all of Crysis:Warhead and Borderlands (okay, I was using OnLive for that but I've played Gaikai games to and they are similar), and although I could feel the latency it was never really annoying. I couldn't believe how quickly this process completes:
- My mouse click
- upstream to the server
- Game's own inherent frame-by-frame latency
- Game screen rendering to buffer
- Video encoding
- Video frame sent downstream to my PC
- Decoding on my end
- First frame of gun-firing animation on my end.
That's a huge amount of shit to wade through, and it felt to me like it was in the 100-200 millisecond range. That's just amazing.

I wouldn't do Unreal or Quake deathmatch that way, not because I don't think I could do it (it would certainly work), but rather because 100-200 milliseconds is the difference between win or lose when you're up against other human players. I suppose if all the other players were on the same streaming service so that they all had the same latency, then I would have no problem deathmatching that way.



DSL or cable modem are fine, as long as you're not streaming Netflix or doing a big FTP/BT download on the same line. If I had someone else doing something major on the household net connection, I wouldn't be able to play.

In the end, I was very interested in the technology and was seriously considering playing a lot of games that way. It's a perfect way to experience single-player games. The only reason I'm not doing it right now is that OnLive hasn't added any decent new games since they launched the service a year ago. It's simply a content thing. If they add some new games that I want to play, I'll log right back in and pony up the dough. And of course, Gaikai is positioning themselves differently, doing pretty much just game demos instead of full games, so that's a completely different thing. I'll try out any Gaikai game demo without hesitation, knowing that the technology works and that I'm getting an accurate representation of the game.