Yup it wasn't that long ago that I was happy playing games with a 64k single ISDN connection giving me pings around 150ms, it is surprising what you can get used too.
A ping of 150ms is a completely different situation.
In an online game with 150ms ping your game engine is still operating at say 5-45ms per frame and your movement/input lag will be below that as well, it's just players within your game would sometimes jump about within your normally running game. That is a complete different concept to the entire game having crappy lag and everything you do doesn't appear to you until 150ms later. Also that 150ms is the return trip for information with exceptionally little processing going on at the other end. With cloud gaming that 150ms would be the minimum, on top of that you would have the frame being processed.
I assume your not a fan of the cloud based gaming tech them DM or is it just the currant state of the implementation of it ?
Anything about how it currently runs is woeful, nothing even connected to how they run at the moment is feasible for even 'good' gaming, let alone anything like what you can do at home today. All modding, gone, high IQ, gone, low latency, gone.
If you take say me playing GTA v now, I can get 120fps easily with xfire, that means movement I make in the game can be updated every 8ms or so, no perceivable input lag and smooth as butter gaming at the settings I chose. Take that to streaming and one, they wouldn't provide me with xfire 290s level of performance so IQ takes a nose dive, 120hz, no chance, no where near as smooth, mods, no chance. But more importantly, my input has to go to them to be processed which means I turn, it gets, even with a great ping 15ms later to them, gets processed which if lucky would be at 60hz kind of performance so another 16ms later, then it has to come back to me. So realistically the minimum input latency will be 45ms. In reality more processing needs to be done, the image needs to be compressed, it has to be fiddled with at this end before being displayed and the last I heard Grid and other game streaming services were in the 200ms or above range, with 200ms considered good performance considering what is achievable today.
Even at it's absolute best, if you could rent 2 high end gpus and get 120hz of high IQ stuff back... and they created a cloud network that had almost negligible excess lag, on a freaking awesome connection you will get 45ms input latency.... which is effectively 10 times worse than what I have gaming at home.
The tech isn't there and likely won't ever be because basic connections across the internet are surprisingly fast already. Accessing a server somewhere within the local area 8-10ms is as low as you will realistically ever get. You have to go through routing hardware in the box you're connected to, at the exchange that box is connected to, from that exchange to your ISP's link to a backbone, from backbone to the server and then back. Into and out of multiple routers determines a realistic minimum latency that honestly won't ever be overcome. These things use fibre optics and the speed of light for most of the communication stages.
Latency sensitive applications suck on the internet, things that aren't sensitive to latency like video/music are awesome. I've tried onlive, it was horrendous for a single player type game, multiplayer through a cloud gaming service would only compound the issue and become horrific.
