I recently switched to Shadow, a streaming service on my Chromebook, and I was excited to see how it would handle cloud gaming. A few moments later, I noticed that the two mice were fighting each other what was happening? The moment I brought up the mouse settings in Windows, the Phantom Mouse pointer disappeared, leaving a different problem in its wake. That is an absurd amount of latency and desync - the mouse pointer had a mind of its own and it wasn't just on the desktop where my mouse pointer felt like it was being routed via USB.

Gaming was equally uncomfortable, not only was the frame rate terrible considering that we were running at 720p with Fidelity FX on. It had some real issues tracking Mouse movement - it feels so deyy in a way I've never experienced before. This is weird - I then decided to give it the best possible chance of success by running it on a gaming system with a 3700k and a 490 in it. Wait, it didn't do any of these checks on the previous systems - this app is completely different on the desktop.

Okay well the weird Mouse desync latency was gone, so that's good but once I launched DOTA, the word "good" quickly melted from my vocabulary and what makes these dips down to 20 frames per second even more shocking is that this is by far the most expensive service I've tested so far. This costs $44 a month - I feel like for $44 you can buy an actual PC that'll run DOTA better than this now an all-in-ness to Shadow PC, I think it's mainly an Enterprise product with some gaming marketing stapled on as an afterthought at least I hope that's the case cuz wow do you have to pay a lot of money for the worst service in the lineup.

Now aside from that, I spent a lot of time cloud gaming this week on a whole bunch of different configurations using different services and I kept reaching the same conclusion - cloud gaming shouldn't be seen as a replacement for physical Hardware. It's just a way to get longer legs out of potatoes you happen to have lying around.

The moment that you're spending $400 for a lobotomized Steam Deck, you're doing it wrong. The same goes for the cloud gaming services - the moment they try and charge you a bunch of money for the services don't do it. It's not worth it in my opinion especially considering how unreliable they were and you still need to buy your own games with a lot of them that's why I really like the free tier of GForce.

Now, the hourlong session limit combined with the queuing for Beats is a bit of a pain in the butt - and you get better performance going up the tiers but latency wise they feel very similar. And it can get expensive quite quickly if you already use your Xbox Game Pass a lot then yeah give it a try although bear in mind it is in beta - the quality is a little bit iffy and I did lose access to it after that first day of using it on a final note.

I also tried one of these little like controller add-ons for your phone with cloud gaming which worked really well even if it was a bit flimsy. I also bought a cheaper one which was basically unusable - it was wireless and added its own latency on top of the latency that was already there so that was basically unusable but this one with a physical connector worked really well and if anything, with my phone in here, it gave me a better gaming experience than the Logitech cloud - and I already had the phone.

Let me know in the comment section down below what experiences you've had with cloud gaming. If you like the video subscribe to the channel maybe watch another one - a suggestion will pop up in a second.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enCloud gaming or, the answer to the question; What will you get if you  combine the experience of gaming with watching YouTube videos over your grandmother's dial-up  connection? ... In today's video I'm going to have a closer look at this industry  more than a year after the death of stadia in the face of Google's failure did anyonesucceed when I decided to make this video I didn't realize the sheer amount of cloud gaming  services that exist at the moment I thought there was just going to be like a couple survivors left  fighting over scraps in a Denny's parking lot but no there's a medium-sized swarm of them all  with their own niches game libraries and pricing pricing is something I really want to talk about  because they range from expensive to imp first I'm going to look at GeForce now's pricing a  service I've looked at on the channel before and it's pretty cool that it comes with a free tier  but that is limited to 1H hour session lengths and ads but you know what they say nothing makes  gaming better than some ads however you can go all the way up to the ultimate tier for those  people that have a 4K High refresh rate monitor but not a system to drive it for some reason uh  so this rig for about $ 26 Canadian dollar a month comes with a 480 and no ads it then took  me ages to figure out how much money you have to give Microsoft for them to let you do some  cloud gaming but after digging through an absurd amount of sub menus I got to this now after ages  of searching from what I can tell this $19 a month tier gets you cloud gaming along with all  of the other Xbox game pass features uh but this is still in beta so I don't know if I'm going to  be able to try this today Sony not to be outdone has their own one with PlayStation Plus premium  Ultra Premium Plus ultimate or whatever they call it which I kind of like the idea of because it's a  w you to get access to exclusive PlayStation games without buying a PlayStation but to get access to  a PS5 on the cloud costs $22 a month which is a lot but I think for that price you get games  included which a lot of the others don't maybe I think it does this stuff is quite convoluted and  I think it's convoluted for a reason so that you end up spending more than you need to but it's  difficult to know what you're getting for your money with a lot of this stuff now if you want  to spend way more money there is Shadow now in all fairness to Shadow it is way more flexible  than something like GeForce now it's not just a game instance running in an app you get a full  virtual desktop as far as I can tell they're like an Enterprise cloud computing service that now  also offers gaming PCs but anyway their pricing is quite misleading as well here it may seem like  it's on sale from $40 and costs $10 a month now but no that's just the first month that costs  $10 it actually costs $40 a month for a system with a 1080 in it but that isn't the full price  either if you click order you'll see that for your $40 Canadian dollars a month that doesn't include  any storage so you need to add a minimum of 256 gigs which is another $4 a month and if you want  something more powerful it's more than $60 a month maximum settings is another similar option which  gives you cheaper options you know there is a $10 a month one but that's got an RX 580 in it and an  AMD 1400 but it has limited hours depending on when you're playing you can just get 2 hours a  day to play and playing any more than that costs you an extra 35 cents per hour and it's 35 cents  per hour for the cheapest package that price scales up with the higher end packages so if you  go up to the big boy system with the 7900 XTX in it for $30 a month it costs you an extra $125 an  hour outside of what you've been allocated Amazon Luna still exists because apparently Bezos forgot  to turn the service off uh I think it's included with prime but you have to pay for all the games  in it which I don't think carries over to like steam or anything so that's fun and you can tell  they're in bed with good Publishers when the main publisher they advertise is Ubisoft boosteroid is  another option which seems to be geared towards the EU Market you can get it in the US but even  the pricing is in Euro but this €750 a month is the only pricing I can find so that could just  be powered by a couple of hamsters in a running wheel and then the final one pricing wise I'm  going to look at is this ant stream which is like a retro game streaming one which makes the least  sense of all of these to me because you can play retro games on a thermostat surely the point of  cloud gaming is giving you access to really beefy Hardware but maybe not everybody knows about the  ew and they're kind of banking on that the point is there are a lot of services all of which have  different game libraries so if you really heavily invest in game streaming you could end up in the  same situation that anybody that watches TV now is in where you have to rent several of  these Services a month just to get to play all the games you want to play and I would rather eat my  own eyelids than have another bunch of companies trying and bleed me dry every month I come the  world's most succulent leech host but maybe I'm wrong maybe that is super fun so with that let's  try out some of these Services I even bought a dedicated bit of game streaming Hardware which  seems like a really stupid idea but let's check it out the hardware in question is this Logitech  Cloud which may look like a steam deck competitor but it's more a 6-year-old mid-range tablet with  some joy-cons spliced to it which I guess would be fine if it didn't have the same MSRP as an  OLED Nintendo switch you know a real console it even costs more than an Xbox series s that's  a brave amount for a device that's performance is directly dependent on how close you live to  Jensen's house okay so ergonomically it's a little bit better than a switch because it's got like  these contoured pads on the base build quality wise it's pretty good as you'd hope for theprice ooh you can immediately tell that it doesn't have an OLED in it this is a 1080p 7in IPS display  uh but I guess we're going to have to do some game streaming on it before we can really tell  what it's like so you can go between like a tablet UI or a console UI so we're going to do that cuz  we're testing its game capability now I wanted to start off with GeForce now because I already had  an account but getting its set up on this device was hugely frustrating it kept hanging on pages  and crashing several times which mixed with the weird keyboard ergonomics made for a frustrating  start okay so we we've finally gotten it working oh no I can't really see where I'm driving it's  okay there there is a bit of a delay between like inputs and things happening but for a game like  this it just makes the car feel heavier because it's running at 1080P and the screen is so small  it looks real sharp and detailed when you do look closer you start to see compression artifacts  and stuff but because of the size of the display unless you really get your face in there you don't  really notice that low YouTube video bit rate vibe to the image too much moving over to cyber Punk  again the input lag is kind of noticeable there is that heaviness to the inputs which makes it  feel a bit like you're swimming in in catchup but I don't think cyber Punk makes sense for this form  factor cuz the environments are quite busy and you have to see enemies at like a distance and  stuff I don't know if I'd play cyberpunk like this it doesn't feel great although you can see there  are some high graphic settings happening here and now that I've quit cyberpunk it it's just  crashed after that crash I decided to make a new account so I could try out the free tier ooh now  that we're in the peasant tier we've got a queue for some beats that's exciting luckily despite  a bunch of eager Gamers ahead of us the queueing just took about 3 minutes we have taken a pretty  significant drop from everything pretty much in Ultra down to medium settings so let's see how  much different that looks visually you could tell that it looked maybe a bit worse than the paid  tier but because of the small screen you really had to look out for it more importantly to me the  latency felt pretty much the same as the paid tier the same goes for cyberpunk the Beats mode offers  a very similar experience to the paid tier I then decided to try a game that in my experience works  really well with cloud gaming fortnite fortnite has this weird way of being surprisingly playable  with cloud gaming and it looks good this is better settings than I normally use on a PC cuz  I usually just turn everything to low with epic draw distance input latency it's not not there  uh but I think if you're just doing some casual fortnite gameplay it's fine visually the priority  tier looks better and does run at a higher frame rate but depending on the context it's difficult  to tell the most important thing is that they feel very similar when it comes to things like  input latency a big disadvantage of the free tier is the hourlong session length and if that hour  Runs Out mid fortnite session you're going to get kicked which is pretty Savage but you can start as  many sessions as you want a day you just need to queue between them so if you time your sessions  right you likely won't ever have your session axed right before a big win or whatever and with that I  decided to try out some Xbox game streaming the Xbox cloud gaming was way easier to get running  than GeForce now I just logged in clicked on a game and it worked so interestingly with the Xbox  live streaming service you get a much more conso like gaming experience cuz your graphics are just  quality or performance like that but then when I realized I had to start a fresh Forza account  which involved a 2hour intro cinematic before I could do anything I decided to launch fortnite  instead uh straight off the bat it already looks a lot blurrier than GeForce now but the the moment  I started playing I realized it was blurrier for a reason wao that feels way snappier than GeForce  now Xbox's clearly prioritized input latency over visual Fidelity which makes sense to me I think  that's a worthwhile tradeoff it does have a little bit of a heavy dlss Vibe with some Grandma's  dialup Connection YouTube video compression going on here but it feels really good and  graphic settings wise I'd say it's similar to the paid tier of GeForce now game Library Wise It's  all of the Xbox game pass stuff uh which is pretty extensive and it's included in the subscription I  then tried and failed to get PlayStation's cloud gaming running the best I could get  running was some abominable form of PS link which didn't recognize the controllers in the Logitech  Cloud forcing me to use a touch control interface from Hell gr Turismo 7 was completely unplayable  because of the lack of variability in any of the controls and it required me to have a PS5 running  so I swiftly moved over to a virtual computer cloud gaming service Shadow PC which went very  well wait you have to use the touchcreen like a trackpad it doesn't what that carries over to the  keyboard as well you have to like move the M what I quickly realized that this was not the correct  device to use the streaming service on so I tried a Chromebook instead I'm excited to see how  this super cheap Chromebook handles Shadow a few moments later it's like the two mice are fighting  each other what is happening the moment I brought the mouse settings up in Windows the Phantom Mouse  pointer disappeared leaving a different problem in its wake wa that is an absurd amount of latency  and desync the mouse pointer has a mind of its own and it wasn't just on the desktop where my  mouse pointer felt like it was being routed via usbekistan gaming was equally uncomfortable not  only is the frame rate terrible considering that we're running at 720p with Fidelity FX on it's  got some real issues tracking Mouse movement it feels so deyy in a way I've never experienced  before this is weird I then decided to give it the best possible chance of success by running it on  a gaming system with a 3700k and a 490 in it wait it didn't do any of these checks on the previous  systems this app is completely different on the desktop okay well the weird Mouse desync latency  is gone so that's good but once I launched DOTA the word good quickly melted from my vocabulary  and what makes these dips down to 20 frames per second even more shocking is that this is  by far the most expensive service I've tested so far this costs $44 a month I feel like for $44  you can buy an actual PC that'll run DOTA better than this now an all fness to Shadow PC I think  it's mainly an Enterprise product with some gaming marketing stapled on as an afterthought at least I  hope that's the case cuz wow do you have to pay a lot of money for the worst service in the lineup  now aside from that I spent a lot of time cloud gaming this week on a whole bunch of different  configurations using different services and I kept reaching the same conclusion cloud gaming  shouldn't be seen as a replacement for physical Hardware it's just a way to get longer legs out  of potatoes you happen to have lying around the moment that you're spending $400 for a  lobotomized steam deck you're doing it wrong the same goes for the cloud gaming Services the moment  that they try and charge you a bunch of money for the services don't do it it's not worth it in my  opinion especially considering how unreliable they were and you still need to buy your own games with  a lot of them that's why I really like the free tier of gForce now the hourlong session limit  combined with the queuing for Beats is a bit of a pain in the butt and you get better performance  going up the tiers but latency wise they feel very similar and it can get expensive quite quickly if  you already use your Xbox game pass a lot then yeah give it a try although bear in mind it is  in beta the quality is a little bit iffy and I did lose access to it after that first day of using it  on a final note I did also try one of these little like controller add-ons for your phone with cloud  gaming which worked really well even if it was a bit flimsy I also bought a cheaper one which was  a complete disaster it was Wireless and added its own latency on top of the latency that was  already there so that was basically unusable but this one with a physical connector worked really  well and if anything with my phone in here it gave a better gaming experience than the Logitech cloud  and I already had the phone and with that let me know in the comment section down below what  experiences you've had with cloud gaming if you like the video subscribe to the channel  maybe watch another one a suggestion will pop up in a second and until the next videobye-bye