TL;DR: With Cloud Gaming a game runs on a computer in the internet. Your input signals are sent to that computer, whereas the video is sent back to your local device.
In addition to our explanation of Cloud Computing we'd like to talk about another famous term nowadays, which is Cloud Gaming. The principle is simple: a game runs on a computer in the internet, instead on your local device. Input signals are sent to the game and the video signal is sent back to the device you’re playing on.
Hardware requirements
Therefore certain hardware requirements a game has or even platform requirements, like PC, Xbox, PlayStation, etc. are eliminated. The device you’re playing on just needs to be able to connect to a game controller (or has one already built-in), and be powerful enough to receive the video signal, which modern phones, tablets and else are.
Quality of your internet connection is key
The most important factor of Cloud Gaming is, of course, your internet connection. And that's in terms of quality (latency or ping) not necessarily ability (bandwidth). What that means is, your input signals need to be sent to the game almost instantly without any delay, so that the game can process these, and send back the video signal. By design this entails latency but you want it to be as low as possible. In regards to bandwidth (the amount of data you're able to receive/send), an internet connection speed of 10 megabits per second (Mbps) or greater is the minimum recommended to play at up to 1080p resolution.
In preparation to one of our next blog posts, a comparison of current Cloud Gaming Services, we'd like to invite you to check out "Shadow PC": a fully-fledged Windows 10 PC in the Cloud.
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Photo by Muha Ajjan on Unsplash
