The OP piqued my interest, so I recently tried a few of these cloud gaming services. This is a long post, but you can skip to the conclusion if not interested in the details. A few notes, before I give my impressions:
- I live in the south of The Netherlands, about 100km from Amsterdam. This place is laden with fibre and it seems like everything is nearby.
- I do not own a gaming computer. Everything is based on my crappy HP Elitebook (work laptop) or my wife's old MacBook Pro (early 2013 model).
- My internet connection is fantastic. I have a 100 mbps fibre connection and I've never heard of capping or throttling on wired internet here.
- I bought a HyperX Cloud Revolver S headset to do audio processing locally (it comes with a small DSP). It is truly exceptional.
- I don't play any multiplayer games, so I can't give any impression about such games.
nVidia Geforce Now
Since this investigation was inspired by the OP, I tried the Geforce Now first. I signed up to the Mac beta and was immediately given access. I do not own many games on Steam, because I haven't played PC games in a very long time (I've been busy with PS4 over the last two years and X-box 360 before that). I tried Skyrim Special Edition, because I own it and I loved Morrowind.
This worked astonishingly well. As in, much better than I expected. I didn't even notice any input lag. Obviously this is hardly important in a game like Skyrim. I don't know exactly where the data centre is located, because they only say Western Europe. The performance is great. I don't know if it is an attribute of the nVidia Grid technology, but the frame rate is high and does not fluctuate by more than 4 FPS. During the Beta this service is free, but the announced price after beta is too expensive in my opinion. My greatest annoyance with this service is its restrictiveness. When you launch it, you see a full screen Steam window from which you can buy and launch games. This means you can't make any changes to the configuration, other than what you can do in Steam.
Parsec + Paperspace - €0.40 per hour and €5 per month for 100GB storage.
Parsec is a company that develops software to stream gaming. Their goal is to minimise latency. They allow you to deploy a Amazon or Paperspace virtual desktop and use it as you would remote desktop. The Amazon option is crazy expensive, but Paperspace launched a new desktop in Amsterdam recently. My latency to Amsterdam is 5ms on speedtest.net. I've played about 20 hours of a heavily modded Skyrim (not special edition, but with ENB running). I can't notice any input lag and the frame rate stays between 30 and 60 FPS. My one annoyance with this service is that they use P4000 Quadro cards for some reason. GTX1080 cards are cheaper and faster. That would be a real winner.
PlayKey - €18 per month for unlimited play between 15:00 and 3:00.
Obviously this subscription is limiting. I played Doom, Hitman and Civilization demos on this service. These were all amazing. Similar to the high and super stable frame rates of Geforce Now, so I am assuming they use similar technology. However, it doesn't allow configuration, similar to Geforce Now. So you can only launch games from Steam, Origin and similar services. For games that don't require modding, I would certainly consider this service. The performance was really amazing and the latency never went over 15ms (this one has a console to show frame rate and latency).
A few other
I tried out the
SimPlay trial. This one seems like a budget option at only €10 per month. It is more like remote desktop though, allowing you to mod and do what you want. Performance was not great though, but that might be because the trial uses the lowest tier hardware.
Vortex Gaming does not have trial so I didn't try it.
Snoost and
PixelStellar are too expensive, so I won't even consider it.
Shadow is an upcoming service by a French company. Their intention is that you buy a cheap custom computer that is specifically made to handle the video compression better. Obviously the computer is also suitable for office related activities.
Remarks
I'm a bit torn about the pay per hour plan. On the one hand it gives great flexibility. I can play a game as much as I want to, then stop my subscription. On the other hand, it sits in the back of your head that every hour costs real money.
For people who play often and consistently, I think the sweet spot is €20 per month. That comes out to €240 per year and €720 over three years. If you take three years as a reasonable upgrade cycle, then €720 over three years is cheaper than buying a gaming PC. Obviously this implies you must still own some computer and screen.
This seems to be quite data intensive. The PlayKey client reports 20 to 30 mbps. If my calculations are correct, this translates to about 10 GB per hour. If you play 40 hours in a month, that is 400 GB only for playing games. I would be happy if it uses double that and gives even better performance, but obviously this will be a consideration for people with data caps.
Conclusion
I will continue using this in the short term. I will most likely complete Skyrim on the Paperspace machine, as I have it set up now. If I spend 200 hours it will cost me €80 to play Skyrim, in addition to the price I paid for the game. Stated like that, it sounds idiotic. However, personal situation should dictate. My work demand fluctuates quite widely. I will most likely become very busy in March again, at which time my gaming PC would just stand idle for a few months, if I owned one. With cloud gaming, I just suspend my subscription while I'm not using it. I do not have to be concerned with hardware depreciation.
This seems rather promising. If a company can deploy the Grid technology (perhaps even the new Volta architecture) and allow you to use it as remote desktop, for €20 per month, then we have a winner I think.
), the Nvidia service will cost you R20754-80 a year.