Most interestingly however is the new performance mode on the Xbox Series S. While the game previously was only playable at 30fps, with a dynamic resolution typically resting at around 1296p, the new performance mode drops the resolution significantly, with the lower bound being 720p (with typical performance at 800p). That being said, it appears as though even then performance is not locked at 60fps 100% of the time, though frame rate drops aren't too common.
The question is, to what extent can Cloud gaming services improve? Much has been made of the fact that even with ultra-fast fibre-optic networks, latency will always be an issue. Similarly, lossless video quality requires so much bandwidth (720p60 is well over 100 megabytes per second) that it's not going to be viable on gaming services. Given that video will always be compressed, to what extent can picture quality - which varies dramatically from one instant to the next - get better?
Assassin 720p
The picture quality issue is perhaps the easier aspect to address. At the moment the standard appears to be to transmit a 720p video stream at 60 frames per second using around 5mbps of bandwidth. Having worked extensively with h.264 video - the same system used by Gaikai and OnLive - that seems to be a very low level of bandwidth for a 60FPS stream, and it's safe to say that this encoding technique performs extremely poorly with certain games: playing titles such as Space Marine on OnLive is a pretty hideous experience all told. The bottom line is that the more motion and colour in play, the more bandwidth is required to sustain quality. In short, some games will look great, others will look terrible. 2ff7e9595c
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