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Even with Sony's confident $380 million buyout of Gaikai and the upcoming PlayStation 4 tie-in, cloud gaming remains a dubious prospect for core gamers. The performance of tech pioneer OnLive highlights the hitherto unresolved challenges: video compression kills image quality and input lag remains an issue. But what if we told you that OnLive has recently transformed significantly - for the better?A recent update to the service - which arrived without any kind of fanfare - brings about serious enhancements to the service, for the time being available in the PC client only. There are new options including the ability to scale up image quality bandwidth up to 12mbps, plus there's a v-sync toggle and low-latency screen modes. The former is a huge boon to gamers with faster connections especially, but are these extras truly enough to put the image quality and latency issues to rights?
With this higher bandwidth setting open for use, we thought we'd see just how much of a leap it represents over the standard 5mbps rate. A 12mbps connection should go a long way towards alleviating macroblock artifacting issues common to OnLive, but considering the h.264-encoded stream is relaying a full 60FPS signal for most games, is this enough to produce a consistently smooth image? Utilising a fibre-optic line offering a download speed of 60Mbps, we play through a range of fast-moving shooters, fighters and racers to get an idea of where the changes come into effect.
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