You know, I was typing out a summation to show you that the latencies would only cause a frame or two of lag at 60 fps, but it's a lot easier if you just go try it yourself.
Go download Steam on 2 computers, find a free demo or something, and turn on the In-home streaming feature. Press F6 to see the latency chart. Now add your 5ms input lag and a 10ms video serialization lag. The rest of the technology stack is pretty much the same.
With my NVidia graphics card encoding and my Haswell GPU laptop decoding, the lag at home over wifi is only 12ms.
It's definitely not a "physical impossibility" to do this over the internet if your ping is 5ms.
Who the hell has a 5ms ping? Most home connections are DSL or coax, both adding lots of overhead and latency. DSL/VDSL is especially bad. My u-verse ping to the nearest cdn mirror was something like 20-25ms. My work comcast is slightly better with a 10-12ms to a local cdn. When I had residential comcast, I had probably double that. And that's ignoring all the overhead Onlive puts in.
Sadly, onlive would probably clean house in the age of to the home fiber. Maybe 5 or so years from now that service would be more common, at least for gamers. This, of course, means that Onlive would have to deploy servers to every 5-10ms distance. So your typical metro region would be broken down into a few dozen zones, each with its own onlive server, game library, etc. It sounds like a cost nightmare.
I think the onlive guys said that 50-150ms is doable for most games and sold a service that worked well with non-FPS games. The problem is, gamers are FPS obsessed and that level of latency is a killer. That's on top with games being cheaper than ever. A plain-jane PC can get on Steam and buy on-sale games for next to nothing.
> The problem is, gamers are FPS obsessed and that level of latency is a killer.
Console games typically have a minimum possible input lag of 60ms, and once you add in the controller response time, TV refresh rate, and the design of the game's engine, it's common to have 100ms or higher. For example Destiny on PS4 has a minimum input latency of 100ms ( http://www.displaylag.com/destiny-lag-factor-review/ )
Point is, consistent input latency is much less noticeable than people seem to think. When people complain about lag they're usually complaining about spikey/inconsistent lag. Consistent 150ms is not a killer. There are billion dollar games that have shipped with worse.
I think the problem is that if I'm playing a FPS on Onlive and playing against you, say in Counter-Strike, and I have an extra 150-200ms lag and you don't, then I lose. Coop and multi-player play in Onlive sounds terrible.
For single player games, yeah, you're right, a person can handle 100ms or so, but that's mostly because he isn't playing against anyone else and the game is designed to handle 100-150ms delay. It can handle an extra 100ms or so from Onlive without too many issues. Its not pretty, but it works well enough.
I do agree that spikes and lost packets are the most noticeable issue, but even if you eliminate or minimize those, you still have the coop delay problem.
Ideally they would only group Onlive players with other Onlive players. Just like it's very rare to have console users playing with PC users, because the console players get slaughtered.
Go download Steam on 2 computers, find a free demo or something, and turn on the In-home streaming feature. Press F6 to see the latency chart. Now add your 5ms input lag and a 10ms video serialization lag. The rest of the technology stack is pretty much the same.
With my NVidia graphics card encoding and my Haswell GPU laptop decoding, the lag at home over wifi is only 12ms.
It's definitely not a "physical impossibility" to do this over the internet if your ping is 5ms.