DF - PS Game Streaming Vs XCloud Streaming Showdown

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XCloud "simply does not compete with Sonys offering"

"There's an extra twist to this too. Not only is the video stream lower quality on Xbox's cloud gaming service, but users are being served the Xbox Series S versions of each game I tested - despite confirmation from Microsoft that xCloud datacentres are built on Series X silicon."

"In visual settings, frame-rate, and functionality then, the Xbox Cloud Gaming version of Requiem is a fingerprint match for an Xbox Series S. In truth the setup here is little disappointing if you're playing on a Series X machine. The Xbox cloud experience not only suffers fram additional compression, but the content itself is not representative of the visuals or performance you'd expect from a local Series X install. As a way to sample the game ahead of installing it, we're not getting the 'full-fat experience' in the way you will with PlayStation Plus streaming."

"The frame-rate-reading is identical between a native Series S install and Xbox cloud here. Likewise, its visual settings for shadows, textures, and alpha effects are a match. By contrast, if we swap over to an equivalent test of PS Plus cloud streaming, there are identical results on a local PS5 install versus the Sony cloud - which translates to 20fps lead on PlayStaiton Cloud versus xCloud, alongside a higher resolution and improved visual settings. Again, it's no contest."

"So, Xbox Cloud Gaming has an issue then - and it doesn't just afflict third-party titles, as Halo Infinite and Gears 5 also run at lower internal resolutions (1080p and 900p respectively) when streamed via the cloud. In both cases, these are lower figures than what we'd expect from true Series X hardware. Added to that, there appears to be a bug with the Xbox service on occasion, causing a 30fps cap with uneven frame pacing to appear regardless of game. In the case of A Plague Tale Requiem and Back 4 Blood, the first times we launched each game over cloud triggered erratic, choppy performance - thankfully fixed with a reboot of the game. PS Plus cloud streaming had no such issue: in every case we were met with a PS5-equivalent experience, at least before video compression and latency are taken into account."

They both look like theyre streaming PS3 games. Pass on this trash.

^^This guy doesn't appreciate braid rendering lol

Those results are surprising. I would expect Sony's service to struggle more.

I'm surprised they didn't do this before, but maybe it's because streaming isn't popular or desirable compared to local gaming.

I was under the impression that XCloud was the industry "leader" in this space. I give other folks a hard time for falling for PR hype, but I guess I'm guilty of it here. For the company that's taking streaming "seriously," I'm shocked at how bad XCloud is performing against the competition.

@ghostofgolden: The discrepancy has been mentioned before but maybe nobody pays attention because not many care about streaming. The marketing is probably louder than the few people who have experience with streaming, and Sony is pretty bad at marketing.

Okay, so now the history of the PS streaming service in a nutshell. Sony bought Gaikai a pre baked service and developed that into PS Now. It was a much easier job.

MS built their service from scratch and was still in beta the last time I checked.

No one claimed or expected the Xbox Cloud service to be as good as PlayStations yet. It has incrementally improved over the last couple of years. It still has quite a way to go. It's not finished.

It's still in beta. You created your own perception. If you've used it you'd know there is weaknesses and it's unfinished.

Its just wasted bandwidth at this point trying to stream in high resolution when the vast majority of users are on phones and tablets.

Higher bitrate? Sure, but you don't need high resolution/fidelity graphics on a tiny screen.

Stability and latency are far more important in streaming

Another dishonest post from the Clown Prince of System Wars.

I am shocked.

Still waiting on all those 4K/60 games you told us about

This is devastating news for all those Xbox gamers who have cloud gaming as a priority and even more devasting to all the gamers who were banking on cloud gaming. Absolutely devastating.😔

I've used xcloud gaming on my phone and laptop; it seems to work well enough.. haven't tried PS streaming so i can't speak to that..

i do know that all new Xbox 1st party titles (and basically any game that joins Game Pass) is stream-enabled while PlayStation has "select titles" available for streaming.. maybe that's a factor..

but the sheer amount of cloud content available along with the higher number of subscribed users is what makes Xbox the "industry leader" in cloud gaming (not to mention the fact that Microsoft owns Azure).. though it is clear that improvements can be made to quality.. losing a head-to-head to PlayStation is surprising indeed..

The video mentioned that the difference is mainly because MS is subdividing Series X hardware to serve multiple users, and that the streaming is capped at 1080p. That is due to the amount of resources dedicated to each stream, and not the maturity of the technology used.

If you're considering the maturity of the tech, MS was responsible in helping to develop some of the earlier variable bitrate streaming with graceful fallback for network congestion. MS has also been developing streaming tech since 1993 and have been using streaming since 1996 with NetShow. They have also been involved in content delivery network solutions. They also owned Skype since 2011 used for realtime communications.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "amount of cloud content available"?

That's honestly surprising...and embarrasing for MS. They should be better at this.

Microsoft is clearly not giving a damn what's happening with their Xbox division. All their focus is on ai, and they couldn't give a crap if the next Halo game is as disappointing as Halo 5 and Infinite.

@ghostofgolden said:

Article

XCloud "simply does not compete with Sonys offering"

Oh DAMN! I thought MS was supposed to be better at this. This should by all accounts be their bread and butter, and getting shown up by Sony... again.

But that doesn't mean that it's good enough and the infrastructure is good enough for something like this. Nothing pushes that technology harder than this.

@HalcyonScarlet: Maybe it's possible that they have been inferior at developing their network technology compared to the competition. But they're still subdividing hardware to serve multiple users and while the Xbox Series X can stream gameplay in 4k at 60fps, they are capping the resolution for xCloud.

i explained it in the previous sentence..

"i do know that all new Xbox 1st party titles (and basically any game that joins Game Pass) is stream-enabled while PlayStation has 'select titles' available for streaming.."

for example, Starfield was available for cloud streaming on Day One of release (with no need to own the console).. correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't believe i was able to stream Spiderman 2 to my phone or PC on it's launch day (outside of remote play)..

Xcloud is still in beta, it is faster than PS cloud streaming that has more lag. You have to use the PS5 console meaning you can't use it on any other device like you can on Xcloud. Also xcloud is more scaleable, PS cloud will have longer wait times. Still it's impressive of Sony to outdo Microsoft in online area. GeForce Now destroys all in streaming though.

I really wish DF used GeForce Now in the comparison. It would blow the others out of the water. Especially in the latency category where it's faster than natively running console games.

@Antwan3K: Oh ok, so by "amount of streaming content" you don't mean that in a general sense, but specifically first party launch games. Substituting "Amount of day one first party streaming content" would be accurate?

@ghostofgolden: Maybe that will be next? It sounds like a good idea. Also comparing remote play on various platforms.

wait, this is just the console streaming?..

what about streaming to other devices like mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and smartTVs?.. y'know all the places where streaming truly matters?..

sure, people do use console streaming to try out a game before downloading but, typically, people just play natively from the consoles..

that said, it's definitely not a good look for Xbox when another gaming platform has better quality streaming than a Microsoft owned company; no matter the endpoint..

i'd wager that ensuring new games like Hellblade II, Indiana Jones, and the upcoming Call of Duty are cloud-enabled on Day One is more relevant in terms of streaming content than a library of PS1/PS2 classics..

so yeah, in general, Xbox is providing the larger amount of new streaming content when compared to PlayStation.. is that accurate enough for you?..

@Antwan3K: I do understand the scope of what you're saying now.

I used the highest tier of GeForce Now last year just to test it out. I was mightily impressed, I could've been fooled I was playing on real local hardware it was so smooth. It's so good I've not used the Xbox Streaming as part of my Xbox Ultimate. Xbox just isn't in the same league.

I am glad I made the jump to cow life.

They had to develop it at a different rate than Gaikai. Xbox is suddenly trying to reach everyone at once which is much more ambitious. Gaikai didn't have to do that, so by the time Sony got it and they developed it further... Xbox built the whole thing from scratch with little experience in the area and then expanded it all the way. And they still have a long way to go.

@HalcyonScarlet: Interesting, do you have a link to more information about that?

It's more of a time line thing, so when you consider when Gaikai came to be and their history, then the history after Sony bought it.

I think we take the history of it all for granted.

@HalcyonScarlet: How did you find out about this stuff? It might be interesting to have more details so that people don't take it for granted.

So Gaikai was founded in 2008 and it's tech was somewhat ready by 2010, but it was more website based. Sony bought the company in 2012.

PS Now came out at the end of Jan 2014 in the US, UK March 2015, EU April 2016 and Japan September 2017 and has been developing since.

Xbox had the idea of cloud gaming in 2016, and teased the idea of the service in 2018. A preview version came out in 2019. The service launched in September 2020 and is now available in 28 countries.

Which is kind of nuts. Sony's plan of bringing the service out in fewer countries slowly, was better because it it allowed them to get it right region by region. Where as Xbox is trying to reach way too many, over a shorter period of time.

Xbox Cloud Service started out with Xbox One S server blades in 2020, but by June 2021, they began transitioning to Series X server blades.

In theory consider the pressure was different for Sony. From 2014, ten years ago, people had less access to high performance online capabilities, so demand would have been lower during their development period. Now a lot more people have access to higher performance broadband.

So MS launched in 28 countries to potentially a lot more demand on the services. It actually explains a lot to me as to why it's still in beta and why the quality isn't always great.

I remember initially Xbox cloud gaming was website based on the PC, which meant no force feedback. Then they started building it into Windows and Xbox Series OS. I have fibre optic broadband 400Mbit, 3 or 4 ms ping. And the last time I tried the service, it still was random as to whether I'd get good performance. I'll give it to PlayStation. Last time I used their service, it was more reliable. But... A beta service is a beta service.

Who said we accepted you? Sorry, but we're rejecting your Cow Visa. Go back to your Green Land.

What with Xbox and their obsession with L. This is literally one area that lems and xbox parasocial club on twitter keep on highlighting as xbox advantages but somehow it also turns out xbox inplementation of cloud suck ass.

Also pretty on brand of Sony having superior tech but not doing enough with it. They could have marketed PS+ streaming on TV and mobiles but nope. PSVR2 awesome product... not enough support. Playstation vue literally best multichannel app... killed it. PS5..... where 1st party games!?.

My mom said I could be whoever I want to be. I chose to be a cow.

Yep resident clown indeed. Xcloud I believe is capped at 1080p and basically prioritizes smoothness over everything else, not 4k output. And honestly that makes 100% sense...because as of right now the only real way to play these games streamed is on a phone or a tablet or if you have an Xbox one. Most people stream it through their mobile device, me for example the only place I will stream cloud is on my steam deck with an 8 inch screen, let that sink in. There is a use case for cloud and the majority of people using it will be using on their mobile devices.

During peak times cloud does get congested, and there is actually a waiting time for popular games. Some cases I had to wait up to 5mins even 10 mins.

Finally got around to actually watching the full video. I believe DF have already looked at the performance of the paid GeForce Now Service, and It wouldn't be fair to compare with these two because for the most part GeForce Now requires you to own the games you want to play on it.

But clearly, compared to PS+ Cloud, Xbox Cloud is a bit shit....

this is gamer bros testing stuff.

they straight up dont know anything about.

both on reddit and comment on video .

call out how much of a joke of the people doing the testing.

I'm a bit surprised, but Sony's been working on streaming since PS3. Maybe I shouldn't be.

@HalcyonScarlet: That's a shame for Microsoft. It's too bad their resources, and experience in networking and helping develop streaming technologies and compression with graceful fallback, were not enough to help here. I guess a lot of their marketing and pushes around xCloud were not well timed with the state of the service. I wonder why MS highlighted this so much when not many people even want to use streaming currently. At least streaming isn't forced like with some games on the Switch.

Thanks for your insight on the subject, I appreciate you writing all that to help me understand, and hopefully others will be more aware too.

Utterly embarrassing for MS lol. I don't care about streaming tbh, I saw the DF video on YT video and I immediately expected a clear victory for MS.

But Sony just dominated them. Wow.

its not a victory, since sony is playing in the little leagues. MS has a humongous audience of cloud gamers that makes the small audience of sony look utterly pathetic. By the way, MS owns the servers that sony uses to stream their games, so there is THAT.

MS made 1080p cloud gaming standardized...there is no need for anything better for cloud gaming. The priority is simply low latency, and smoothness. DF needs to check their privilege at the door. They might have a super fast internet connection, but majority of people can't support 4k bandwidth over wifi. MS is thinking about everyone, the little guy.

Wtf are you blabbering about? MS is a two trillion dollar company and they are getting their ass kicked by a company worth 20x less in an industry they were supposed to dominate.

This is maximum cope 🤣

Excuses from Xbox peeps, what else to expect

@silentchief: none of that is cope, it's just us lems defending the truth from the resident clown on system wars. We lems have no problem entering shitty threads like this one to do that.

Maximum cope would be the cows staying far away from the thread about Sony abandoning psvr2, or the other one about the Sony layoffs.

Interesting. I don't see this fanboy side of you come out often. What's got you triggered today?

Geez, people playing SW BS over streaming🤦‍♂️

We should all be united on this crap and hope they all fail with it. If this goes great, the next thing you know your console will become an app on your tv that you click on to stream games from.

See this is the thing lots of people don't understand, I'm not a blind fanboy. I can look at things objectively. For someone who couldn't give two shits about streaming this is an area Microsoft should be dominating in. I personally hope streaming becomes nothing more then an optional alternative.