I tried to play GTAV when the first article came out, and while it wasn't unplayable, the latency was frustrating at best. Driving was futile, and I have a muc, much lower latency to aws than 120ms:
> ping -c 4 sdb.amazonaws.com
PING sdb.amazonaws.com (176.32.102.211) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 176.32.102.211: icmp_seq=1 ttl=239 time=7.35 ms
64 bytes from 176.32.102.211: icmp_seq=2 ttl=239 time=7.51 ms
64 bytes from 176.32.102.211: icmp_seq=3 ttl=239 time=7.11 ms
64 bytes from 176.32.102.211: icmp_seq=4 ttl=239 time=7.15 ms
--- sdb.amazonaws.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.119/7.285/7.512/0.180 ms
7.5 ms of latency will not degrade your gaming experience, I'm pretty sure. If you're gaming at 60 fps, and move your mouse right after a new frame is displayed, the mouse movement won't be visible until the next frame, 16.66 ms later. And 60 fps feels smooth to me.
On my home internet connection, pinging, for example, google.dk gets me a response time of a few milliseconds, and a HTTP GET request for the root URL has the same latency. But if I do a HTTP GET request as part of the search, the latency is much higher.
I think the google.dk/com main page (and probably other heavily visited sites) are cached by ISPs, so that you don't necessarily reach Google when you ping or HTTP GET the root domain, but rather some network cache device between you and your ISP.
So be careful trusting that ping latency necessarily equals HTTP GET latency, or latency for some other request, to a server.
That is weird. It should be worth investigating if you have any other bottle necks that are increasing the latency. Monitors for example, usually have a response time, from input to when you see the image, of around 10-20 ms.
Input > PC > amazon > PC > monitor
Maybe there's something in your PC that is adding to the lag, like a slow software render.
It could also be that the machine answering to the ping is closer due to anycast routing.
Can anyone come up with a practical way to measure the actual lag from input to screen render!? For example using a high speed camera.
The decoding was in hardware, and I have dual amd 7850s, so I don't think that was the issue (and I wasn't trying to run at the full 4k either)
There was a very noticeable input -> display lag, according to telemetry on steam it was ~40ms total, which is fine for a lot of games, but really noticeable and annoying for something like gta. I mean I've played civ5 over vnc before, and 40ms would be a godsend compared to that, but it was still more than playable.
