HOW WE TEST CLOUD GAMING SERVICES
We dove deep into all of these services to get the best feel for what they’re offering, including getting technical specifications when possible, testing each service in identical locations for comparisons, and trying to get the more subjective perspective of whether it feels good to play.
Our main test location was in Texas on a home Spectrum internet connection with a minimum 400Mbps down and 25Mbps up, and a maximum of about +10 percent for both speeds. Latencies were tested against major server locations for each gaming session to ensure there weren’t any unexpected problems getting in the way there. Geforce Now was the only service that included its own speed testing and troubleshooting tools, so we confirmed that conditions were good there, and then recorded the other speed and latency stats to recreate that connectivity as best we could with the other cloud gaming services for as much consistency as possible.
All of our testing was done on a custom gaming PC with a Ryzen 7 1700X CPU, 32GB of Corsair DDR4-3600 RAM, an EVGA Geforce RTX 3070 8GB XC3 Ultra GPU, and both a 1080p and a 4K monitor. For controls, we used the same Razer Basilisk v2 mouse and Corsair K70 RGB Pro keyboard when relevant, as well as both an Xbox One and a Playstation 4 controller connected to the PC
with USB cables. All tests were done on the Windows 10 Pro 64-bit OS.
Some, but not all, services offer both a web browser interface and a stand-alone Windows application to browse and launch games. All of our tests were done with both when relevant, and our full reviews reference, which seemed to provide the better experience in both browsing and playing. For the web browser access, we tested with both Firefox and Google Chrome with little difference between the two except for Stadia, which calls for Chrome.
When it came to game performance, we were not able to capture accurate frames per second or benchmarking data for every service, so we did not directly measure data for those comparisons. This largely has to do with the obfuscation of information, and the fact that most of the cloud gaming services are running console versions of the games on their platform, meaning much of the PC testing options simply aren’t available for in-game testing. Even if we could do that testing, our performance stats wouldn’t necessarily match anyone else’s since those results would be tied more closely to internet speeds and latency issues, which can depend simply on how far your PC is from a service’s data center.
The feeling of gameplay came down to a handful of tests. Some games are available on multiple services, so we would be sure to play the same game across multiple services to see if things like responsiveness felt the same between them. Additionally, we would specifically pick out games that required what people consider “tight” or quick response controls to play successfully, including various platformers, fighting games, and action RPGS. Additionally, we would compare the cloud gaming experience to just playing the same game locally on the test rig to see if anything did feel notably off. The results are subjective and are likely to be more noticeable for more experienced players, especially in the competitive gaming space.