OnLive will have less lag than consoles

Onlive boss Steve Perlman has defended his cloud gaming company, which sees games run on server farms and fed to players over the internet, from those who say that there's too much lag.

The lag that players typically see in Onlive games is 'very, very close' to the level of lag seen in console games, Perlman told Eurogamer.

'In fact, with some of the improvements you'll see coming out this summer, in a lot of cases it'll get to be less,' said, before going on to explain how Onlive will offer a more lag-free experience.

'Video games today, when they're built for Xbox 360, PS3 or even PC, they have pre-render queues. In order to get as much realism as they can with the processing hardware they have, they introduce multi-frame lag in games. There is some period of delay before the result hits the screen.'

'We're able to compensate for that because we have state of the art servers with very high performance GPUs. A 2005 class Xbox or PS3 game, when you put it on a 2011 class server, we don't have to have that pre-render queue. Instead, we use that time for the network delay. The algorithm keeps getting better and better.'

'We tune the game system from a human perceptual point of view to try to make it so the game plays as good as possible.'

'There are different algorithms used for different games. In fact, there are over a hundred algorithms used for different types of connections, whether it's cable, DLS or fibre... certainly Wi-fi and 3G are different.'

'We don't expect this to displace the people who are hardcore gamers, who really want the maximum performance out of it. We expect this to reach a more mainstream audience and hopefully bring a lot more people into the gaming community than had been there before.'

Onlive will roll out across the UK this autumn, so let us know your thoughts in the forums.