Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective got his hands on a coveted OnLive beta invite, the widely discussed but incredibly secretive remote gaming service, and put it through the paces on a few popular games and wrote up the experience. He was, sadly, unimpressed.
The games were running at 1280 by 720, and the expected issues became reality. “The input lag on UT3 was so noticeably bad with the mouse and keyboard that I would call [the] game simply unplayable. I often found myself overshooting the mouse movement by half a screen, moving well past my intended target because the cursor didn’t stop when I did.”
It’s worth pointing out that he did not receive the beta invite via official channels, rather via the age old ‘friend of a friend’. This is important since OnLive has long said that they would deploy multiple gaming centers, to maintain the required proximity to the end-user, and he may have been too far away, resulting in his degraded performance. In fact, it even warned him via the image shown to the right.
Guess we’ll just have to wait for a real review on an official invite.
PS: If any OnLive folks are reading, I’ld be happy to take one 🙂
OnLive Game Service Preview, via OnLive demoed: lag, graphics are a problem.
