Cloud gaming makes any computer game playable on a thin client without worrying the hardware requirements as before. It frees players from the need to constantly upgrade their computers as they can now play games that host on remote servers with a broadband Internet connection and a thin client. However, cloud games are intrinsically more susceptible to latency than online games because game graphics are rendered on server nodes and thin clients do not possess game state information that is required by delay compensation techniques.

In this paper, we investigate how the response latency would affect users' experience when playing games on clouds and how the impact of latency on players' experience varies across different games. We show that not all games are equally friendly to cloud gaming. The same degree of latency may have very different impact on a game's quality of experience depending on the game's real-time strictness. We thus develop a model that can predict a game's real-time strictness based on the rate of players' inputs and game screen dynamics. The model can be used to enhance players' experience in cloud gaming and optimize data center operation cost simultaneously.

Yeng-Ting Lee, Kuan-Ta Chen, Han-I Su, and Chin-Laung Lei, "Are All Games Equally Cloud-Gaming-Friendly? An Electromyographic Approach," In Proceedings of IEEE/ACM NetGames 2012, Oct 2012.

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