
Finally, the other thing you need is at least 20Mbps download speed, ideally on a 5GHz WiFi connection.Īny form of cloud gaming is sensitive to latency, so the lower the latency of your connection, the better the experience. Since rebranding to Xbox Cloud Gaming, games are now streamed at up to 1080p and 60fps. When Xbox Cloud Gaming was called Project xCloud, it streamed games at 720p resolution and 30 frames per second (fps). For certain supported games, save data is synced, so you can pick up where you left off the last time you played. If you remain inactive for too long, the session will automatically exit, otherwise you can play for hours (some users report a stream ending after four or five hours).

There’s an ever-so-slight delay for controller inputs being sent to the Xbox streaming console and those inputs reflected on your screen. Assuming you have a stable connection and low latency, controller inputs are sent to the streaming Xbox console as the game downloads. In my tests, it takes around 10 seconds to load a game, which means you’re looking at the typical game intro videos before hitting the main menu. When you choose a game to play on Xbox Cloud Gaming, it sends a request to start the game on an available Xbox console that’s at the nearest Microsoft Azure server stack.

Xbox Cloud Gaming works a lot like streaming video with some extra steps.
