Only 4ms of extra latency between Halo 5 on Xbox and xCloud

One of the hurdles for streamed gaming is the lag that can sometimes occur. There will be a slight delay from your press of a button to when something eventually happens on-screen. Microsoft claims to have a superior technology for its upcoming service, xCloud, and Ars Technica decided to find out at E3 if that claim has any truth to it.

And it turns out it has. Through three tests with Halo 5: Guardians running on a Samsung Galaxy S8, it took 67 milliseconds of lag between the press of the A-button until the game responded. As a comparison, the same game has 63 milliseconds input latency when rendered locally on an Xbox One console.

It should be noted that we don't know how far away the xCloud servers used are from the E3 event (San Francisco, we think, but we can't say for sure) and Microsoft has, of course, made sure it works in the best possible way. Still, these are of course very impressive numbers that show that responsive streamed gaming should be possible in theory.