Thoughts on XBOX Game Streaming on a Chromebook

Hi all. I'm copying this from the where I originally posted it on the ChromeOS community. Not sure if it belongs here or if anyone would find it interesting, but thought I would share...

I'm not much of a gamer at all. In fact, I decided to sell my Xbox as it has been gathering dust for the last couple of years. But as I was listing my XBOX on eBay, I started wondering what the state of cloud gaming is these days, and if I could - if the hankering (and the time) arose in the future - do some casual gaming on my Lenovo Duet Chromebook (low specs - ARM CPU, 4GB RAM). So I did a quick bit of Googling and (from what I can tell) the only service currently available in Australia is XBOX Game Streaming. It's currently in "Beta", but I thought I would sign up and try it out - mostly out of curiosity.

So I downloaded the Android app on my Duet and picked a random game which looked interesting (Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice). I played it for about an hour, and I have to say - I was super impressed! The game was really, really smooth and there were 0 glitches. The graphics were actually pretty amazing! Like I say - I'm no "gamer" so maybe I'm easily impressed, but I really thought it looked better than on my Xbox. Certainly better than it would look playing locally on my pretty old and limited desktop PC.

I uploaded a few short vids taken from my phone when I was at the very start of the game. Unfortunately, I quickly got a bit to involved in the game to bother after that! Every so often at the start there was a sort of a horizontal refresh. You can see it on one of the vids. It didn't actually bother me and it didn't cause any lag or anything. Either it stopped happening or I stopped noticing it, because I didn't really see it once I got into the game.

But the game itself was really responsive. There were a few scenes when you had to fight the baddies and do fancy combos and dodging (which I sucked at) I didn't feel any lag at all. The controller was really responsive. Once I got the hang of the combos I could more or less beat the easy guys!

Overall I was actually blown away that I could play what seems to be a pretty graphics-intensive game on the Duet streaming from the cloud. I have no idea what the other services are like (NVidia, Stadia etc) because they don't seem to be available in Australia. But the Xbox one seems pretty cool at 1st glance. Even though it is an Android app, it worked perfectly. It was full screen and super responsive.

Part of the reason I basically never play games is I find it a pain and limiting that I have to turn on my TV and Xbox, sit in my living room, download a million updates before I can even start, then I have to buy or download any game I want to play. I'm fairly time-limited and only really have maybe an hour or so at night if I want to play a game. Usually I find that by the time I get all setup, my gaming window is over!

With this, I can just sit in bed while my wife is watching a show, turn it on and begin a game where I last left off in minutes. I think I'll subscribe to this service if it's not too much per month. I can see myself playing a lot more often this way. Normally, I just watch a 1 hour show in bed, but I could get in an hour of playing a cool game instead. Maybe I'll be a gamer yet!

Anyway, this is already too long, but I thought someone might be interested. I'm just really impressed that it was not only possible to play what I assume is an A+ title on this little under-powered device - but that it worked so well!

Links to videos: https://imgur.com/a/xbYQOLh

submitted by /u/thespoook
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