I played Shadow of the Tomb Raider on 5G, and it was not

Anyone who has experienced a cloud game service knows that wired Ethernet is almost necessary. Wireless? The games may differ somewhat. And by cell? If the game is fast, you are only causing problems. But the cloud game on AT & T's 5G network prototype was actually … awesome?

At the AT & T Spark conference in San Francisco on Monday, I had the opportunity to test Nvidia's GeForce Now service for AT & T 5G PCs, playing the new Shadow of the Tomb Raider game on a generic Lenovo ThinkPad.

The traditional way to run a PC game is locally, to run the game on a hard drive or SSD on your PC, using the processor and the GPU to make the game as fast as possible. The disadvantage, of course, is that you have to buy all this material yourself.

The cloud game makes every image of the game like a Netflix video, streaming to your PC. The tradeoff is that 3D rendering takes place on a remote server, a cheaper solution than buying a high-end graphics card, at least in the short run. But every move of the mouse or every push of a button should be sent to that server, processed and the results returned to your screen.

All this back and forth adds latency, the delay that makes the difference between a reactive action game and one that you give up because of a noticeable lag. (The latency usually depends on the distance between your PC and the server.) According to a Nvidia representative, the first implementations of cloud services such as OnLive have experienced delays of 100 milliseconds or more.

Mark Hachman / IDG

At the AT & T Spark event, an overlay at the top of the tomb Raider screen showed that latencies rarely exceeded 15 ms, resulting in surprisingly smooth gameplay.

Typically, requesting a web page through your phone sends the wireless request to the local cell tower, which then routes it over the standard wired network. What Nvidia and AT & T showed worked a little differently. Instead of a 5G dongle connected to the PC, the signal was sent via Wi-Fi to the local access point, then to the nearest GeForce Now server from Nvidia in Santa Clara, California. The signal was then sent via a Cat5 cable to AT & T's 5G router, via the 5G link, and from there to the Internet (and back to the client PC).

Certainly, we did not have the chance to do more than run around a deserted tomb, to shoot some arrows of our heroine on rats and a skull or two. The real test of a cloud game scenario is what it feels like when you have to quickly react to what you see on the screen. But the overlay also revealed the bandwidth sent to the server, which was very low when the scene was still or slow. But when we turned the mouse in both directions, the overlay revealed that we were sending 30 Mbit / s back and forth. (The game was rendered in 1080p, using high settings.) Again, there was no noticeable lag.

One of the interesting omissions of AT & T's Spark event was the disclosure of the available bandwidth that 5G will bring, even though the company touted its progress in millimeter wave technology and which cities would receive AT & T 5G coverage in 2018 and 2019. (Look for other 5G ads later this week, while the Mobile World Congress show starts in Los Angeles.) would bring.

What does it mean for you: It's hard to believe that consumers will end up playing cloud rendering versions of Fortnite on a small laptop like the Surface Go on the way to work, even if everything works as expected – and the demonstrations are Assumed to work as advertised. Real life, especially with regard to cellular connections, often does not do it. Nevertheless, we have been able to hope that AT & T (and probably other operators) are not only concerned with bandwidth, but with a fast and responsive network connection. It's something we can support.