Xbox Cloud Gaming in New Zealand

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freitasm

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#296349 10-Jun-2022 08:57

Xbox Cloud Gaming Now Available in New Zealand (geekzone.co.nz)

Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) begins rolling out later today so you can soon play Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon 5, and Tunic directly from the cloud with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription on iOS devices, Android phones and tablets, Windows PCs, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One consoles. In a few weeks, you’ll be able to play on Samsung smart TVs without a PC or console.

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#2924577 10-Jun-2022 09:08

Interested to know where this is hosted from, any ideas?

freitasm

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#2924579 10-Jun-2022 09:09

No idea and I don't think they will disclose. But I wonder if it will be better once the Azure DC is open for business in AKL.

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st3v3th3p1r4t3

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#2924584 10-Jun-2022 09:19

Been waiting some time for this…

Previously - You could have used a VPN to get around the geo-lock, but the additional lag of going offshore made the experience less than perfect, especially for “fast” games like Forza.

Screenshot of the service working over a 4G connection on 2degrees (on an ancient iPhone 6s).

Video quality is surprisingly good and smooth (the intro is pre-rendered, and less going on than an in game stream - but the encode/decode seems to handle it fine). Maybe at lunchtime I can get some time to test out gameplay, but I don’t have a controller at work…

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#2924586 10-Jun-2022 09:21

Its probably out of Oz at the moment unless they've leased local which most likely won't make sense.. once DC opens in NZ I would expect the performance to improve and it to drop out of beta... I'm gonna test in a bit as I've just started playing origins on my xbox series x so will do a direct comparison.

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#2924587 10-Jun-2022 09:25

Australia East/Central/Southeast most likely. I was expecting this wouldn't be here until the NZ region was live. They're rolling this out game by game are they?

st3v3th3p1r4t3

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#2924593 10-Jun-2022 09:37

Hades has touch based controls. Input lag is perceptible, but IMO acceptable (again, over 4G). I don’t have stadia or Nvidia to compare against - but colour me impressed so far..

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freitasm

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#2924594 10-Jun-2022 09:42

Gaming over 4G (or even 5G) will have some delay due to upload speeds and latency.

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#2924627 10-Jun-2022 10:56

I just had a bit of a play from an Xbox, and granted it wasn't a totally low latency type game (Sea of Thieves) but overall the experience was good. I think it did look a little low res but that may just be that game as I've never played it before. I also had a couple of full screen reloads, which looked like a screen wipe from top to bottom. All up it was pretty good though. If it gets better from here when it moves in to the new DC in AKL then good job.

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#2924629 10-Jun-2022 10:58

apparently next set of improvements (unknown time) will be the ability to play digitally bought games not in game pass... so pretty much a digital xbox in the cloud rather than just a gamespass player.

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#2924641 10-Jun-2022 11:40

Couldn't get Origins to load so had a go on Forza Horizon instead. HP tablet, wired connections, 1Gb fibre. Quality was as to be expected, not great with noticable blocking due to the compression and latency. Controller input was minimal but noticable. Problem will be the rainway tech. Rainway Gaming was never able to produce the same quality as nVidia Gamestream on my PC to PC streaming and I've seen the same on my local Series X stream to local PC.. they need to improve the bitrate and encoder settings generally. Should improve once operated within NZ so was perfectly acceptable but not fantastic... however with that said, game streaming tech always impresses me!

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#2924661 10-Jun-2022 12:22

Benoire:

apparently next set of improvements (unknown time) will be the ability to play digitally bought games not in game pass... so pretty much a digital xbox in the cloud rather than just a gamespass player.

Colour me excited for when this occurs!

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#2924945 10-Jun-2022 22:05

I'm impressed that it's not horrendous. I tried a VPN to Sydney before and it was an unplayable mess and this seems to be a significant improvement over dealing with that with much less blocking of the stream and latency now at a much more acceptable level.

No idea where they are hosting this though, could they have added some blades in a local DC to give us the bets grial until the full MS ones are up and running. Good timing as I just relegated my Xbox one to another room and figured I'd never play it as I can't stand the load times now I have a series s, but suddenly it might not be the Ed in to just a media streamer.

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#2925095 10-Jun-2022 23:19

Tried it now. Noticible reduction in image quality but no blocky artifacts. Perceivable control lag but not as bad as it felt with GeForce streaming on the PC, but it's a controller anyway so it's not as nice.

Quick to launch and means I can get into game pass games and see if it's worth putting time into without a download first.

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#2925294 11-Jun-2022 17:16

Yep just tried it i.e FH5 - and pretty happy TBH.

Loaded up fast, no issues with controller lag and GFX while obv not as good as my local Series X are totally acceptable IMO for a cloud delivered service.

And I am stoked that its effectively "free" ie. built-in as a GamePass Ult subscriber.

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#2925297 11-Jun-2022 17:31

Yes it’s good that we’re finally starting to get feature parity with other regions, ours is no longer just a ‘lite’ version of GPU.

Xbox Design Lab is also now in NZ where you can design your own controller for $120.

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