Depends on the game. I think I'm more sensitive to latency (less able to compensate) than most people. I couldn't enjoy playing Titanfall until I put my Samsung TV in game mode; I would just get hit and couldn't do anything about it playing League of Legends on my gaming laptop with a 4K monitor, but when I hooked up an external monitor, mirrored the screen, and ran a clock, I took photos showing my laptops' screen was behind by 30 ms. I started playing on an external monitor and started to win. I even found I had a hard time with some 1 player games such as Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet if I didn't run in game mode.
On the other hand, I went through a phase where I did a lot of streaming from my PC to a NVIDIA Shield and an XBOX. Sometimes through wired Ethernet, something through an airMAX microwave link to my other house. Games like Persona 5 and Orcs Must Die 3 were just fine, but I could not play any Rhythm games, which I have a knack for, High-Fi Rush was no fun at all.
My kid plays fortnite using home streaming to an xbox, and says he doesn't notice the latency. I do the same on an Asus ROG Ally, and it's "good enough". I am not a competitive FPV player, but suffer from OCD and notice latency and it tweaks me hard.
I'm playing single player games via Parsec and the latency feels fine. Moonlight is tolerable but Steam streaming feels terrible for some strange reason. This is running two Wifi 6 devices so nothing is even wired. I often use a controller connected to my laptop, or even better use the wireless controller, connect that to the physical device then you bypass the controller latency and only the video has a lag, which is kind of a neat trick if you're close enough to the computer you're streaming from.
The only sorts of games I can't play are things like Binding of Isaac that are super dependent on reaction speeds, but even games like Elden Ring feel fine.
Sunshine on the server and moonlight on the client blows steam link out of the water in terms of latency. Even on my home network with everything on ethernet, steam link would stutter. I sometimes forget I am not directly connected to a computer while on the couch.
Did clicking on the Rent my PC tab really try to benchmark my GPU through my browser, or did I accidentally click another button on that page inadvertently that triggered that?
If the former, that's a terrible idea. If the latter, that button really needs a confirmation and explanation of what's about to happen.
I'm viewing on an Intel Mac and it hung my entire computer for like 15 seconds. I didn't even connect that it was related to viewing your site until I got the error at the end and everything unfroze.
It does. Sorry about the experience, we will try to improve it.
Having user confirm it is not a good option, because every click is a hassle.
What we could do is first run a very short version of a smaller benchmark, and if that takes too long, don't run the main one. Then the worst case you will have a 100ms lag at this point, which is way better than 5 seconds of reading.
It's a neat feature, I just think it'd be ideal to do a confirmation first. It wouldn't be a great experience if it happened on mobile, either.
Every click is a hassle, but principal of least astonishment applies here. Literally not a soul will be expecting that to happen when casually browsing your site.
What does utilization look like? I would be interested in running this on a spare machine but it's not clear how large the potential audience of renters may be in my area.
Right now the utilization is low (< 10%), but in the effort to prop the providers side the company is footing the bill and paying for availability approximately 50% of what the benchmark on the page tells you. This is a rather common strategy for bootstrapping any two-sided market.
