Technology
What is between your controller and the frame
A full stack of specific engineering choices, most of which exist to remove milliseconds.
Decisions worth explaining
AV1 where the client supports it
At the same perceptual quality, AV1 costs about 30% less bitrate than H.265, which matters enormously on a constrained domestic line. Hardware encode keeps the latency cost under a millisecond.
QUIC datagrams, not TCP
Unreliable datagrams with our own loss concealment. A lost packet degrades one slice of one frame instead of stalling the stream while TCP retransmits.
Whole GPUs
Time-slicing a GPU between two players produces exactly the kind of frame-time variance that makes cloud gaming feel bad. We do not do it, and it is why our per-hour cost is what it is.
Client-side prediction where it helps
Mouse-look is predicted locally and reconciled, which removes the sensation of drag in first-person games without affecting what the server sees.