Boosteroid is one of the most popular cloud gaming services operating in North America and Europe. Like GeForce NOW, it allows you to play games you already own on PC game stores like Steam, Epic, Ubisoft Connect using their high-end hardware in the cloud. You can stream HD (and soon 4K) games directly to your TV, phone, laptop, etc.
Boosteroid has one of the slicker interfaces around, particularly on the web, where you can access and play your games in any browser. They recently also updated their network test (a must-have feature for any cloud gaming service), and the interface is now particularly good.
What’s New
As soon as you hit “Start” on the test, you are now presented with a map showing all of Boosteroid’s datacenter locations around the world. The map then zooms in on your closest location as shown in the screen capture below:
For many cloud gaming services, the location of the available data centers is a complete mystery. With Stadia, for example, it was never clear exactly where your connected server was located. GeForce NOW, at least, has a status page that lists all their data center locations and capabilities and lets you manually specify a location in settings.
For myself (located in the San Francisco Bay Area), you can see the closest location is Seattle. This isn’t particularly close, which perhaps explains why my connection stats – which display next – aren’t particularly great.
You can that, from my home, I’m seeing an added latency of 36 ms. This isn’t awful. It’s low enough to be more than performant enough for most games, but it is also not ideal.
Kudos to Boosteroid
While, for myself, having the closest server located up in Seattle isn’t ideal, I want to give major major kudos to Boosteroid for being so transparent about this in their new network test. While your home network is likely the biggest factor in the quality of your cloud gaming experience, your location relative to the available data centers is another important factor. Too many services leave the locations of their data centers opaque to their customers.
I hope others now adopt a network-test interface similar to Boosteroid’s.
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