Highscore is an upcoming cloud gaming service being created by a startup in San Francisco. The team has been promising some fantastic features. The service will let you play your entire Steam catalog. Not just games that “opt in” like with GeForce NOW’s library, but every… single… game. The service also promises unique cloud-gaming features, such as remote couch multiplayer, as well as play suspend and resume to the cloud.
Back in February, I visited the Highscore team at their office in San Francisco and had the opportunity to try a very early build of the service. However, last week, I had the chance to use the upcoming Alpha version of the service from my own office in Oakland.
The experience has left me incredibly excited. You can check out the video above for my hands-on experience. Unfortunately, some of the service’s most exciting features aren’t yet ready to be shared. But, I can tell you at least a little bit about the experience.
Performance is Fantastic
The initial set of Highscore servers are located in a data center in Santa Clara, CA. Being in Oakland, we weren’t far away. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that we were able to achieve solid round-trip ping times. We saw consistent numbers between 15 ms and 25 ms. This is as low as we’ve ever seen when cloud gaming on any service, however.
Highscore has an overlay that displays other sources of latency, as well as other stream statistics.
In my experience, Encode/Decode adds only an impressively low <10ms of latency. That means the entire cloud gaming setup (including round-trip ping) adds just about 30ms of latency on average. I am not able to feel that added latency at all. Games feel as if I’m playing natively – better than natively, actually, because the machine I’m playing on couldn’t play the games at near the quality I was seeing.
The stream itself looks fantastic. I have been playing at an ultra-wide 3440×1440 resolution (which matched my monitor), and the visuals look crystal clear. It is also possible to play at up to 4K resolution with the Alpha service. As shown in the screenshot above, I have been achieving a bitrate between 30 and 40 Mbps.
Where some cloud gaming services significantly compress the image they transmit, you can see in the capture below how clear each blade of grass is in the scene I was playing from Ghost of Tsushima.
Note that Ghost of Tsushima, like all games published by PlayStation, is not available to play on GeForce NOW. But, it is playable on Highscore.
UI/UX That Impresses
I’m not yet able to share the complete Highscore UI/UX with you. But this is easily my favorite part of the experience. Other Cloud Gaming services (e.g., GeForce NOW) have always had a clunky experience, requiring numerous clicks (and sometimes multiple password entries) to access a game. The experience with Highscore feels refined in comparison.
A couple of examples of the UI that I am allowed to share include the game loading screen, individual game pages, and the in-game sidebar, which quickly allows you to control your cloud gaming experience.
Conclusions
In summary, Highscore is looking (and feeling) great! For a pre-Alpha version of the service, I see a ton of potential here. The fidelity of the stream is excellent, matching or surpassing that of industry leaders. But it’s the overall user experience that really stands out to me. To me, this has always been the most critical aspect of a cloud gaming service. Highscore is ready to shine here.
I look forward to more people getting their hands on the service as it enters its public Alpha, Beta, and production releases.
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It sounds very promising! Can’t wait to try it