Glossary
Cloud gaming, demystified
30 terms you'll see across our reviews and guides, explained without marketing fluff.
B
- Bitrate
- How much data the encoder spends on each second of video.
- Buffer overrun
- When a streaming client receives data faster than it plays back.
C
- Click-to-photon latency
- Time from input on the controller to the corresponding pixel changing on screen.
- Codec
- The algorithm that compresses video on the server and decompresses it on your device.
E
- Edge
- A data center physically close to you that runs the streaming session.
- Encoder latency
- Time the server spends compressing a rendered frame before sending it.
F
- Frame pacing
- How evenly successive frames are displayed.
G
- Game catalog
- A curated, subscription-included list of games (the 'Netflix' model).
H
- H.265 / HEVC
- A video codec that delivers H.264 quality at roughly 50% the bitrate.
I
- Input lag
- Often used interchangeably with click-to-photon latency.
J
- Jitter
- Variation in network latency from packet to packet.
L
- Latency
- Generic term for any delay; in cloud gaming usually means click-to-photon.
N
- Network RTT
- The round-trip time for a network packet between your device and the server.
P
- PWA
- Progressive Web App — a website that installs like a native app.
R
- Reflex / Anti-Lag
- GPU vendor technologies that reduce the render queue depth, lowering input lag.
- Refresh rate
- How many frames per second your display shows.
- Resolution
- How many pixels make up the streamed image.
- Rollback netcode
- A technique that compensates for network delay in fighting and racing games.
S
- Server-side render
- The cloud GPU draws each frame on your behalf.
- Sub-streaming (subset)
- Streaming a subset of a game (e.g. demos, time-limited trials).
T
- Throughput
- Actual sustained data rate, as opposed to peak burst speed.
- Tier
- A subscription level within a service.
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- What cloud gaming actually costs you over years, not months.
V
- VRR (Variable Refresh Rate)
- Display tech that matches refresh rate to incoming framerate.
W
- Waiting room
- A queue applied to free-tier cloud gaming users at peak times.
- WAN jitter
- Jitter on the wide-area network (your ISP and beyond).
- WebRTC
- The browser technology most cloud gaming services use to deliver low-latency video.
- Wi-Fi 6 / 6E
- Two recent Wi-Fi standards that materially improve cloud gaming on wireless.
Y
- Yield
- How well a service degrades when the network gets worse.
Z
- Zero trust gaming
- An anti-cheat philosophy that's broadly incompatible with cloud streaming.