I have followed the original instructions and after a couple days of tinkering around it is now my go-to service for gaming. I can play AAA titles on my mac without having them consume precious SSD space nor does the computer get anywhere as hot as when I was running them in bootcamp. The cost is quite affordable when making your own AMI with Steam and everything preinstalled. Since booting the machine and setting everything up takes around 10 minutes I also don't get tempted to play when I would have to work. It is a much more conscious decision. I only had to get an ethernet cable because wifi was too flaky. But now it is very solid with a 50M DSL line and average ping of 60ms to Ireland.
I, too, followed the original instructions and played the Witcher 3 and Ark: Survival Evolved via my mac against an AWS instance on the frankfurt datacenter. This was in Vienna which means that the average ping was around 40ms.
It was a fun little project to get it all working and it was playable but barely.
The added latency makes you feel a little floaty (like a bad VR experience - the kind that make you sick). The witcher looked good when you stood still but not while moving. Ark's performance was abysmal on the aws hardware such that I had to turn down the settings.
Part of the bad experience is likely my ISP's fault - I had spikes of packet loss - though I think this is fairly typical.
The cost is mostly not in the spot instance (that /is/ cheap) but in the storage (EBS) that you need to keep around to mount a spot instance whenever you want to play. The bandwidth cost is non-trivial for the amount of data you're streaming. I had about a 40 euro bill for the month under somewhat light use.
In the end, I can't say I recommend it. Onlive and Gaikai didn't do so well. That might have been their business models but I believe the tech is equally to blame. It's a ridiculously hard thing to get right consistently.
Well, to be fair, ARK is not the best benchmark. It's still early access and not optimized. I need to run it at Medium settings on my i7/GTX970 rig. The devs know this and they are working on it.
I used OnLive, the latency in response, even if its good for a while isn't consistent enough, even on a good connection, for playing anything other than Lego Star Wars or turn based games without screaming in frustration. You'll be met with sudden input delays or shuttering that just screws you.
This was not at all my experience with OnLive. I played Just Cause 2, and even having a relatively terrible connection through Time Warner Cable, it worked well enough that I was able to play the entire game without any noticeable input latency. The only exception being at times that TWC was having severe network issues, but that was both rare and understandable. The OnLive service itself worked pretty flawlessly for me.
I used about a gig an hour which came to around 8 dollars for the month. Storage was 15. The g2.2xlarge was 9 for 112 hours of use (I was lazy and didn't always shut it down between sessions).
