LiquidSky Mid-2018 Review

When we first tested LiquidSky at the beginning of 2018, we felt that they had some opportunities. Their network wasn’t very stable, and they were a bit under-powered. Have they improved at all during the past few months?

Improved Networking

When we tested LiquidSky earlier in the year, their networking needed some work. We experience quite a few disconnections, and we encountered frequent artifacting. Artifacting isn’t game-breaking, but it does affect immersion. The disconnections were unfortunate because the LiquidSky server takes about 5 minutes to boot up. It wasn’t fun to be cut off from Gaming and then have to wait 5 minutes to get back in.

Today things are different. We tested LiquidSky through several modern Games and didn’t experience any disconnections. We also didn’t encounter any boot-up errors. The servers were quite reliable this time. On the PC we also didn’t really notice any artifacting during Gameplay.

Performance is a Mixed Bag

During this round of testing, we focused on two Games: Battlefront 2 and No Man’s Sky. We tested each game on both the Gamer and Pro LiquidSky servers.

Playing Battlefront 2 on LiquidSky honestly surprised us. It performed exceptionally well on both the Gamer and Pro machines. Each looked great, and we had smooth 60 fps performance. I walked into testing expecting the Pro machine to run the game decently, but I wasn’t expecting such great performance from the Gamer server. Everything from bloom effects to reflections looks fantastic. On the Pro server, you’ll get the addition of better textures and antialiasing.

Next we moved on to No Man’s Sky. The developer of No Man’s Sky recently released their Next Update which improves graphics, stability, planet generation, multiplayer, and more. No Man’s Sky is a very demanding Game. It requires a minimum of 8 GB of RAM and a Graphics Card with at least 4 GB of vRAM. LiquidSky’s Gamer machine does not meet these requirements. We tried it anyway. It does boot the Game, and you can start playing. However, we were unable to achieve a consistent 30 fps, even with all settings set to their lowest values. It does run, but not well enough to provide a good Gaming experience.

We transitioned to the Pro server which does meet the Game’s minimum requirements. As expected, it does run much better. However, we had to keep most settings on Medium, and we still struggled to run above 30 fps.

Impressions

LiquidSky has noticeably improved since the beginning of 2018. This is especially noticeable on the networking side. While LiquidSky hasn’t upgraded any of their server hardware, they have been busy optimizing for various Games. This shows in Games like Battlefront 2. However, not all Games run this smoothly. It appears that smooth Gaming is somewhat reserved for titles that have been optimized for Cloud Gaming.

The Future

We recently wrote about some announcements that LiquidSky made on Twitch. They are very close to releasing a new driver for their M60 GPU. This should improve some things within certain Games. They also plan to upgrade their GPU’s before the end of 2018. In the meantime they are continuing to optimize both Games and their hardware.

What about Android?

The PC is just one side of LiquidSky. They also are working on an Android App for Smartphones and Tablets. So how does that perform today? We tested Fortnite on LiquidSky’s Android App, and we posted a review on our Patreon Page. If you’re an Android Gamer, then it’s definitely worth checking out.

If you’re interested in seeing how LiquidSky performs on PC today, take a look at the video below.

Originally published at Flickstiq.