OnLive promises nothing less than the moon and the stars: the service wants to stream games to you via your laptop or lower-end computer on their own proprietary hardware. We've seen tech demos and speeches at shows, but how does it work in practice? Ryan Shrout, from the website PC Perspective, had the fine luck to have access to the beta, and he has shared his thoughts with the world. No surprise: lag is an issue, as are graphics.

Running the games was just as easy on the system as promised. "You are seeing OnLive running Burnout: Paradise on my local system using just under 60MB of memory and anywhere from 4-7 percent of the CPU power," Shrout wrote. "My system is running on a Core i7-860 so that is a bit lower than the total system consumption you'll see on slower systems, but that is obviously much lower CPU horsepower than would be required to play these types of games locally." In terms of bandwidth, the system was using around 1Mb/s.

The games were running at 1280 by 720, and the expected issues became reality. "The input lag on UT3 was so noticeably bad with the mouse and keyboard that I would call [the] game simply unplayable. I often found myself overshooting the mouse movement by half a screen, moving well past my intended target because the cursor didn't stop when I did."

The problem wasn't nearly as bad when played with an Xbox 360 controller, but Shrout found the graphics were sharper when played locally. The graphics aren't anything to phone home about, the lag was noticeable, and the resolution wasn't set very high. When something sounds too good to be true... that's usually a hint about the final product.

Of course, there is one large gotcha here: "I first have to admit that I don't actually have a beta account with the OnLive service; instead a friend of a friend of a friend passed to me their login information after I requested it in order to write a preview of the technology. Why is this a note-worthy point to make? There is a chance that OnLive is only selecting beta members that are on ISPs close to their current data centers and as I live outside that area that could affect my experiences with cloud-based gaming." So there is that aspect to the writeup.

Be sure to read the whole writeup for all the details. And now an honest question: is anyone surprised?