When Sony launched its PlayStation Now service as a beta last year, the ridiculous per-game rental pricing structure stopped us from giving it any serious consideration almost immediately. Last week, though, the service graduated from beta with a more feasible all-you-can-play subscription plan . Suddenly this was an opportunity. Has the idea of running games on remote servers advanced at all since OnLive's ahead-of-its-time launch back in 2010

We've been kicking the tires on the service for about a week now, and what we've found is a surprisingly compelling addition to the pay-per-game ownership model of retail discs and downloads. If you have the bandwidth and a yearning to sample some PS3 classics among the service's somewhat limited initial selection on your PlayStation 4, PlayStation Now is well worth checking out.

Performance

When initially reviewing OnLive back in 2010 , running a game through the offering's remote servers was a noticeably worse experience than running that same game locally. Even with a 20Mbps FiOS connection, our reviewer "could tell that the game was not running natively" thanks to "framerate bumps, sudden resolution drops, and gameplay blips."

Things have changed quite a bit in the intervening time. For one, we tested PlayStation Now on a relatively beefy (but still residential-level) 75 Mbps FiOS connection in the Washington, DC suburbs. At that speed, the streaming experience was practically indistinguishable from loading a disc on a local PS3. After about 30 to 60 seconds of start up (including a required connection test to confirm bandwidth), PlayStation Now games ran at a solid HD resolution. We saw a smooth, rock-steady frame rate and seemingly instantaneous responses to our controller inputs.

The performance over this connection was identical over wireless and wired connections, and it didn't seem to dip even when someone was streaming video in another room. While pro-level players might be able to notice some dropped frames in a twitch-heavy game like Super Street Fighter IV, an intermediate player (including this reviewer) should see no apparent issues. If you set the PlayStation Now app next to a PlayStation 3 running the same game, we'd be hard pressed to tell you which was which.

Of course, not everyone has such a healthy Internet pipe leading into their home these days (#humblebrag). To see how the service scaled, we went into our router settings and intentionally limited the bandwidth going to the PlayStation 4.

A visual reference for what you're about to read.

Our throttle testing started with a limit of 5 Mbps of download speed, which Sony recommends as the minimum "for an optimal gaming experience." At that bandwidth level, the service usually wouldn't even start; instead, a pre-launch connection test told us that the connection simply wasn't good enough for PlayStation Now. The same error surfaced when bumping the bandwidth limit up to 6 Mbps.

At 7 Mbps, we were able to start PlayStation Now reliably—but with a significant performance hit. The image was noticeably grainier than it had been at full bandwidth. Sometimes we were able to get a relatively smooth frame rate at this bandwidth, but most of the time the frame rate stuttered, dipping noticeably up and down near constantly. A game like Super Street Fighter IV was technically playable at this level, and inputs seemed to register just fine, but the constant stuttering usually made it a frustrating experience.

Sliding under the data cap If you're one of the many unlucky broadband customers If you're one of the many unlucky broadband customers subject to a cap on your data usage , you may rightly wonder how streaming HD gameplay from a remote server will eat into your monthly allotment. In our tests, most games sucked down an average of 2.6 GB of downloaded data over an hour of gameplay. On a plan with a 150 GB data cap, that means you could stream about 57 hours of PlayStation Now gaming every month, provided you didn't want to do anything else with your connection... This rate varied very little across a number of game types, from heavy action games to low-res classics to relatively sedate puzzle games. The only exception was our test of Pure Chess, which only drew 732 MB of data on an hourly basis. This might be because that game's static view of the chess board remains largely unchanged from frame to frame, which probably helps with the compressed image stream.



With just a little more bandwidth, though, the experience improved quite a bit. At a limit of 8 Mbps, the image returned to what seemed like 720p HD and boasted a solid frame rate throughout. At this bandwidth level, the only issues were occasional compression artifacts appearing as small, scrambled boxes of pixels for a few frames here and there. By the time we hit 9 Mbps of download speed, streaming once again felt like local play.

Before considering PlayStation Now, we'd recommend going into your PS4 settings and seeing what kind of download speeds you can register through the Connection Test option. If you consistently get numbers under 5 Mbps, you'll need to beef up your connection before being able to use the service reliably. With anything from 5 to 9 Mbps, you'll find PlayStation Now usable but probably not ideal all of the time.

(Note that the PS4's connection tests can be pretty unreliable, and they may give different numbers over multiple tests. Also note that the PS4's reported bandwidth is usually a bit lower than your ISP's theoretical maximum, even without interference, and others using the same connection simultaneously may impact the available throughput to the PS4).

If your PS4 can clock in for downloads above 9 Mbps, though, you're in for an impressively functional streaming gaming experience. It's all the more impressive when you consider that, four years ago, a 20 Mbps FiOS connection wasn't good enough for a solid OnLive performance in our tests. It seems Sony's 2012 purchase of streaming company Gaikai, along with the intervening wait for improvements in underlying Internet streaming technology, have paid off.