I find it funny that you're putting CS and Heroes of the Storm on the same level. Considering the latencies already mentioned (25-50ms to the closest AWS data center), CS should only be usable for casual play while for your other title... most Dota clones are playable up to 250-300ms latency, if you're not spiking.

Dota 2 is absolutely unplayable above 150 ms. Last-hitting and denying get hard enough, but at an even higher level you MUST be able to react to in-air projectiles with abilities such as Black King Bar, Manta Style, Blink, Naga's Mirror Image, etc to disjoint the projectiles.

Anecdotal evidence: historically I have a 60% winrate on US West servers (~40-70 ping) and only 50% winrate on US East servers (~110 ping). I've played on EU servers and it is absolutely miserable at 200+ ping. If I had to play regularly on anything above 110 and I'd probably drop to 45% or 40% winrate.

I've been playing Dota 1 and Dota 2 for 10 years now and I can tell you that with enough practice anything under 250ms is doable if there are no spikes in latency.

After a certain number of games you get used to it and start anticipating. It's not perfect, that's for sure, but it's definitely doable. Or are you talking about 5k+ MMR? In that case it is trickier, of course, but I know even pros managing to do it :)

Your blanket statement is false. Even professional teams playing online tournaments regularly deal with 200+ ms (EU vs. NA, etc.). It's not ideal, but playable.

Not yet, but I'll spin up an instance in the next day or two and try the New Unreal Tournament and report back. https://www.unrealtournament.com/

That would be great. I might try it myself, too. Currently, I'm gaming on a MacBook Air 2013. Works alright, but I play Heroes of the Storm on low settings and it could indeed be a bit nicer :)

I have a VMware ESXi box at home that I use to run a Windows VM with a video card passed through. I've been using it to stream Heroes of the Storm with Steam's In-Home Streaming and I get a consistent 30 FPS (1920x1080) with no noticeable lag.

Admittedly, it's not exactly the same as the setup in this article since it's not streaming over the internet, but I would assume that as long as your latency is low and bandwidth is high, you'll have no problem with this setup.

I'm just wondering. Theoretically, you have an additional hop.

Game server <--> Amazon <--> Home

From a pure latency point of view, this is probably not an issue. However, whatever events you see on screen, the game server sees you reacting slower, because your keyboard basically has a delay of 20-30ms (Home --> Amazon).

Maybe, it depends a bit on the game you play, if this has any negative consequences or not.

Edit: This could be somewhat compensated by the faster connection of Amazon <--> Game server (just assuming that it's faster than a connection from home).

Have you tried to VT-d passthrough the Intel GPU? I was trying to figure out if this would work.

If all of your matches were against people hosted on the same cloud, I imagine the latency between game clients would be very low and then the latency would just be the same as your normal client <-> server lag.

True, but right now, I can't make this assumption. Cloud gamers are probably rare :)