Cloud gaming can deliver a clean image at a high frame rate and still feel unlike playing locally. The difference lies in the delay between an input and the response appearing.
Every frame makes a round trip
A button press travels to a distant server, the game responds, the resulting frame is encoded into video, sent back and decoded before it can be displayed.
Each of those steps takes measurable time, and they add to the delay a local machine already has between input and display.
The total is what the player feels. A stream can run at a high frame rate and still respond noticeably later than the same game running locally.
Distance sets a floor
Signals travel through fibre at a finite speed, and each network device along the path adds a small amount of handling time.
This creates a lower bound that no amount of engineering removes. A server far from the player cannot feel like a machine in the room.
It is why providers build regional data centres and why the experience varies so sharply depending on how close a player happens to live to one.
Video encoding cannot be instant
Compressing a frame efficiently means comparing it against previous frames, which requires holding data briefly and spending processing time.
Low-latency encoder settings reduce that delay by giving up some compression efficiency, which raises the bandwidth needed for the same picture quality.
Providers therefore choose a position on a trade between responsiveness, image quality and bandwidth, and no setting satisfies all three at once.
Network variation is worse than network delay
A steady delay can be adapted to, and players adjust to consistent lag within minutes. Variation cannot be adapted to, because timing changes unpredictably.
Congestion, wireless interference and shared connections all introduce that variation, which is why cloud gaming over a wired connection is markedly better than over a busy wireless link.
Buffering smooths variation but does so by adding delay, which is exactly the resource that is already scarce.
Genre determines whether it matters
Strategy games, turn-based titles and slower narrative games tolerate the added delay well, because their inputs are not timing-critical.
Competitive shooters and precise action games do not, since the player is reacting to events on a scale where the added delay is a meaningful share of the reaction window.
This is why cloud services are judged so differently by different players. They are describing the same delay applied to games with very different tolerance for it.