Input Latency

Input latency is the lag between pressing a button and seeing the result, and it is the honest bottleneck of streaming — not the device’s chip. Native play has essentially none; cloud and local streaming add a network round trip on top of normal display lag. Fast-reaction games expose it, slower ones hide it, and a strong low-latency network minimizes it. When we weigh a streaming handheld, the network and the latency it produces matter more than any spec on the device itself.