Lots of games do lag compensation. What you’re trying to do is get under their lag compensation wire, where they’ll do what’s possible to keep everything fair for everyone and you.

Someone already said to shoot for Singapore remote servers. That’s a good start. Make sure you have qsv or your computers equivalent of it to decode video quickly. The decoding time adds to your input lag because you can’t see the stream until it gets decoded for you.

Someone already said to look into the Chinese bizarro mobo/cpu combos built off of excess chips, prototypes and factory seconds. Bear in mind that support for these is nonexistent unless you read Chinese and sparse at best there. Bear in mind that a lot of the time the CPUs are soldered to the board so you can’t upgrade and have to be a little more careful when installing a heatsink. If you’ve been in the game long enough to pull a bare motherboard out of a dumpster and fiddle around with it until it works then the aliexpress computer pipeline might be a good one for you.

Check out the Chinese video cards too.

I have an alternative set of solutions though, and they’ve worked well so far:

Turn down the resolution. It makes a huge difference. Turn down the texture quality and post processing.

Alternately, stop playing new games. They’re so bad.

If you don’t want to turn down the music or stop listening to it, give the intel b series a look. They’re competent at 1440 and cost a fraction of what nvidia cards cost.

Obviously this is antithetical to this community, but when Stadia was a thing, it was actually really amazing. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 on release day with a shit PC blew me away. I'm not sure how it worked in Australia, but the lag was only noticeable sometimes, and never was a distraction or took away from the game play. GeForce Now is ok, but they need to support your game, and then you need to purchase the game + have a subscription. I know Stadia got a lot of shit, and also had a limited catalog, but it actually got me to buy cutting edge games, sometimes on release day, with no subscription.

For me, piracy is not about cost, but more for combating anti-consumer behavior by corporations. Say what you will about Google, but Stadia was actually a good product. I guess it's just good they killed it before they could enshitify it.

GPUs are expensive everywhere. I'm an Aussie living in the USA and would offer to buy stuff here and ship it to you, but it's getting to the point where some stuff here is actually more expensive than Australia now, thanks to significantly worse inflation compared to Australia, and the Trump tariffs.

Renting a dedicated server or VDS with a decent GPU would be pretty expensive too. A lot of people are using them for AI, which has caused a lot of price increases as plenty of people are willing to pay a lot for a server with powerful AI capabilities.

I know this is a piracy community, but if you really do want to do online game streaming, a service like GeForce Now would end up quite a bit cheaper even after factoring in the cost of games. Their highest tier (which comes with a GTX4080 and 16 vCPUs) is $20/month which is significantly cheaper than what it'd cost to rent a similarly specced system.

To the point where light speed limitations means rtts of like 200-300 ms

Consider testing servers that are located in Singapore, especially if you use Optus or if your ISP uses Optus as one of their upstreams.

If you're lucky, your ISP will route from Australia directly to Singapore and you'll get around 100-120ms ping, about half what you'd get compared to a US-based server. If you're unlucky, it'll be 400+ms, routing to the USA then from the USA to Singapore.

I'm curious on the responses as potential long term strategy to stay in this hobby without financial ruin, but frankly I just got more creative sourcing parts.

Aliexpress mobile CPU frankensteined onto desktop micro ATX. Staying with 1440p. Buying used parts. Last gen GPU for 1440p has been fine. But that's Canada, I know Australia is even worse off with tech prices.