So much for negative lag. Also, it’s sufficient doesn’t mean equivalent right? I feel like these words are being chosen… carefully.
Yeah, “sufficient” sounded suspicious to me too.
I guess this may be a dumb question but why does a cloud game have an install? What is it installing, and where is it being installed?
He says it is almost instant. I suspect the term install is the incorrect term for what it is actually doing.
Right, it’s more like adding the license to your account and allocating storage for savegames and such.
I’ll forgive them for the misuse too. They’re just trying to convey information to the general gamer, and we’re all use to losing time to installs.
But…but…Negative latency!!!
Assuming a good stable connection, game streaming works perfectly well for everything other than “twitch” titles, like Mortal Kombat and Super Meat Boy. And even for those types of games it’s fine for casual players.
There’s no real fix for this, a couple frames of latency is inherent in the solution.
Eurogamer’s impressions are worth reading. With a high speed camera setup and non-Stadia versions for comparison, they were getting 40-50 ms of lag added by Stadia.
But they were actually less critical of the resulting experience than I expected, and more down on the image quality than I would’ve expected:
Obviously, it’s early days for Stadia and there’s a lot the system gets right. The controller is excellent and innovative in the way it directly connects to the cloud as a separate client. While image quality can’t really hope to equal the local experience on a living room display, it’s still delivering results that can look really impressive, and while never pristine as such, Stadia looks good on smaller screens. Yes, the lag is perceptible, but remember that the vast majority of players are gaming on flat panels with game mode disabled - lag is a thing that many gamers just accept. Latency is important for sure, but across years of cloud system testing, we’d found that consistent response is probably more important (something we discussed with the xCloud team in an interview coming soon).
One thing that’s worth noting in that though, is that he says that the input lag was worst in his bedroom, over wifi, where the wifi connection is the worst in his house.
That suggests that in other places in his house, he didn’t have that input lag… which suggests at least some component of that isn’t Stadia’s fault at all.
But then again he’s also on 150 mbps from his ISP, which is hardly a guarantee across the US.
Wifi doesn’t work well for game streaming in general, even inside your house with Nvidia Gamestream or Steam Link. It’s too inconsistent.
150Mbps is (way) more than enough to stream 4k60 encoded in HEVC. His bandwidth was not the problem, it must have been a consistency thing or possibly QoS from his ISP.
I love the idea of living in a world where Stadia would be a viable option, but such a world is probably out of my grasp.
Yeah, your connection is insufficient.
Well, at least it’s apparently faster than 61% of the US!
I was also surprised to see Destiny 2 runs at 1080p resolution, upscaled to 4k. The promise of Stadia is Google’s datacenter has infinite resources, offering the highest resolution at locked framerates. But the hardware underlying it is a Vega 56 or 64, which is basically as fast as a GTX1070/1080 or RTX 2060/2060S/2070, and those GPUs are simply incapable of running modern games at 4k60.
This thread is way more entertaining than the idea of actually using a Stadia.