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How they dare to like a videogame you don’t like

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Stadia and other streamers should copy the ‘surprise me’ button from GamePass. It’s a lot cooler if you don’t even have to install the suggestion to try it out.

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But you still have to buy the games so there’s no pool of buffet games from which to surprise you with a suggestion? The total catalog is still under 25 games.

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Clearly they need to think a bit harder about of number of things :)

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Destiny 2 player populations on 11/25 vs 12/18

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I got Stadia Pro via the buddy pass last week. It wasn’t working very well in my brief testing from home, but I chalked it up to using an ad hoc VPN setup. (Stadia isn’t launched in Switzerland yet, and do geo-blocking both on account creation and on actually playing the games).

But luckily I was traveling abroad for Christmas. The results have been rather inconsistent. Basically it was totally unplayable for me from a Chromebook and from Linux Chrome. Like: I clicked a button to fire a gun, immediately hear the sound, then see the muzzle flash half a second later.

It was pretty obvious that this was due to missing hardware acceleration on the video codec. Browser CPU use at 100%, the lag was much worse with more action on the screen, and switching to 720p helped a lot. It made sense: Linux Chrome doesn’t do any hardware video acceleration, and my Chromebook only said it was supporting h264 and vp8, but not vp9.

And indeed, booting my Linux laptop to Windows, and Destiny ran smooth as butter at 1080p. I could not have told either from the latency or graphics that it was being streamed.

So far so good. The baffling part is this: looks like Chrome wasn’t actually doing VP9 acceleration in Windows either, since I hadn’t gotten the Windows 10 creator’s update. (All VPx decoding was apparently disabled). But it was definitely accelerating the decoding somehow, since CPU use was just 10%. If the Stadia streams are h264, why didn’t the Chromebook work?

But this is also the kind of thing where it’s absolutely baffling that Google didn’t figure out this would be a problem, and add some detection for hardware acceleration. Surely they must have run into this all the time during beta testing?

(Incidentally, I’d bet that this is what was happening for that infamous Washington Post input lag video.)

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Screenshots taken with Stadia are misleadingly taken from GPU output at data center before it’s steamed and compressed right?

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Edit:
[actually I have no idea]

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So from the “frame buffer” and not representative of streaming network conditions actual output.

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let me check

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this is a screenshot taken from stadia, then exported with takeout.google.com
it was in jpg in the original

I have no idea if the image was taken before or after video stream generation, I guess before?, before is what would made more sense

I can’t see any difference between this screenshot and what I can see on my TV . (maybe the image look a bit better on my TV)

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I picked up a Stadia package towards the end of November. I was in the market for a second Chromecast, so I said hey,why not.

This is light years ahead of OnLive in terms of picture quality and performance. With OnLive you could see the encoding artifacts in the stream and it looked kind of hazy. Not here, I think the screenshot that Teiman posted is a good representation of the what you will experience, I am sure that if you analyzed the pixels (like some hardware sites do) you could conclude it wasn’t as good, but in motion it’s excellent, assuming of course you have a good connection; Stadia evaluates my connections as “Good” and I am playing on either a 55 inch TV or my aging HP computer with a 27 inch monitor.

I’ve also played on my ancient 1st gen Lenovo Chromebook with the Stadia controller plugged it and was surprised with how good the performance was. I also played on my android phone using a custom chromium build by enabling web mode. I had my XBox One controller connected via bluetooth. The performance was pretty impressive, and will only get better once the native app is released for non Pixel phones. The picture quality is excellent on both the Chromebook and the phone, although I did experience some ‘lag’ a few times. Overall all though, quite playable on those platforms.

With the Chromecast and my Pc (both wired) I can’t really tell that I am not playing the game locally, it’s really incredible and Google really delivers on what they are selling here.

Although serviceable, keyboard and mouse is not yet perfect on the PC (almost like a weird kind of acceleration) , so I usually play with the Stadia controller plugged into the computer. This is something I hope the improve soon, as in the past the PC was my main platform for gaming.

So far I have played, Destiny 2, Borderlands 3, Rage 2 and Tomb Raider on the Platform, all run at 60 fps @ 1080p and look fantastic at that resolution. I don’t have a 4k TV or monitor and don’t really plan on getting one any time soon, so I am not overly concerned about the fact that some of the games run at 30fps at 4k. Playing Destiny 2 at 60 fps is a real treat after playing it on the Xbox One S which is at 30 fps.

Ultimately Stadia will live or die based on the games. The technology is there for sure.

I have no regrets picking it up. Before Christmas I brought it in to work and was showing it off to some of the folks there, and they were super impressed. One of the guys is a super hard-core competitive gamer and he couldn’t believe it. He said it ‘wasn’t for him’ though because of the frame rate limitations (he has a monster gaming PC with a 144 mhz monitor) but he thought it was pretty awesome.

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Some challenges in porting games to Linux (due to a unique issue with its kernel) and Stadia:

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Latency claim testing:

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They can continue tweaking the kernel, even replace the scheduler with other options. The beaty of it is the kernel is open source and well know with many experts available to work on it.

One of the post in the article mention that Linux outperform Windows using all available NUME’s, so most motherboards with more than one NUME have these multiple NUMEs disabled to appear as 1, to make Windows happy. It would take only to enable all NUME’s to get more mileage from the same hardware.

Finnaly, Linux is not a realtime OS. Is not optimized for realtime, but can be optimized and patched to behave more like a realtime OS.

This guy made a single Java app that all it does is toggle the color of the screen. I don’t think this is a realistic scenario. To call people liar just because your toy test seems to give you different result I think is a bit extreme. At least you would need two different test that give the same result using very different aproachs before you can end on that result and call names.

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Isn’t that chart from Digital Foundry’s very thorough tests, not Google?

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Dude, you appear to have no source criticism filters for anything to do with stadia. As long as it is negative, you’ll just lap it right up.

Those were obviously not numbers from Google, but from Digital Foundry. A source who do their own testing and should be above reproach in these matters. They also were not generic claims about latency, but about AC Odyssey. This is the original post: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-hands-on-with-google-stream-gdc-2019

(I.e we have here a source who lying about the source of the numbers, and incompetent enough to think it makes sense to compare a AAA game to their toy app that draws a single rectangle. And who obviously had no access to stadia. Why give them any credence?)

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Calm your tits. I didn’t choose “lies about stadia’s latency” nor did I agree with it. I do agree I should have prefaced the link with a warning since about his (yes, simple)toy app test. I was not critical about Stadia in posting about the scheduler analysis either and shared the link out of sheer interest in the kernel challenge. There was no malice or “look! Stadia sucks! Because this xxx reason” behind my sharing either of these links.

Still, yes I do believe Stadia is a poor value for gamers and is high value for rent-seeking publishers as DRM. While I have softened on my original knee jerk reaction to it (and its streaming predecessor OnLive) It offers less not more value to gamers. We can clearly see what happened to all those that “bought” their games on OnLive. No, not just poor value for gamers but for anyone and everyone who isn’t Google who appear to also be waiting for it to pay off later down the road. Certainly not any developers who aren’t the ones whose studios were extended lifelines by being bought out by Google don’t appear to be reaping enough cash or assistance to bother releasing or keeping their Stadia releases at parity with other platforms.

Stadia streaming is, for now, all BS smoke and mirrors for early adopter suckers. The cross section of casual gamers who who will pay for fast and stable enough Internet but not pay for console hardware, games or decry 1-time patching inconvenience but yes gladly consume more data traffic monthly for an inferior experience is too small a number and won’t grow enough to sustain it. The number is even smaller who would pay more for a game locked to a platform with 50/50 odds for Google Graveyard.

I’m certainly not openly mocking, insulting or flaming or denigrating anyone who enjoys it or has a positive outlook.l

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Uh-huh.

Look, I’m not particularly interested in the current iteration of Stadia either and I agree that Google’s history of killing off products on what seems like a whim is really biting them in the ass here. But… I dunno, move on to something you do enjoy?

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What if he enjoys arguing on forums? What then, huh?

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I don’t really have any concerns that the Stadia streaming tech more-or-less works for most games, though obviously it might not be ideal for games where any added input latency feels bad (fighting games, twitch shooters, etc.).

I think it’s everything else around that core tech with Stadia, that sucks right now. Whether it’s the core proposition of Stadia as a discrete platform (versus simply a PC in the cloud, for example), or the absolute clown show that has been their rollout strategy, that has been covered extensively here.

There’s also the simple fact that they aren’t living up to their own pre-release hype of having a system with more power than a PS4 Pro and an Xbox One X combined right now. They’ve tried to throw the devs under the bus on this point (classy), but regardless of whose fault it is, it’s the reality right now. Google should have been throwing resources at their launch “partners” for months, making sure their games looked and ran best on Stadia.

This is why I think some people are kinda relishing the floundering of Stadia right now. Google sauntered into a fiercely competitive industry with a half-assed, unfinished platform; a lack of any first-party studios when their closest competitors have over 30 combined; no launch exclusives beyond a timed-exclusive indie game, and full of hype about how you were getting a high-end gaming machine in the cloud. And of course, there’s the general bad reputation Google seems to have as a company these days - far removed from the “Don’t be evil” era.

So yeah, people saying “I used Stadia, and it actually worked surprisingly well on my insert-device-here!” doesn’t really shock me. But once the neato factor of the core technology wears off, I’d love to know how many Stadia early adopters will just go back to their consoles, if they haven’t already.