It’s not well known but AT&T and Nvidia partnered to use hardware encoding/decoding (Shield) and fiber internet with compute at the last mile and they still couldn’t make a product that wasn’t laggy and have distracting artifacts. I am sorry to say Google‘s demonstration was more of the same and customers will not overlook this. Imagine how bad VR titles would get you motion sick with all of that latency and compression artifacts. With computers cheaper than ever and games hitting a ceiling on how much power it takes to render them, Stadia makes less and less sense. What does make sense is Google is so hungry for revenue they don’t care about user experience. What also makes sense is that those downvoting me have become blinded by optimism.
It depends on where you're located. With FiOS in NYC I can get to AWS Virginia in 18ms. I don't have any Google Cloud servers to test with.
When I use Steam/NVidia in home streaming with my GTX 1080 card, I can render a 1080p frame in about 10-12ms and decode it in 10ms on my 4K FireTV. (I beat Witcher 3, TombRaider, and Hitman with it over a 50Mbit powerline ethernet setup and they all looked fine BTW.)
Even if the Google data center is twice as far as AWS, that's 58ms lag, or 4 frames at 60fps. You can emulate the same lag by turning off Game Mode on your HDTV, it's fine for most games.
However, it is bullshit that the Stadia website doesn't have something like fast.com that tells you if your internet connection has enough bandwidth/latency to actually work with the service.
It's also not a good sign that they're not talking about avoiding wifi for your connection the way Steam does.
>It's also not a good sign that they're not talking about avoiding wifi for your connection the way Steam does.
At the very least, they send an email full of tips to everyone that buys one, where the top-most/first block mentions a wired connection makes a big difference over wireless.
I don’t know what games you play, but in home streaming is too much lag for me on basically any game. For myself, 144hz is a requirement because 60fps is a slide show. The resolution would need to be increased as 1080p looks terrible, so that is unacceptable too.
I don’t know what their target audience could possibly be. If the game is so visually unappealing that the customer doesn’t care about frame rate or resolution, then it’s likely they already have the capability to render that with the console they already have. Stadia needs to convince people they have a better product than what consumers have today. Instead it looks like a step down and you still have to pay full price for the games. People can finance a console purchase over a couple years for a little more money and enjoy their experience more while having a structured monthly payment.
But why won’t people just use the devices they have today to play such a game? I don’t even know how many physical CPU cores Google will give each machine, but imagine running Civ on some server grade processors with tons of cores. That could actually be a good experience but I doubt Google could make money if they were generous in this way.
I'm playing Stadia on my non-fiber cable internet, and there's no perceptible lag. I previously tried Geforce Now, under the same conditions, same pc - and it was unplayable.
Somehow even Steam in-home streaming between two wired PCs is a mess of distracting artifacts for me when playing a turn-based game from 2005 at 1080p. Is it really that hard?
