Stadia, Google Game Streaming platform [2019-2021]

Destiny 2 run at medium settings on Stadia, and is also upscaled from 1080p. Worse yet the FoV is very narrow on Stadia and the gun takes up 1/3 of the screen.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18...aming-cloud-price-specs-features-chrome-pixel

 

Relevant snippets from The Verge review:

With Destiny 2, it’s even more obvious that the game isn’t running at the highest settings. On a Chromecast Ultra, a “4K” stream looked closer to 1080p, and my colleague Tom Warren and I swore that the 1080p streams we were getting in the Chrome web browser looked more like 720p.

Initially, Google told us that it was using the highest-resolution, highest-fidelity build of Destiny 2 available. But Bungie later confirmed that our eyes weren’t deceiving us. “When streaming at 4K, we render at a native 1080p and then upsample and apply a variety of techniques to increase the overall quality of effect,” a Bungie rep said, adding that D2 runs at the PC equivalent of medium settings. That explains why the Xbox One X build, which runs at a native 4K and with higher-res assets, looks so much better than Stadia.

...

I can’t truly tell you whether Google Stadia will work for you with as much fidelity as you see above because I live in Silicon Valley, a mere 45-minute drive from Google’s headquarters, with a fairly good 150 Mbps Comcast internet connection and an excellent Wi-Fi router at my disposal. I’m likely close enough to the company’s West Coast data centers that I’m probably akin to a best-case Stadia user.​

 

So how many instances of Destiny is that 10.7TF GPU running if it's being outclassed, at 4 times the resolution, by a GPU 0.56 times as powerful?

 

The problem also seems to be compounded by what looks to be some sharpening added which just exacerbates the compression artifacts? Compare the face of the guy chasing Lara.

Meanwhile all fine detail is lost in a lot of things (Lara's hair, for example).

It'd be interesting to see how things compare to PS streaming and Xcloud. But for a decent comparison we'd need to look at the same title running on all 3 platforms.

I wonder if it's because of issues like this and how slow Google are to roll out features combined with a reputation for dropping support which is why more large publishers are partnering with MS and not Google? Granted MS also has a history of dropping support, but less so than Google.

I'd imagine having to port all of your games to Linux might be a bit of a barrier as well. They aren't porting games to Android are they?

Regards,
SB​

 

Amazon hasn't announced that they want to get into Cloud Gameing yet even though it has been suspected in the industry for some time. Now I look at some comments from Chris Roberts where he talks nicely about Cloud Gaming. This somehow rises the suspicion on which we could soon see an announcement of Amazon. Amazon Cloud Gaming with Star Citizen (in the then current state) as an exclusive game. And everyone who complains that they don't want to have a Cloud Gaming game will be told: "The quality of a the multiplayer experience will increase because you’ll have much less latency, you won’t have any issue of cheating, you eliminate the issues you get with lag".

 

Lack of available hardware. So I suppose possibly many. Or that specific hardware isn’t ready yet and they are using something else.
It’s not ready running multiple instances on a single GPU. You’re bound to run into a lot of challenges. We crash all the time running cuda jobs on the same GPU. So there definitely needs to be software required to schedule it.

And if you’re running a scheduler; expect some if a lot of overhead.
Bandwidth and memory I believe is the main issue; not so much compute.

 

So is anyone here biting on this?

Or saving their duckets for next year?

 

I would say give it time to become the service that they are marketing it to be.
There are quite a few challenges that Stadia faces that Xcloud does not. In particular, I don't recall XCloud being about offering high frame rate, high fidelity gaming. It is, as I understand it, just taking your games on the go. This concept in particular makes it easier for MS because they theoretically only need to manufacture Xbox One S chips into blades. Offer 720p etc. Don't care about ray tracing, 4K or the other goodies that next gen could offer. Overall it's a smaller scale problem. XCloud competes with PSNow, with a large advantage on back haul infrastructure access, but the service they provide is pretty similar.

Stadia is a much harder solution to solve.

 

It's nowhere near good enough now. You'd have to be a bit of a Google fan to bite this early I think, or quite a niche customer. I think the sensible thing to do is wait and see how streaming develops until it offers something really solid and worth the cost. The 'YouTube' of gaming in terms of quality isn't particularly inspiring, although it does make games more cinematic if they are compressed to hell for streaming.

 

Stadia has some interesting methods of getting into games and being able to play them directly from youtube. Being able to queue up and play with streamers is pretty novel as well. I think these are all features MS is trying to create for their Mixer platform (thus the recent purchasing of streamers). Google has also recently purchased a Twitch streamer as well. All of this cannot be coincidental.

Perhaps those are challenging things to solve, I don't know. I imagine that some people who use tablets/phones all day long may find this service appealing, especially the younger generation that has grown up on Youtube and not the Tele.

As much as people are disappointed with the service today, I think the integration with Youtube and meeting that marketed service is probably a more important issue to solve, at least to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

 

So, seeing reports that have mentioned that with ideal internet conditions and a really good connection the lag is minimal. Other reports from people with the hardware indicate lag of 1-3 seconds even when they reside in the same city as the data center.

I'd guess that for the people having issues in the same city it's likely that their internet provider has vastly over-subscribed the trunk of their service that leads to those peoples homes and/or people on that trunk of the service are using the internet far more than "average."

Also, seeing some reports that while wired ethernet connections seem to do relatively well, WiFi connections appear to introduce noticeable lag.

Regards,
SB

 

AMD has virtual GPU tech for Vega.

 

An additional 44 ms to 70 ms over local gaming in the some tests, making it 33% to 50% additional input latency. That's probably their best case scenarios.

 

Watching itmeJP using Stadia right now.

Started it up. Wondered why the Stadia controller wasn't working. Turns out that the wireless Stadia controller doesn't work wirelessly. It requires a wired connection. Wireless functionality is "coming soon."

He has a gigabit connection in a city with a data center and lag felt acceptable to him. He's using it with a wired ethernet connection.

So far every game he has tried (the two free ones) have looked horrible in his opinion. Destiny 2 looked to be about 720p with compression artifacts in his opinion just looking at what was on screen. Also that FOV is REALLY narrow in Destiny 2. He fired up his local copy of the game and just alt-tabbed back and forth to compare. And just now switched his local copy to 1080p to compare and he definitely feels it's only 720p.

Lots of functionality is just missing.

Regards,
SB

 

Google must have some analytics that says that launching in 2019 is more important than providing a good experience but launching in 2020 the same year as next-gen Sony and Microsoft consoles.

 

Or it was just barely good enough to generate some income and they can iterate afterwards, which is the Google way. They must have realized what kind of reviews they'd get with the abundance of missing features and poor quality. Besides, they can just blame quality issues on the internet.

 

Anyone been 'brave' enough to buy one and offer a personal opinion?

 

Mine came today but it'll probably sit in a box for a week or two. I have gigabit fios and live in nyc so I imagine I'm best case scenario for stadia. Really have 0 desire to play destiny 2 though. When I get around to it I'll let the class know how it is.

 

I'm most interested in the rhythm games like Just Dance. These really shouldn't work well with any additional latency.

 

games like just dance and guitar hero will work well after calibration!
You just need to hit the screen when you see/hear the tune and it should be able to determine the latency difference for scoring.