The ongoing debacle over Google's streaming service continues, as customers express discontent over the visual fidelity of their streamed games. Prior to the launch of Stadia, VP and general manager of Google, Phil Harrison, had boldly claimed that, "yes, all games at launch support 4K. [...] We want all games to play 4K/60 but sometimes for artistic reasons, a game is 4K/30 so Stadia always streams at 4K/60 via 2x encode". When the service launched, however, many noticed that those claims didn't turn out to be entirely true.

Eurogamer and Digital Foundry discovered that Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, both of which are considered as a huge draw to the service, never manage to run at 4K resolution. the latter is rendered at 1440p at maximum, and is then upscaled, while the former is rendered at 1080p, and is upscaled as well.

Red Dead Redemption 2, Stadia's most high-profile port, also doesn't play in true 4K. As Digital Foundry revealed, Red Dead Redemption 2 renders at 1080p or 1440p, depending on what data rate you are using, and is then upscaled to 4K on a Chromecast Ultra. Essentially, Stadia's 4K mode is actually processing fewer pixels than PS4 Pro on its biggest port.

As Digital Foundry puts it: "Perhaps there's something more we're not seeing behind the compression but from a technical perspective, Red Dead 2 on Stadia doesn't seem to be delivering on key marketing promises - certainly not the spirit of them at least. At the reveal, we were told that Stadia's GPU has the power of Xbox One X and PS4 Pro graphics combined, yet RDR2 on Stadia only has 44 per cent of the X's rendering resolution, while even the 4.2TF PS4 Pro GPU is generating a higher pixel-count (even before factoring in its checkerboarding upscale). Stadia's GPU seems to be an offshoot of AMD's RX Vega 56 based on its specs, yet in 1080p mode, performance is more in line with the PC version running on a much less capable RX 570 or RX 580.

In press conferences and during the reveal of Stadia itself, Google had drawn attention to the fact that their service would offer better graphical performance than both the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X combined, but when put to the test, either console provides a better picture quality for Red Dead Redemption 2 over Stadia. Google offered a response to the lingering questions as to why the quality isn't exactly as advertised, which can be seen in the following quote.

"Stadia streams at 4K and 60 FPS - and that includes all aspects of our graphics pipeline from game to screen: GPU, encoder and Chromecast Ultra all outputting at 4k to 4k TVs, with the appropriate internet connection. Developers making Stadia games work hard to deliver the best streaming experience for every game. Like you see on all platforms, this includes a variety of techniques to achieve the best overall quality. We give developers the freedom of how to achieve the best image quality and framerate on Stadia and we are impressed with what they have been able to achieve for day one.

"We expect that many developers can, and in most cases will, continue to improve their games on Stadia. And because Stadia lives in our data centers, developers are able to innovate quickly while delivering even better experiences directly to you without the need for game patches or downloads."

In short, Google states that the rendered graphics of its streamed titles will improve with time, and do indeed output at 4K resolution, even if it is upscaled. This creates a large disconnect from the pre-release promotion, which had promised something a little different.

Source

Tags: [PLATFORM=/platform/stadia]Google Stadia[/PLATFORM]

 

[kevin corms]

I guess they just found the limit to their information monopoly.

 

[air2004]

Stadia will be tombstoned in 3 years (at most)

 

[Deleted User]

Surprisingly, in Austin Evans' YouTube video about it, he said he could not notice any input lag and it felt pretty much like playing locally, and that the image was very good. Which does not seem to match up with some other people's experiences, who complained about input lag. But I figure it is still early access and they probably don't have servers in every country so how close the nearest server is to you could make a huge difference in lag. Course, some games are just not designed to run at 4K even on current high end hardware, so you can't expect ALL of them to run at 4K if there are some really demanding ones in there.

I don't know how demanding those specific games are but in the case of RDR2 that is a brand new AAA game so likely very demanding. And the available processing and graphics power has to be shared between multiple clients. For the price you're paying, I don't think being limited to 1440p in a small number of games is that big of a deal, especially when 1440p is already so good, you probably can't tell the difference without looking at the pixels with a magnifying glass. 1080p seems like a bit of a step back though. It also doesn't scale to 1440p very cleanly for those that have 1440p monitors. It's always best to be running at native res. 1080p scales easily to 4K though (it's a simple 2x) and with 4K it should be so high resolution that you won't notice any scaling artifacts that occur in going from 1440p to 4K.

Still, this is intended for those who don't have a powerful enough PC to game on. Most of that audience likely isn't too fussed about 4K if they have never experienced powerful PC hardware. And it's still probably a much better experience than they would get on their potato PC.

Keep in mind these are at the end of the day PC versions of games and they won't have the same optimizations as an XBox One or PS4 versions simply because they have to be designed to run on all kinds of hardware. So obviously they will require better hardware to run the same (PC also usually has a lot more postprocessing effects and such that have to be removed to make many games run well enough on consoles)

And this is still early access of sorts, they likely have a very limited amount of servers, once they expand to have many servers in every country latency and performance should be much less of an issue.

The funny thing is... Even if you have the most top of the line PC this might be the only way you can play RDR2. Considering many people can't even get it to launch.

How much did Google pay him?

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Stadia will be tombstoned in 3 years (at most)

6 months my friend

3 years is a pipe dream

 

[the_randomizer]

Google, moving goalposts since 2019. If you want 4K gaming, get a PC that can play it or get a PS4 Pro instead, don't waste your money on Google's bullshit.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Google, moving goalposts since 2019. If you want 4K gaming, get a PC that can play it or get a PS4 Pro instead, don't waste your money on Google's bullshit.

Why a PS4 Pro? The XBox One X is a much better 4K experience.

 

[the_randomizer]

Why a PS4 Pro? The XBox One X is a much better 4K experience.

My point still stands, there are better ways to get 4K than having to pay for a piece of crap like Stadia.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

My point still stands, there are better ways to get 4K than having to pay for a piece of crap like Stadia.

Sure, if you don't mind the graphics fidelity being lower and often capped to lower than 60 FPS. PC also has way more games but Stadia doesn't get that benefit since the library is curated and heavily limited so you'd get a way better library with consoles TBH.
$500 gets you a lot of months of Stadia though. If you are like me and don't play games that often (on and off for a few weeks at a time when a new great game releases) and you have a fast internet connection Stadia might actually be cheaper. And it's a much smaller up front payment, which might be important to some.
But honestly, the only way I would ever pay for Stadia is if I could play my existing Steam purchases on it. It's PC based, it just doesn't make sense to me that I can't play my PC games on it, and there's no way I'm paying for them a second time. Geforce Now is way better in that regard.
In my opinion game streaming isn't a bad idea but this implementation is just going to be a repeat of OnLive. If they had implemented it more like Geforce Now it might actually see some success.
I do like the idea of using a Chromecast to do the game streaming though. Many people already have one, or there's one built in to their TV, so that saves some money and you don't have to buy another set top box. So they at least got that idea right. But apparently there are issues with overheating on Chromecast Ultra when streaming games, so that should have gone through more testing, and a hardware revision with improved cooling would have been a good idea.

 

[the_randomizer]

Sure, if you don't mind the graphics fidelity being lower and often capped to lower than 60 FPS. PC also has way more games but Stadia doesn't get that benefit since the library is curated and heavily limited so you'd get a way better library with consoles TBH.
$500 gets you a lot of months of Stadia though. If you are like me and don't play games that often (on and off for a few weeks at a time when a new great game releases) and you have a fast internet connection Stadia might actually be cheaper. And it's a much smaller up front payment, which might be important to some.
But honestly, the only way I would ever pay for Stadia is if I could play my existing Steam purchases on it. It's PC based, it just doesn't make sense to me that I can't play my PC games on it, and there's no way I'm paying for them a second time. Geforce Now is way better in that regard.
In my opinion game streaming isn't a bad idea but this implementation is just going to be a repeat of OnLive. If they had implemented it more like Geforce Now it might actually see some success.
I do like the idea of using a Chromecast to do the game streaming though. Many people already have one, or there's one built in to their TV, so that saves some money and you don't have to buy another set top box. So they at least got that idea right. But apparently there are issues with overheating on Chromecast Ultra when streaming games, so that should have gone through more testing, and a hardware revision with improved cooling would have been a good idea.

The fact I can't even download games is a deal breaker. Once servers shut down, and they will, goodbye to your overpriced games.