Google Stadia launches today to mixed reception over input lag

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Google Stadia has finally kicked off its launch today, releasing eight months after its announcement back in March of this year. Google planned to create a "Netflix" of gaming, of sorts, by allowing players to stream games to any device, be it a netbook laptop's browser, a phone mobile app, or a TV's Chromecast, removing the need to own an expensive gaming console. Theoretically, Google would lower the barrier of entry, and allow millions to play the latest and greatest that gaming had to offer, in a simple and casual manner.

Initially, many took issue with the idea of streaming video games across the country, as data caps, input lag, and slow connections would likely stand in the way of consistent performance. A month prior to launch, in October, Google promised that latency would not be a problem with Stadia, as they claimed their servers and technology would be able to easily handle streaming 4K 60FPS video games to its customers, without issue. There was even an official statement of how Google Stadia would have "negative" latency, and would offer a more responsive experience than playing games locally, in the coming future.

But latency is the thing that gets the most attention. And while it's already proven to be more than playable, [Madj Bakar, VP of Engineering] expects further improvements. "Ultimately, we think, in a year or two, we'll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud that they do locally, regardless of how powerful the local machine is," he claims. These improvements will come via a term which sounds rather slippery. "Negative latency" is a concept by which Stadia can set up a game with a buffer of predicted latency between the server and player, and then use various methods to undercut it. It can run the game at a super-fast framerate so it can act on player inputs earlier, or it can predict a player's button presses. These tricks can help the game feel more responsive, potentially more so than a console game running locally at 30fps with a wireless controller.

This only served to create more controversy for the service, with many skeptical of such a concept even being possible. Those claims are looking to be even more impossible in the near future, as Stadia is having issues with streaming games upon its first day of release.

For many, this isn't a surprise at all. Digital Foundry, and its parent publication, Eurogamer, took Stadia out for a test drive with the Founder's Pack, describing their time with the service as "incomplete", and "basic". More importantly, though, they measured the exact input lag, comparing Stadia against an Xbox One X.

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While the above chart shows a definite amount of difference in terms of input lag, Eurogamer admitted that the games they played, at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second on a 200mbps wired connection, felt fine, overall, still being considered playable to the masses who likely wouldn't notice any major input lag.

Ultimately, the question is how the game feels in the hand. Nothing I played could be considered 'unplayable' or very laggy - with the possible exception of Tomb Raider in quality mode, but I even got used to that after a while. Remember that different actions may have different latencies, so the table above is far from definitive. At best, it's a test of the one particular motion carried out in the same scenarios on each system. More tests on more titles may put Stadia into better focus, but 45-55ms of lag generally is perfectly acceptable for many experiences and even a fast-paced FPS like Destiny 2 plays out fine on the pad. Obviously though, if you're gaming on a living room display via Chromecast, do make sure game mode is enabled and definitely ensure that you're using a LAN connection.

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Other sites, however, were not as pleased. Forbes' writers reported massive amounts of input lag, making the 22 launch titles impossible to play or control.

Across all test titles I played, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat 11, Destiny 2, GYLT and Red Dead Redemption 2, I would get periodic stuttering issues with massive resolution and frame drops. Not all the time, but enough to be noticed frequently and disrupt gameplay, which is what everyone feared may happen with this kind of tech. The intensity of the game didn’t matter, it could be the graphically rich Red Dead or the cartoony GYLT. Single player or multiplayer didn’t matter, I could be playing solo as Lara Croft or playing Destiny 2’s Gambit in a pre-arranged match, the issues were the same. You could have 80% of a session be going fine, but then the last 20% would suddenly lurch you into dropping, stuttering territory. And in most games, all it takes is one hiccup to make you pay dearly.

What many have already likely seen, is the above GIF, which comes from The Washington Post. In their trial, Destiny 2 had full seconds of latency, between pressing a button and the intended action occurring.

It's important to consider that this is all still technically an early access soft launch for Stadia--those who are making use of the service now, are playing with technology that still has much room to improve and change, especially before its separate base release, slated for 2020. But while Google can certainly try to reduce input lag, develop better codecs, and innovate their streaming technology as a whole, many have a fear of if Stadia is actually really here to stay, with Google's infamous track record of creating services, investing into them for a handful of years, and then tossing them aside in favor of new projects looming in the back of our minds.
 

FAST6191

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Stadia runs under Linux, so yeah, they're all PC games ported to Linux. But I think expecting them to releasing the game files is a pipe dream, they're basically solving their piracy problem and AAA publishers are known to be ruthless when it comes to killing games, the only preservation they care is preservation of profits. Some gonna happen with the "gaming as a service" we have now, if Epic decides to shutdown Fortnite, there's no Fortnite anymore, sure you own the game files but you can't play it just like DarkSpore. Gaming ownership is on its way out.
There are people recreating servers, and there are specific exemptions for the DMCA as of a couple of years back for making such servers.
Still I am sure there are plenty of companies creaming their jeans at the thought of "of a service".

That said I still reckon mods and open source will rise up to do things there.
 
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evertonstz

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There are people recreating servers, and there are specific exemptions for the DMCA as of a couple of years back for making such servers.
Still I am sure there are plenty of companies creaming their jeans at the thought of "of a service".

That said I still reckon mods and open source will rise up to do things there.

The modding and open source community work is becoming extremely hard, since games nowdays are so complex that reverse engineering them is becoming harder and harder and basically impractical, also the corporations are becoming better and better in preventing their games from being decrypted, for example we in the Vita community are currently unable to translate the Vita release of Catherine because the English release for the PS4 simply can't be decrypted.
In the next gen of consoles it's not crazy to assume you'll only be able to make mods if the devs want you to make them.

Streaming is the pipe dream for the current philosophy "we don't sell user games, they pay us to let them play our game" the gaming corporations are following and you can be 100% sure they will push towards streaming market dominance, instead of a healthy market were streaming, consoles and PCs can coexist. That's why I assume in 5 to 10 years we will simply get another gaming crash and I hope indies take the lead in the newly refreshed market.

What I mean by all this is that Streaming isn't the villain here, corporations are. If people are trash talking Stadia but are buying games from Activision-Blizzard, EA, and all the big dogs they're simply feeding the Cerberus via its other mouths while trying to cut just one (gaming streaming).
 
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FAST6191

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The modding and open source community work is becoming extremely hard, since games nowdays are so complex that reverse engineering them is becoming harder and harder and basically impractical, also the corporations are becoming better and better in preventing their games from being decrypted, for example we in the Vita community are currently unable to translate the Vita release of Catherine because the English release for the PS4 simply can't be decrypted.
In the next gen of consoles it's not crazy to assume you'll only be able to make mods if the devs want you to make them.

Streaming is the pipe dream for the current philosophy "we don't sell user games, they pay us to let them play our game" the gaming corporations are following and you can be 100% sure they will push towards streaming market dominance, instead of a healthy market were streaming, consoles and PCs can coexist. That's why I assume in 5 to 10 years we will simply get another gaming crash and I hope indies take the lead in the newly refreshed market.
What does the PS4 version not be able to be decrypted have to do with the Vita? I guess it is nice to have a translated version from another source to look at (even if it is legally dubious) but it is far from a requirement. Also does that mean decrypted as in the keys for the PS4 version are not know or people have not determined the formats?

As far as hard then for newer things it may or may not be but engines can be made, existing ones are already out there and it is not like we have gone supercomputer AI or whatnot to make up for things people can't program for current games (indeed most seem to have less scope than I got used to seeing on the 360 and PC of that era).
 

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This is not really surprising. Cloud gaming has always been a bit flawed. Latency is probably going to be the biggest issue when playing on the internet. Peer-to-peer connections, hybrid cloud, and of course playing the game on a local machine are all better options with little to no latency. However, with each of those it's not possible to play on nearly any device anywhere. Peer-to-peer requires that you are within range of the computer you'll be playing from. Hybrid cloud actually downloads some of the game, which may be the better option, but you would have to require an emulator of some sort as some games do not natively run on all platforms, and some may be a bit large for your device, depending on where you play it. Local play is always best, but then you have to play on the machines the game was designed for, unless you use an emulator.

Google Stadia... will it improve over time? It may not be able to, as it requires pinging across multiple servers which are not maintained by them. There may always be latency. It's best to do a traceroute on several sites and games to see which servers it has to go across to get to the source, and use a ping program on the sources to measure latency. There may still be hope.
 

evertonstz

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What does the PS4 version not be able to be decrypted have to do with the Vita? I guess it is nice to have a translated version from another source to look at (even if it is legally dubious) but it is far from a requirement. Also does that mean decrypted as in the keys for the PS4 version are not know or people have not determined the formats?

As far as hard then for newer things it may or may not be but engines can be made, existing ones are already out there and it is not like we have gone supercomputer AI or whatnot to make up for things people can't program for current games (indeed most seem to have less scope than I got used to seeing on the 360 and PC of that era).

Because there's not enough man-power in the Vita community to do a full translation from zero in the game, it's just too complex, the only viable way to translate the game is by dumping the english assets from the ps4 port and importing it into the Vita port.
Anyways, just stop and think how much their security has evolved and how complex games got since the psone era. In couple of generations it'll be just too much work for the modding community to handle. Not saying we can't do it now (even tho we can't in the Xbox One/PS4), but in the future it'll just be too much work.

Heeeh, who knows, opinions aside we are all guessing in the end of the day. Hope we close this book with a victory for gaming ownership, tho.
 
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FAST6191

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If I am crossporting a script I still expect to have to reverse engineer the formats well enough to know what is going on, especially from mainline console to handheld. About all that crossporting gives you is the option to not have to find a translator (or only bother one for the odd line).

As far as future complexity I don't see it, or at least people have said such things for years and it has not been true (I have met those that know the entire 6502 (NES) instruction set and more besides -- I can't do the ARM one from my head, never mind with all the timings of everything else but GBA and DS hacking seems to be going along just fine), and we have better tools than ever. Maybe at the high end in whatever the future equivalent of all those fun shader languages that were all the rage a few years back (haven't paid attention enough to know what the current hotness there is) but again that might well be irrelevant in the same way I don't care what the fancy 100000 USD a chair software lawyers use to format contract proposals or whatever when we have other office software doing what needs doing.
 
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They could skip animations based on latency to make it feel slightly better, at the cost of making it look worse. So say you hit jump, it can skip the first part of the animation based on the latency and teleport you off the ground to the proper location you would have been if there was no latency, and the resume the rest of the animation/physics. That works better for actions, but not really for movement, because if you tap left it will pretend as if you held left for the duration of the latency so moving tiny amounts becomes impossible, not to mention how you'd constantly be teleporting just by moving around.
 
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leon315

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i've average of 40mb/s connection speed, i wish to see it myself, Is there anyway to try Stadia out without purchasing Chromecast?
 

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Gamers spend lots of money to reduce input lag with 1 ms 1000hz wired mouse and keyboard, low input lag gaming monitor, powerful CPU/GPU high speed internet etc . . .
Why in hell do they think many ppl would be ok with ways to add input lag when playing games?
I mean its fine when playing slow paced games but you can't play anything that requires precise control or any type of competitive PvP . . .
 
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kumikochan

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To be entirely fair, even being not a fan of google stadia the shitty reviews have all been written by American journalist who complained about latency and connection issues while i have seen videos and reviews of European reviewers and they all don't seem to have that problem and the latency is almost non existing compared to the European reviews and quality wise it is massively different. So in the end it just comes down to stadia will not work for the US because the US will always have shitty internet while the rest of the world mostly doesn't and don't experience the same problems when it comes to streaming.
 

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Because there's not enough man-power in the Vita community to do a full translation from zero in the game, it's just too complex, the only viable way to translate the game is by dumping the english assets from the ps4 port and importing it into the Vita port.
Anyways, just stop and think how much their security has evolved and how complex games got since the psone era. In couple of generations it'll be just too much work for the modding community to handle. Not saying we can't do it now (even tho we can't in the Xbox One/PS4), but in the future it'll just be too much work.

Heeeh, who knows, opinions aside we are all guessing in the end of the day. Hope we close this book with a victory for gaming ownership, tho.
All of this from an atlus game, which isn't even a full blown AAA Dev afaik
 

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hahaha did anyone tought it would work??

stadia is the most hype-less thing I have ever seen in the video games world
 

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"or it can predict a player's button presses", Sounds cool but scary.. I wouldn't want the game to play itself for me or make mistakes that cause me to loose.

How does the latency reduction features work in RetroArch? Maybe something like that could work in cloud gaming?
 

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Meanwhile, at the queue of people who have extremely high internet at home yet never bought a gaming console and some games, despite having an interest in it:



:creep:


Ahem...but seriously: I can't but join the band wagon. If you ask me, it's more than just the technical impossibility of a lag free environment(1). Of the offered games, all are recent (but already released) AAA-productions. Nothing exclusive. And especially: nothing unique. Netflix would never have grown here if all the offered was a few handful of the most recent movies. What they should have done is at least have a slew of slow or turn-based combat games (into the breach and stardew valley aren't going to wow in visuals, but these complaints would simply not exist either).



(1): "negative lag" actually brings back memories of me playing UT2004 a decade ago. One of the mods (okay: mutator...but that difference is irrelevant here) was called "zeroping". I'm sure it worked on the same principle: the algorithm took your ping (and IIRC also latency? :unsure:) into account to determine if the most important things - shooting - were adjusted. Basically: if I hit someone on my end, it registered as an actual hit rather than having the shot fired a few dozen milliseconds later (and thus missing). and I gotta say that the difference was notable. On low pinging servers, it somewhat served as an aimbot for everyone, as it was literally (slightly) easier to hit someone than it was offline. The problem was that I also played American friends. And on 100+ ping, that meant that was an actual hit counted as impossible shots on their end (like: being hit through walls or in cover). I never encountered a high pinging player on a (for me) low ping server, but we knew each other well enough to avoid cheating accusations and just not use the mutator anymore
 

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