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]

 

[Bedel]

Are you talking about actual 24fps, or animation being keyframed at 24fps?

If you are talking about the game, afaik even the fights are 24fps locked. If you are talking about the anime, you can see in the file properties the frames per second of the video file.
The framerate doesn't need to be the best it can sometimes. Not defending stadia with that argument or saying games should run with less fps, but sometimes, and just sometimes, it really is an artistic choice. And I think that's great.

 

[deinonychus71]

Good upscaling can actually do wonders. Ever tried waifu2x?
Those who spend time remastering old movies and anime and play with avisynth will tell you a lot about it

Now of course, that doesn't work when an upscaler needs to be running in real time.

 

[Xzi]

Lol 10 teraflops, yeah, right

That's less than what a GTX 1080Ti will give you, so it is plausible. Still not all that impressive if the idea is to get people to give up their local hardware and ownership over games.

 

[Foxi4]

Good upscaling can actually do wonders. Ever tried waifu2x?
Those who spend time remastering old movies and anime and play with avisynth will tell you a lot about it

Now of course, that doesn't work when an upscaler needs to be running in real time.

Most people don't know that not all upscaling is quite the same beast - scalers in TV's use simple techniques like Nearest Neighbour to adapt the image to the resolution of the panel, they're rudimentary. Dedicated upscalers that are intended to produce high quality output use complex algorithms, path tracing and filtering to produce an image that is often times quite close to how a native result would've looked. There's upscaling and then there's Upscaling with a capital U - dedicated scaling hardware isn't cheap and does make a difference.

 

[Pipistrele]

So people pay for a wasted bandwith while google simulates flops it doesn't provide. Crooks.

That's sheer robbery.

Stand and deliver, your teraflops or your life

 

[gamesquest1]

why didn't they just render at 640x480 and upscale to 8k, I mean if your going to use upscaling as a selling point why even bother with 1080.....might help reduce some of that input lag too

but really for something like this to succeed, I would imagine it would fall upon steam to try implement it so people can actually use their own games without having to shell out full price for games they already own on a sub-par experience, I have used the steam remote play at home and even that isn't perfect, but if your playing a slow game or turn based game its pretty cool to be able to carry on your game on your phone while cooking or something

this kinda feels like Netflix if you had to pay for every movie you want to watch and it had buffering problems, the only way a service like this will succeed is if its a supplemental service provided by someone like steam/epic or if they manage to provide all the games free with ads or some shit so people live with the sub-par experience

 

[ChibiMofo]

Lmao Google failsorz

Want some feedback from a non-Sony fanboi instead?

 

[the_randomizer]

Most people don't know that not all upscaling is quite the same beast - scalers in TV's use simple techniques like Nearest Neighbour to adapt the image to the resolution of the panel, they're rudimentary. Dedicated upscalers that are intended to produce high quality output use complex algorithms, path tracing and filtering to produce an image that is often times quite close to how a native result would've looked. There's upscaling and then there's Upscaling with a capital U - dedicated scaling hardware isn't cheap and does make a difference.

And Google likes to market false claims, it seems. Glad I never considered buying this laggy overpriced crap.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

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.

 

[SatoXR]

4K, hd, true hd, 3D, 3d glasses, no glasses, upscale, streaming... words that remind me the times working selling electronic devices, people totally confused by the terms and skeptical about the info I shared with them.

 

[Dimensional]

Lol 10 teraflops, yeah, right

This product is one massive Tera-Flop.

 

[the_randomizer]

This product is one massive Tera-Flop.

Well played

 

[Captain_N]

no google. Your shit should have worked as advertised out of the box. Would someone want to buy a 4k tv that only views tv shows and the user will have to wait for an update to watch movies. The Wii U worked better out of the box then your shit, hell, a cd 32 works better then your shit..... A crt displaying 4k converted to analog works better then your shit.

 

[DSpider]

What kind of bullshit response was that? What a waste of time reading it...

They're saying stuff without saying anything.

This kind of speech should be sanctioned.

 

[DaniPoo]

Tell me about it, You cant add in pixels/lines that arent there to begin with!!

ever heard of AI Neural Networks? You would be surprised of what's possible with a lot of money, R&D and a few big data-centers.
I'm not saying that Google is using this when they are upscaling. But I would if I were them.

 

[DSpider]

ever heard of AI Neural Networks? You would be surprised of what's possible with a lot of money, R&D and a few big data-centers.
I'm not saying that Google is using this when they are upscaling. But I would if I were them.

Upscale needs to happen on YOUR end, not on theirs. And wifu2x/Topaz Gigapixel takes several seconds (on a decent PC) for a single frame, let alone 30/second. Good luck doing that on a Chromecast in real-time.

 

[xdarkx]

Google should have spend more time developing the platform as oppose to rushing the product out for no good reason. They also need to figure out who their target audience is. Even now I still don't know who exactly this product would appeal to besides those that just like to be first to adopt new technology (even though this isn't anything new).

 

[DaniPoo]

Upscale needs to happen on YOUR end, not on theirs. And wifu2x/Topaz Gigapixel takes several seconds (on a decent PC) for a single frame, let alone 30/second. Good luck doing that on a Chromecast in real-time.

Who says that upscaling needs to happen on the userend??

 

[DSpider]

Who says that upscaling needs to happen on the userend??

Because it's faster to send a video stream at a lower resolution, since it uses less bandwidth on their server and on your end.

Uses less processing power on their end (meaning less electricity) making the service cheaper (in theory at least, but that almost never happens, lol).

And the stream starts faster with less buffering. Like how you can scrub through a 480p Youtube video faster than you can through a 1080p one.

Less chances of garbage pixelization on the screen because some of the packets were dropped along the way.

Not to mention that a lot of places in the US (and around the world) don't have the kind of bandwidth required for 4k streaming, let alone an additional channel for voice chat or something like that.

 

[andyhappypants]

Who says that upscaling needs to happen on the userend??

graphical fidelity comes second to me when they can’t sort something simple like getting controls working 100% without lag.

This platform is gonna tank!