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Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

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Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#351

Post by pier25 »

yegle wrote: post #320
pier25 wrote: post #233

Sounds great on paper but I'm skeptical. Not only you will need a really good internet connection and wifi, but also being close to a Stadia data center. The best possible case scenario will probably be a latency of around 50 ms, but I'm guessing the average will be closer to 100 ms which is too much for many types of games (specially competitive games the streamers play). Heck, even streaming in your local network i…

I was a beta tester for Project Stream. FWIW, I traveled with a Pixelbook and played Project Stream with the hotel WiFi in Seattle. Everything is smooth and similar (if not the same) experience when I played with my home WiFi. The latency is good from my experience. There are occasional resolution drop but that happens I also played Nvidia Shield Now on Mac while it was beta. I would say Project Stream is a much much…

I'll try Stadia for sure when it gets to my country, probably in 2020 or 2021 since Google is not very fond of Mexico.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#352

Post by pjmlp »

hex12648430 wrote: post #225
vbernat wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PS4 is running on FreeBSD and yet, this doesn't seem to have change anything for FreeBSD gaming.

Well AMD will have to keep writing good Linux drivers which will most likely benefit everyone with an AMD card. They're also partnered with Unity and Epic Games which means these engines will make it easier to target Linux as the release platform and maybe port some DX-only features over to Vulkan.

Which doesn't mean any of those changes will be contributed back to upstream, just like it happened with many of the PS 4 features in clang and AMD drivers, where only what wasn't business critical from Sony's point of view was contributed back.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#353

Post by esalman »

justfor1comment wrote: post #176

I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game will continue before the lag started. This…

That's interesting. I remember now that I signed up for the beta. However I never received an invite :(

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#354

Post by CoolGuySteve »

_v7gu wrote: post #266
rasz wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already cant pirate current generation of console games.

Nope, Switch piracy exists thanks to Nvidia

And what about the other 2 consoles? What are you contributing exactly with your boorish "Nope"?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#355

Post by lione »

geddy wrote: post #330
deminature wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already stream to a mobile device over 4G now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykFQW6Jtc0A The quality of this is only likely to improve with 5G coming in the next year or so. This technology consolidating in the hands of only two companies implies there aren't going to be any competitors. Nvidia is already establishing a foothold in this space, and I imagine AMD will also do so eventually. If the technology…

It's dystopian in the sense that nothing is actually owned anymore. I grew up collecting games and still collect them now, and for a ton of people (the average gamer is in their mid-30s, and that's a massive demographic) still likes to collect their games. They like a shelf of titles. Heck, even those who buy digital have little digital collections, and more power to 'em. But paying a monthly fee and having my gaming…

I'd say the vast majority of PC gamers right now have maybe one or two special edition physical boxes and everything else is digital in their Steam/Origin/Epic accounts. As it is right now at any point those accounts can be closed down without oversight or warning, and you don't legally own the games in your steam account. I don't see game streaming fundamentally changing things at this point, the "own your games" ship sailed long ago. Also like many steam users I have a metric ton of games in my account that I will likely never play or use again in my lifetime. A monthly rental playing a catalog of old games and some new ones might honestly end up costing me less then having all those old useless games in my library that I played once for 2 hours and can't return that I'll never play again.

As for the subway thing, wifi networks are becoming more and more ubiquitous and advanced, I know my local subway has it's own inbuilt wifi, obviously it's not going to be amazing any time soon but between that and 5g and the hotswapping connections to keep uptime, idk it can work.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#356

Post by Androider »

Scramblejams wrote: post #315
meruru wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between this and Valve's push for gaming on Linux, another of Linux' Achilles heels is solved. What else is missing before the Linux desktop is adequate for pretty much everyone?

Developing a game that runs on Stadia and one that runs on the customer's local Linux box are probably going to be two different things, unfortunately. :-(

This isn't going to bring any new local games to Linux, rather it "solves" the gaming problem by simply making these streaming games playable on Linux with Chrome, same as on Windows, Mac, on your TV with ChromeCast, tablets, phones etc.

Much like web apps, YouTube, Netflix etc. today already work flawlessly on Linux, so will gaming too with this development. For most people, the browser is already the only "native" desktop application they use on their computers.

Web apps and web video finally made the Linux desktop viable, but also irrelevant in the bigger picture.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#357

Post by Florin_Andrei »

justfor1comment wrote: post #176

I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game will continue before the lag started. This…

> This was specifically a problem when playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey cause in the cutscene the characters would say something like "Go to the lag * and meet * lag " and then I had no idea what I had to do next.

That's annoying.

Now, as a technicality specific to ACO, the goals should still appear in the mission's description, no matter whether you hear the NPCs stating those goals or not.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#358

Post by RIMR »

alexandre_m wrote: post #182
shereadsthenews wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google operates tiny little datacenters in every ISP POP in America. That is why the video I just watched on Youtube in Oakland came from some place 2ms away even though Google's nearest real datacenter is in Oregon.

Video files (even live stream HTTP based protocols like HLS) can be cached very easily on CDN infrastructure. However, a gaming session means to have a dedicated daemon running for you somewhere. I doubt this can be deployed anywhere on the spot, but perhaps they have some amazing technology for that.

Yeah, but the video file has to be the same video streaming to lots of people.

CDNs aren't helpful if every stream is unique.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#359

Post by bastawhiz »

lbotos wrote: post #348
bastawhiz wrote: post #341

My immediate thought is that Google is going to be actually running the games on hardware in edge data centers (to keep latency low). If you own a cloud software business, you're likely looking for any revenue-driving excuse to build out hundreds/thousands/etc of small DCs in every corner of the world. Stadia revenue (or the promise of Stadia revenue) would pay to build out the infra, and extra capacity could be sold…

I like this thought, but if google can't build edge nodes because of: - GCP - AdSense - Gmail - Internal CDN Needs Then I don't think that Stadia would be a big push for doing so.

They do already have at least _some_ edge presence. But my understanding is that's largely been for distributing content, like YouTube. I imagine storage/bandwidth at the edge are largely solved problems for Google.

Has Google needed to run code physically closer to the user up until now? Likely not. Gmail/AdSense/etc. probably don't have [many] use cases where putting compute physically closer to the user (versus physically closer to a database replica) adds a ton of value.

With the advent of AI/ML, that's changing. Accurately recognizing speech, recognizing people and objects in streaming video, translating text, etc. likely don't require access to other resources, but the latency between the server and the user is super important. Video games are essentially the epitome of the use case: you're not going to need to bang out many queries across the Google network to play a round of Splatoon, but every millisecond of lag you can shave off, the more valuable your service becomes.

I could see Google selling cloud functions that execute within shouting distance of the user. What would the round trip be? 30ms? This could be a play by Google to take on Cloudflare workers.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#360

Post by dougmwne »

LaserToy wrote: post #310

Former PSN eng here. So, it will be very interesting to see what is going to happen. I feel we were not very successful with Playstation Now. It requires a lot of money to even start scaling, you need a powerful (read expensive) machine which can be fully utilized by just 1 AAA game. And for any competitive gaming experience - latency is a big one. If you want to play multiplayer as you going to have latency to Googl…

What do you think of Google's controller? Having it bypass the laptop/chromecast and connect directly to wifi seems like it will save some latency, but how much?
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