"Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it" • Hacker News Board

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#661

Post by Tsarbomb » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

evervevdww221 wrote: post #154

akvadrako wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it make sense that a computer at home, with 5% utilization and retail power prices, can be less per hour than a computer with 50% utilization and wholesale power? Even if all you do is host single-user machines with retail games installed and some kind of imaging solution, it seems like it should pay off.

$2 per hour per machine is not a made-up number, just check how much Amazon charges for a GPU vm. Again, we were a small company, we had to use other cloud providers. I don't know why amazon or alike are so expensive. We tried colocation too, not any cheaper to be honest. Also, when buying a computer or a console, you don't pay by usage. you pay one time to own the hardware and the remaining 5 year usage is free, plu…

> And I'm saying "Eventually" is actually a month.

I was the technical lead on a project where I warned the product owner that implementing a certain feature the way they wanted in AWS would have astronomical costs. I was told "let me worry about the money".

A month later we were told to scale down our ECS and EMR usage as the bill was astronomical.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#662

Post by dwild » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

smileybarry wrote: post #623

dwild wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With web workers and web assembly soon we'll see AAA games running in the browser on any device. I heard something similar to that for the past 10 years at least. > you can progressively stream the 3d models in real time while playing People were amazed of the speed at which models loaded using an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive... and that was when games were in the 5 GB range. Loading time is latency too.…

Streaming will never take off for competitive playing, because the physical latency will always be there. You already have people optimizing their display & input latency, not to mention GPU buffering tweaks, to shave anywhere from 5-20ms off the final result, and that's in _local_ gaming. Windows 10 1803 introduced a "fake fullscreen" mode to cut around the window compositor lag. Assuming Stadia really does all thes…

> Streaming will never take off for competitive playing, because the physical latency will always be there.

If they are forced to, I have no doubt they will. It's not because there's more constraint that competitive game play won't happen. A mouse is so much more powerful than a gamepad that crossplay between console and PC on FPS is pretty rare. Yet you'll find competitive fields in console FPS too.

They'll definitely takes any advantage they can, that's including "fake fullscreen" to cut out lag, better display, mouse, etc... but I have no doubt if a competitive game happens on the cloud, the gamer will be there just as much.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#663

Post by dwild » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 7:38 PM UTC

touchpadder wrote: post #433

dwild wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With web workers and web assembly soon we'll see AAA games running in the browser on any device. I heard something similar to that for the past 10 years at least. > you can progressively stream the 3d models in real time while playing People were amazed of the speed at which models loaded using an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive... and that was when games were in the 5 GB range. Loading time is latency too.…

Turbofan optimisations, SharedArrayBuffer, Web Assembly really impacted performance of my game engine. With enough assets it's already possible to make GTA V complexity and quality game running in the browser. The biggest progress in browsers and webgl performance happened in the last 3 years so it doesn't matter what you've been hearing 10 years ago. It already happened and is possible NOW, even on phones. "Loading…

> The biggest progress in browsers and webgl performance happened in the last 3 years so it doesn't matter what you've been hearing 10 years ago.

There has been some amazing progress in the past 10 years too ...

> It doesn't matter if you're getting closer to an object and in the distance it fades in(or loads higher LOD) even with 500ms delay.

If it fades in 484ms for the other guy, he just saw you a full frame earlier than you (and that's excluding the potential 484 ms remaining ;)). That sound much more like gamebreaking than my 50 ms over Nvidia Geforce Now, but I'm also just a casual gamer.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#664

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 8:06 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #650

Dylan16807 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games. If you want the equivalent visual quality of the service, I don't think a 4 year old $120 GPU is enough. Maybe you don't care about the game settings, but I was going for apples to apples.

If you read the article and the attached twitter threads, stadia's streamed content is not of high visual fidelity.

Being worse than an Xbox One _X_ doesn't mean you could run it on an old cheap GPU.

Also the PC version of Stadia seems extra broken compared to the chromecast version right now, and there's a tweet in there saying it looks a lot better on chromecast.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#665

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 8:22 PM UTC

Faark wrote: post #658

Dylan16807 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I said that. But cheating vs. not cheating has nothing to do with needing a 'serious' server. Edit: Okay I really need someone to explain why this particular comment got downvoted, I'm baffled.

Keep in mind MMOs have a persistent world. In CoD, meeting a cheater can ruin a 20min (? haven't played in a while) game session. In an MMO, it might screw up the entire economy. Thus off-loading authoritative work to clients is pretty much a no go. To prevent clients from cheating, you have to run pretty much the entire game engine on the server. Sure, you can strip graphics, but not physics, cooldowns or inventory…

Having a persistent world does not need a 'serious' server.

And I mentioned trust in my first post. It's a reason to use a server, but it's not a reason to use a 'serious' server.

None of these are reasons you couldn't use 40 tiny weak throwaway servers in place of 5 big serious servers.

> As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.

That sounds more like a shooter than an MMO. And a shooter instance definitely fits into a tiny 2-4 core server.

> dev time is valuable as well

Which is why so much software is single-threaded. And single-threaded software only needs one core.

(And the dev time for what I was talking about would be tiny, and it would save money overall. There are good reasons not to do it, but I don't think dev time is one of those good reasons.)

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#666

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 8:35 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #651

taneq wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not "running modern games" at any kind of acceptable frame rate and quality on a 15 year old CPU. And you absolutely aren't running VR on a 15 year old CPU even if you have a 4 year old GPU that technically fits within the minimum requirements.

I run VR with an i5 4440 and an RX 580 8gb. The CPU is 6(!) years old and the GPU is about 3. I have no trouble running VR games at 90fps consistently and 1.5-2.0 supersampling. Games like H3VR, VTOL VR, and I still have headroom to transcode video using OBS studio and stream to twitch and save locally. I also run Windows 7 meaning I am missing about a 10-20% performance bump from advanced features of the Windows 10…

A 10 year old CPU might barely work, depending on the game. But you're describing a 2.5 year old $230 (but more in practice) GPU, which is massively ahead of a 4 year old $120 GPU. And every year past 5 for the CPU loses you more performance at an increasing rate, since things weren't stagnant then.

> I also run Windows 7 meaning I am missing about a 10-20% performance bump from advanced features of the Windows 10 drivers.

Where did you get those numbers? Also you'd be avoiding a lot of the microcode security-mitigation slowdowns that way.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#667

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 8:47 PM UTC

clinth wrote: post #633

Dylan16807 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about the fundamental value of the product, so the normal price matters a lot more than the preorder price.

I get where you're coming from, but go to Stadia's page. Click "Buy Now". You land at $130 plus $10/month with no other options. This isn't a future product or preorder, this is launch. The hardware and service are live right now. If you want to play: $130 plus $10/month. I think this release structure is pretty daring. They're getting a lot of bad press, it's expensive, it's not a smooth experience. Also, if nobody…

They don't have to say on their website that it's three-ish months of paid beta access to make that the reality.

> Also, if nobody gets on this holiday season, I'd expect game developers to throttle on putting money into optimizing for the platform, which would begin the platform death spiral.

Google can very easily afford to pay 50 developers to optimize for it. I only see this dying from Google's direct failures, not from that kind of death spiral.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#668

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

Crinus wrote: post #617

Dylan16807 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of your games do you play more than a year after purchase? If you could have rented most of your games at a lower price, and then bought the ones you really liked on sale, would you have paid more money total?

With a few exceptions, pretty much all of them are games i buy at some sale or at recommendation of someone i trust but i find time for actually playing them much later. Many of those games (e.g. VtMB that i mentioned elsewhere) are games i've bought (let alone played) way after their developers ceased to exist. You probably need to check out the whole "gaming backlog" meme :-P

That doesn't answer the second question I asked, though.

And pretend I asked what percent you continue to play more than a year after starting them.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#669

Post by jayparth » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #636

Kaiyou wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing how, imho, the best games of all time were all made in the 1990s, I don't think gaming is all that reliant on powerful hardware.

Agree with your point but I'd say 1980s!

Agree with your point but I'd say {decades in which you were a child}!

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#670

Post by ukyrgf » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 10:48 PM UTC

taneq wrote: post #505

ukyrgf wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games. I built my first computer 15 years ago for $500 using a $120 GPU. 10 years ago I upgraded it with a $120 GPU. 4 years ago I upgraded that with a $120 GPU. It should support VR, but I imagine when that tech has matured I'll want to pick up another $120 GPU.

You're not "running modern games" at any kind of acceptable frame rate and quality on a 15 year old CPU. And you absolutely aren't running VR on a 15 year old CPU even if you have a 4 year old GPU that technically fits within the minimum requirements.

Nobody said anything about the CPU, I've gone from two cores to quad to now... I dunno, whatever the hell an i7 is. 16? My screens have also gone from 1680x1050 to 1920x1080 to 2560x1080. I just took umbrage with the idea that you need to spend hundreds on your GPU to get good performance. People see the 3-monitor setups and RGB lights and streaming equipment and think that's PC gaming, but it's not.

Games are more efficient than ever today. The worst era was definitely the really lazy Xbox 360 ports at the end of the 00s/early 10s. Those games would turn my GPU into a space heater.