Google Stadia in desperate need of promised "negative latency" mode

[amdorintel]

1 hour ago, MadDuke said:

Here in Croatia it's 20 USD for 150 down 15 up

that is really cheap, data in europe is generally cheap

[CarlBar]

2 minutes ago, amdorintel said:

that is really cheap, data in europe is generally cheap

 

Well unlike the US we have actual competion. I get 350mb down for just over £60 a month.

[jiyeon]

7 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I don't know why but the GIF is simultaneously both the most amusing thing and irritating thing.

 

I saw Gene's tweet regarding it and it was at work, so some people were speculating that the work network was re-routing the connection before it reached his system, so the delay is exaggerated from other people playing from their home.

[vanished]

Just now, sowon said:

I don't know why but the GIF is simultaneously both the most amusing thing and irritating thing.

 

I saw Gene's tweet regarding it and it was at work, so some people were speculating that the work network was re-routing the connection before it reached his system, so the delay is exaggerated from other people playing from their home.

It's absolutely possible and I definitely want to know for sure one way or another if that's the case, but I'm reluctant to accept that completely due to a few things.  For one, I would hope and expect that anyone reviewing this service has the adequate experience to recognize and avoid such an issue and not blame the service for a LAN issue.  Second, the fact their wifi experience (though very poor) was so much better gives me pause.  Is their wifi not routed through the same network that their ethernet access is?  That would seem to be very odd to me.

[yolosnail]

I don't get how Google can be having issues like this (if they even exist)

I tried out Nvidia's game streaming platform when it was first announced and I never had any latency issues on a 40/10 'fibre' connection over WiFi. If there were any I certainly didn't notice

[MadDuke]

17 minutes ago, amdorintel said:

that is really cheap, data in europe is generally cheap

Yeah. But also the reason why from my crap part of the EU the closest server will probably end up in Hungary. 

The closest Edge node (if I recall correctly where Stadia will be probably hosted there) for me will be Budapest and best case scenario 15ms so 30 both ways. 

Which should correspond to a delay of 

1 frame at 30 fps

2 frames at 60 fps

4 frames at 120 fps.

 

or double that from some probable real world scenarios

This should be more than enough for everything except e-sports needs. 

 

 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

 

[Trik'Stari]

Just let this service die before steaming games becomes even remotely profitable and we end up in the same situation video streaming has ended up.

 

I do not understand how anyone who games thinks that game streaming from a company's hardware is a good idea. In the end, you'll have to buy a subscription from each of the major publishing companies and you will, in a given amount of time, end up paying as much or more than a console or decent gaming PC, for less actual value in game.

 

Yeah, I said it. Even console gaming is more of a value than Stadia.

 

This will, at best, further segment the market, lead to more exclusivity, drastically decreased value, and the death of game modding for the biggest game franchises. The indie community will continue to exist, but get ever smaller.

[That Franc]

Spoiler

I can stream games from my shoddy home PC to my nearly 8 year old ThinkPad over 4G without a noticeable delay when I'm half a city away - without any monthly fees. Google has zero excuses for screwing stuff up that badly and charging money for it.

[vanished]

4 minutes ago, That Franc said:

  Hide contents

 

I can stream games from my shoddy home PC to my nearly 8 year old ThinkPad over 4G without a noticeable delay when I'm half a city away - without any monthly fees. Google has zero excuses for screwing stuff up that badly and charging money for it.

It's hard to tell exactly but I count at least 4 frames of delay, so at 24 fps that comes out to about 166 ms.  Better than any of WP's examples but still far from what I would call "without noticeable delay"

[That Franc]

15 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

It's hard to tell exactly but I count at least 4 frames of delay, so at 24 fps that comes out to about 166 ms.  Better than any of WP's examples but still far from what I would call "without noticeable delay"

Noticeable delay is the delay that noticeably affects gameplay, not the delay you can notice by going through a recording frame by frame  (I called it not noticeable because I didn't notice it when playing)
In my experience, a couple games are slightly difficult to play remotely - Battlefield 4 and Forza Horizon 4, the rest (at least the ones I've tried) actually feel really good.

[vanished]

Just now, That Franc said:

Noticeable delay is the delay that noticeably affects gameplay, not the delay you can notice by going through a recording frame by frame  (I called it not noticeable because I didn't notice it when playing)
In my experience, a couple games are slightly difficult to play remotely - Battlefield 4 and Forza Horizon 4, the rest (at least the ones I've played) actually feel really good.

I noticed it easily just by watching the video, that's what made me curious enough to check frame by frame just so it could be quantified.  If it works for you that's great, just giving my view of it.

[maartendc]

Of course the latency will depend on your specific connection and distance to a Google Stadia server farm.

 

I assume the writers of that Washington Post article are in Washington DC? Not sure how close they would be to the nearest Google Server, even though it is a major US city.

 

Giant Bomb did a quick look of stadia, and they experienced very minimal latency, almost unnoticeable. But they are in San Francisco... probably Google data centers are all over the Bay Area.

 

The service is probably really only viable for people in very certain areas (close to a google data center) with fast internet access.

 

 

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

For one, I would hope and expect that anyone reviewing this service has the adequate experience to recognize and avoid such an issue and not blame the service for a LAN issue. 

You're expecting WAAAAY too much from mainstream reviewers.

 

 

7 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Second, the fact their wifi experience (though very poor) was so much better gives me pause.  Is their wifi not routed through the same network that their ethernet access is?

Depends on how it's configured, but it's not uncommon to handle wired and wireless connections differently for security purposes.

The fact that it's such a massive difference between the phone and PC latency tells me that something is up. Not sure what, but it doesn't really make sense that the phone has about half as much latency as their presumably wired desktop (might be a wireless desktop too).

[MadDuke]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Depends on how it's configured, but it's not uncommon to handle wired and wireless connections differently for security purposes.

The fact that it's such a massive difference between the phone and PC latency tells me that something is up. Not sure what, but it doesn't really make sense that the phone has about half as much latency as their presumably wired desktop (might be a wireless desktop too).

I actually had a crappy ISP router and when I had a ~20-30 percent of the network saturated on ethernet, connecting with my laptop to wi-fi would offer better performance.  

[Taf the Ghost]

4 hours ago, maartendc said:

Of course the latency will depend on your specific connection and distance to a Google Stadia server farm.

 

I assume the writers of that Washington Post article are in Washington DC? Not sure how close they would be to the nearest Google Server, even though it is a major US city.

 

Giant Bomb did a quick look of stadia, and they experienced very minimal latency, almost unnoticeable. But they are in San Francisco... probably Google data centers are all over the Bay Area.

 

The service is probably really only viable for people in very certain areas (close to a google data center) with fast internet access.

 

 

Tokyo, South Korea, chunks of LA and San Fran are the major, viable markets for something like Stadia. Or maybe the only viable markets, yet their game lineup is more targeted at suburban teenagers. They've got a real Target Market vs Real Market problem with this product.

 

Main technical aspect that is of note is actually how poorly the games are running. It seems clear they're going to be running at least a couple of instances of Game Clients per GPU they have in their servers. Which means somehow Google is selling a product that looks worse than Launch Xbox/PS4s. There's some impressive "what were you thinking?" questions that really should be addressed, but it has seemed clear, to me, that Google has always had little interest in rolling out a true consumer product. They wanted to build a GPGPU infrastructure and this was their idea for how to make others pay for it. And, hey, if it's a hit, they'll make money.

[maartendc]

29 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Tokyo, South Korea, chunks of LA and San Fran are the major, viable markets for something like Stadia. Or maybe the only viable markets, yet their game lineup is more targeted at suburban teenagers. They've got a real Target Market vs Real Market problem with this product.

 

Main technical aspect that is of note is actually how poorly the games are running. It seems clear they're going to be running at least a couple of instances of Game Clients per GPU they have in their servers. Which means somehow Google is selling a product that looks worse than Launch Xbox/PS4s. There's some impressive "what were you thinking?" questions that really should be addressed, but it has seemed clear, to me, that Google has always had little interest in rolling out a true consumer product. They wanted to build a GPGPU infrastructure and this was their idea for how to make others pay for it. And, hey, if it's a hit, they'll make money.

Well there are theoretically plenty of "casual gamers" in those markets that this kind of service could appeal to that don't own a console yet.

 

I just don't know if the target market for this service exists. PERIOD. This service is only for people who want to play AAA games, yet don't own or want to own a console yet (because you still have to buy the games in both cases). Who is that??

 

Most people either care about AAA gaming, or don't. If you care, you bought a console a long time a go. If you don't, you just don't.

[Taf the Ghost]

5 minutes ago, maartendc said:

Well there are theoretically plenty of "casual gamers" in those markets that this kind of service could appeal to that don't own a console yet.

 

I just don't know if the target market for this service exists. PERIOD. This service is only for people who want to play AAA games, yet don't own or want to own a console yet (because you still have to buy the games in both cases). Who is that??

 

Most people either care about AAA gaming, or don't. If you care, you bought a console a long time a go. If you don't, you just don't.

The audience that can afford full-priced games on Stadia would already have between 1 to 3 consoles in those markets, since the games are targeted at age 15-25 year old males. Mobile/Casual is 18-35 year old female dominated. That's the disconnect. This is why Tokyo & South Korea should have been the primary target markets. Those have large 4G/WiFi infrastructure along with a very small console market but huge Mobile market. Google isn't this incompetent. Their management is pretty terrible, in general, but they do hire the "best & brightest" and they wouldn't miss what is pretty obvious to anyone that's spent 10 minutes looking at global gaming trends.

 

Google has put more into the server infrastructure hardware than anything else in this project, which points to the actual reasons for the project. Stadia is just an excuse to get someone else to pay for the project.

[WereCat]

I got better latency when streaming from my PC to mobile with SteamLink over LTE. 

[TechyBen]

19 hours ago, Princess Luna said:

So it's a problem regardless of your Internet connection latency? That looks pretty awful even to me who often do couch gaming on a TV with game pad.

 

And to think their negative latency technology could end up being like nVidia DLSS... great on paper but with a failed execution that only worsens everything... seems like local hardware is still staying around for a good while before we're ready for fully "cloud gaming".

How. Mathematically and physically it's not possible unless you have 10x the hardware/performance (so it works in 3+ frame move/increase on retro games where it REALLY is used, to map multiple inputs before actioning in game, so the game is running 1-3fps "ahead" of the player, which in reality is just a render engine offset to some extent).

 

"negative latency" is bunk, snake oil and pseudoscience aint even good bad enough for it.

[SADS]

I don't really think that you will ever get a better experience than running a game on your machine locally that pretty much responds instantly to your inputs.

 

I understand that these companies want to make money. And credit to them for trying. But this method has tried and failed before and to be honest, even if it was low latency, it's still not faster than running the game on my machine... and I probably still wouldn't want it.

 

Not everything has to be 'servicified'...

I don't want to be milked of my wage every month thanks... even if every business these days sees me as a cash cow.

 

I heard about piracy being on the rise recently because there are so many companies offering services now, people are having to pay-up way too much every month for a number of services that have exclusive content on and the user only wants a small portition of that service.

[Doobeedoo]

To no ones shock, absolutely horrible. And to even pay for this, worse experience than starting time of gaming. So bad. 

Such a better option to get a PC and avoid all the mess, have your own local machine, control, etc. 

This is an insult, to subscribe, for this?! Literally gamers looking to lower latency and input lag, this being extreme opposite. 

[Otto_iii]

Googles bigger then they know what do with themselves, they do this thing every few years where instead of being a search engine+an ad service, or some practical service for businesses (say Google Docs, Drive etc) they try to create something nobody wants and invest crazy amounts of money into it, then fail.

i hope Stadia fails sooner then later, i want the used GPU market to be flooded with more of Radeon VII then it knows what to do with
 

19 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Stadia will work in South Korea, Tokyo, a few Major USA cities and, possibly, the places with early 5G. That's about going to be it. That's always been the case with this tech. MS & Sony all know it's an "add-on" tech for high population areas and useful in things like adventure games & what not.

coasties at it again smh

[BuckGup]

I beta tested GeForce Now over a year ago which is exactly what stadia is except you can use steam, origin, or any gaming platform to

purchase games. I tried it on a 1 gigabit connection and while the latency was noticeable it wasn’t anything worse than a TV would be. I was also playing fast paced games like fortnite and it took a bit but you got used to it. I then tried it again on a 5gigabit connection and it was damn good. Still some lag but it was getting marginal at that point. I don’t suspect most to have 5 gig connections though. So whatever google is doing NVIDIA did much better over a year ago

[Taf the Ghost]

5 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

I beta tested GeForce Now over a year ago which is exactly what stadia is except you can use steam, origin, or any gaming platform to

purchase games. I tried it on a 1 gigabit connection and while the latency was noticeable it wasn’t anything worse than a TV would be. I was also playing fast paced games like fortnite and it took a bit but you got used to it. I then tried it again on a 5gigabit connection and it was damn good. Still some lag but it was getting marginal at that point. I don’t suspect most to have 5 gig connections though. So whatever google is doing NVIDIA did much better over a year ago

OnLive was apparently not a terrible experience, but, as you quite rightly point out, who is going to have that level of connection? In theory it'll be fairly common in highly populated areas in a decade, but latency is the true killer in this. Though I could see a revival in story-driven interactive games, as point & click would work well in a streaming format.