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Comment by eternalny1 | Hacker News Reader

Stadia to me may not be ready yet, but I have no doubt in the future this is how we will be gaming.

Once bandwidth is ubiquitous enough to stream 4K games at 60 FPS without having to INSTALL anything or even OWN A GAMING PC/CONSOLE, this is a no brainer.

Why shell out for a new 2080TI card when you can just pay another month to Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k 60 FPS?

No downloading a 150 GB game, no patching, no constant hardware upgrading, no having to go back in your catalog and reinstall everything if you get a new system. They are all there and you just "press start".

I realize Stadia currently does not run RDR2 at 4k and 60 FPS. But it will once the hardware and bandwidth landscape catches up.

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What you're saying makes sense, but

> No downloading a 150 GB game, no patching, no constant hardware upgrading, no having to go back in your catalog and reinstall everything if you get a new system.

Downloads and updates also speed up as bandwidth improves.

Download sizes also grow as graphics hardware and thus asset quality improves. 4k 60fps stream will consume same bandwidth regardless of a game size.

Bandwidth isn't the problem. Latency is. Multiple gigabits of bandwidth won't help you when it takes half a second for your character to start jumping after you hit the button.

With such latency we would have 0 online shooters. But we have a lot of them.

There is a bunch of tricks that go into the netcode though. A slight delay on hit recognition is noticeable and sometimes annoying, but movement can be silky smooth. With Stadia, wouldn't that latency open you up to input lag?

Of course there is, but there are some tricks also for it :) Modern software (and AI) can predict some user actions very precisely. Anyway, there will be input lag, without any doubts, even with the smartest AI, but for some games it's pretty acceptable. Especially for non-competitive ones.

I've used Parsec. It's not perfect, but better than a low to mid-range gaming machine. The input delay isn't as much of a problem as bandwidth, but it could definitely be improved. The problems arise when setting it to 120+ FPS.

60FPS works surprisingly well, and for single player games you probably wouldn't even notice the input delay.

Stadia is most likely much more optimized.

Basically everyone there uses client based prediction models (for your and enemies actions).

I know about it. Trust me, NOBODY will play with a teammate with 500ms latency. On EU servers my usual latency is 43-47ms. It's really far from "half of a second".

I (EU) played regularly with someone in Australia on R6:S and it wasn't much of a problem. He's used to latency issues so he played as well as anyone else would.

It's not possible to get used to such huge latency (500ms). He is a burden for a team in competitive games. It is a fact (if that "friend from Australia" exist at all).

That friend certainly exists and he's not a burden on the team. Maybe you focus too much on the latency number and forget that some people play to have fun, while still playing very decently.

I think it's very rude you suggest I don't know people in Australia (do you even know someone from Australia?)

Still I don't believe you. I have experience of playing competitive shooter with 250ms latency and it was nearly impossible to aim. And you are talking about 500ms latency. Let's just agree to disagree.

Well, he plays with between 100 and 300ms latency on average, atleast whenever I check the player screen. They're perfectly capable of hitting targets reliably.

On a similar note, I used to play World of Tanks with around 400ms latency before I got a better internet uplink, while it's certainly bad for a month, you start to get used to it eventually and the brain compensates. Of course, if reaction time matters you loose, but you can adapt your playstyle in a lot of games so that pure reaction time doesn't matter as much.

but thats different. the input is still local so the latency there is only the output. its much more noticable if the input has latency

You are severely underestimating Google's infrastructure if you think the latency to your nearest datacenter is going to be 500 ms.

Sharing without comment: https://twitter.com/GenePark/status/1196488999524802562

The latency for a few people involved did actually exceed a second.

The problem is you need the latency for the nearest Google DC with graphic cards in servers which might not be your nearest Google DC at all. And Google probably fucked up other things too, considering the amount of fail in thsi product.

I think there's a potential for how games are made to make a huge change. One possibility is a "thin-client" that sends input events separate from the rendering machine.

A drastic improvement to input/rendering delay for "cloud gaming" (<10-30ms) and lots of bandwidth could even attract professional gamers. Having the your gaming machine in the same DC as the game servers is a huge advantage if everything else is optimized.

It's exciting what the future might hold.

That type of thing is alright for action inputs like shooting, running, etc. I've yet to use a game streaming service, including Steam Link inside my own house, that doesn't make first-person camera movement nauseating.

> I realize Stadia currently does not run RDR2 at 4k and 60 FPS. But it will once the hardware and bandwidth landscape catches up.

You mean when the PS5 is out and runs RDR3 at 8k at 120 FPS for $350 ?

Cloud computing is an ancient idea. Unisys was huge, before I was born (it destroyed itself just about when I filled my last diaper). Cloud computing has advantages: connectivity, content and interaction, both between players and between content providers, even then. It also has huge disadvantages: MUCH less capacity. Cpu, memory, display, speed, ... all are less on the cloud.

That can be a great trade for a number of applications, especially line of business apps, but I must say I don't see it working well for games.

I am not so sure. Downloading, updating, installing are certainly no issues if the bandwidth problem is solved. It just isn't really a hassle today for people with good connections. Maybe it will capture the casual market, but there are disadvantages to the platform.

Just think of modding as an example. It might capture some console players, but I am not sure if they pull off even that, since the service is actually more expensive. In that case they will also need to compete with exclusives like other systems and it is questionable if developers will commit.

> Downloading, updating, installing are certainly no issues if the bandwidth problem is solved.

No. The problem's of proper system administration go far beyond issues of bandwidth. To apply a positive change you have to know about it, find it, download it, install it, and configure it. Not to mention it helps to understand the content of the patch, how it applies, and the social/technical context of the patch. And with Windows, this is in the presence of a large amount of proprietary software at the operating system, device driver, and application level.

So, no, good bandwidth does not solve the sysadmin problem.

Steam automatically updates your games. Windows 10 automatically installs updates for your system. Chocolatey automatically updates your apps. And your driver software automatically updates your drivers if you choose. Everything on my computer automatically updates without my intervention unless I choose to intervene right now. With GNU/linux it's even easier with package managers. Same with Mac.

Consoles solved the sysadmin problem decades ago.

Er... Was 2001 the last time you gamed on a computer?

All those issues are solved in modern day pc gaming. Even GOG with its drm free games automatically updates and syncs your games, and even supports beta channels. Also, I don't recall the last time I had a OS related problem more complex than "update your graphic card driver".

On consoles this is even more of a non issue.

>> you can just pay another month to Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k 60 FPS?

Except that you can't, because even though the premium tier is advertised as 4K/60fps, the game actually runs in 1440p. The Stadia hardware as it is right now simply isn't powerful enough to run that game in 4K.

I can see it running many games in "very good" frame rates and quality. But the economics don't make sense for Google if it tries to match the true high end PC configs. Once RDR2 is at 60fps, there will be other games pushing the envelope that won't be at 60fps on Stadia. Same applies to other consoles, of course... I'm saying that PC Gaming will still allow premium experiences for a while.

I don't see this cost argument.

Either you buy a decent gaming PC and use it personally a few hours a week, or Google buys a decent gaming PC and uses it ~50 hours per week across ~10 users on average.

Google can probably also utilize that gaming PC during the other 118 hours of the week with batch jobs, indexing, etc. Your PC will just be idle and depreciating at 3am.

Google's costs are clearly lower.

Not necessarily if you factor in some sort of impact for the slightly degraded experience they'll be offering you. You and Google may buy the same gaming pc and clearly they'll have lower costs, but that doesn't mean that your experience playing locally on that machine is the same as the experience of a streamed game on that machine. To compare apples to apples you'd have to compare the kind of machine you'd need to replicate the streamed experience, and that would very likely be a cheaper computer, so it's really an empirical question.

The high end PC customer can keep upgrading frequently, while Google will need to upgrade their entire data center to offer the top experience every few months. They will settle for a reasonable good/great experience for their user base, while the High end PC owner will always be above the Stadia standard setup.

So it's not that Google's cost is higher than the high end PC owner, it's just that the high end PC owner is willing to throw more money at it to stay on top compare to what Google is willing to throw at its entire user base.

Console hardware is vastly underpowered compared to PCs and yet frequently competes with mid-tier graphics cards in terms of performance and graphics quality.

The reason is that game devs are able to optimize their games specifically for the GPUs in the console hardware. Google is presumably betting that if they get enough market share, devs will start to optimize for _their_ hardware, and reap similar rewards.

Why shell out for a new 2080TI card when you can just pay another month to Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k 60 FPS?

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Think of it like the “free” phone you get with a contract. You will look back and realise you have spent more than you would have if you did buy it, and at the end you won’t have the hardware.

But then the question naturally becomes what could someone at that point be running in their own home? 8k at 120fps? Part of the argument needs to be that the cloud stack could eventually deliver an experience that would surpass what a "gamer" could cost-effectively create locally, and I'm not 100% that's necessarily the case.

The 4k 60 fps bw requirement is just 35 Mbps, is there really catching up to do unless we're talking about mobile hotspots? Netflix 4k is 25 Mbps.

Latency might still be an issue for many

If everyone would use that bandwidth simultaneously, that can put huge loads on the net.

Imagine you suddenly have 3 kids. You would need to tell your least favorite kid that it needs to play outside because your connection is too slow.

"Back in 2020 I sometimes had to choose between playing video games at 1080p and going to play outside because my parents didn't want to subscribe to the 100 M net connection, you kids today don't know how tough we had it." "Really gramps? I know 1080p looks terrible but how could they threaten you with the outside?" "Well the outdoors was less of a scorched hellscape back then. "

In Germany I have 8 Mbps DSL

60 FPS is garbage for a lot of games

If bandwidth is good enough to handle 4K 60 FPS game streaming, downloading or patching a 150 GB game will be breezy enough it won't bother you much anyways.

Bear in mind, the Washington Post reviewer who was showing how bad Stadia was on the office's gigabit connection was speedtesting at 291 Mbps down at the time.

That still doesn't cover the cost of a high-end gaming machine. GPU alone can be north of $1k. Imagine not having to re-buy all those components every 2-3 years.

Stadia isn't going to give you the visual quality of a high-end gaming machine so that's a bad comparison. 4k at 60 FPS doesn't mean anything if there is lag and compression artifacting.

Stadia is like a 960 GTX equivalent quality for the free tier and a 1080 GTX for the 4k tier. Let's not kid ourselves about the level of hardware power that one gets from this service.

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