Google is blatantly lying about the quality of Stadia’s games | Hacker News Reader

Google is blatantly lying about the quality of Stadia’s games

9to5google.com

89 pointsOsiris30 comments

Depends on how they measure 4k and 60fps.. i mean their dongle can output that steadily even with 1fps and 800x600 stream..

I seriously see no point to stadia, at all. Main concern is an input lag - you either have a huge lag(150+ms is huge) or you use some kind of predictive algorithm.. and then you get input mis-predictions which are very noticeable and annoying for players.

Not to mention a bit of philosophical approach - is it even you playing the game? why not watch lets play instead(i hate myself for saying this)?

I've seen side-by-side comparison of RDR2 on stadia and xbone, and it looked like stadia was running on low details(not to mention that everything was blurry due to upscaling) - but i have no idea how legitimate that comparison was.

The biggest failure I see with stadia is completely misguided game genre choice. The setup would work perfectly for slow methodical games; I'm sure many a player would love to cruise around Euro Truck simulator at 'Holy Shit' graphic levels or spend hours crafting their Cities Skylines creations on their Chromebook. So why on earth did they pick twitch shooters and fighting games for a high latency service when they know the playerbase for such games can have huge obsessive arguments over the true refresh rate of their 144hz monitors??

Hey, we don't have obsessive arguments over the true refresh rate of our 144 Hz monitors, we only have obsessive arguments over if you should enable or disable vsync on 144 Hz gsync monitors when you already cap your frame rate below the refresh rate to avoid the vsync input latency, because you could either get one frame of increased latency or one frame of tearing if the FPS cap misbehaves or the frame rate drops suddenly.

So, yeah. What's stadia?

I just play OpenArena: you don't need to worry about latency when you're locked at 333 FPS.

I remember first reading about this in a magazine 10-15 years ago. It's not about whether this makes sense. They need this to happen because they (Google, Amazon, everyone) want to offer pc-as-a-service. Every tech purchase you make which is over 300$ (or whatever) they would rather somehow offer it to you for 20$ a month. There is so much redundancy in owning things and even though some middle classes can afford it, it's still a margin to catch for the big corps

Agreed. The same point was made in an earlier article on Stadia, comparing it to Sun Microsystems' thin client SunBlade machines. Essentially dumb terminals that are useless as a computer unless it's logged into a Sun-based VM.

When the Blackberry CEOs were ousted in 2012, the new CEO Thorsten Heins frequently spoke about dumb terminals to escape the challenges of low-margin hardware. Rather than trying to compete with Asian OEMs in that area, let them make the hardware, while BB provided the software on a subscription basis.

I'm more wondering: this service has been tried and failed at least once by OnLive, who were acquishutdown: "Sony has acquired important parts of OnLive. Due to the sale, all OnLive services were discontinued as of April 30, 2015."

Is the technology now good enough? But haven't gamers' expectations increased in the meantime? Is there any group of customers more notorious for unreasonable expectations and anger when those expectations aren't met?

Both publisher/devs and customers have unreasonable expectations about games and google with stadia. We all remember molyneux and are experiencing star citizen.

People see games and its like their brain hits light speed. Expectations warp to infinity, imagination is set to overdrive and it all seems reasonable because computers are insanely overpowered compared to anything people can reasonably estimate. Up until the point you have drudged the hundred miles OnLive or Doom has been and you understand why they made the choices they did...

The visual fidelity is not the first step, getting the gameplay working like normal or better is priority one. Games are an interactive real time medium, that's the differing point to choose your own adventure books and movies. Even the majority of slower paced games will feel bad to play with lag.

Heh - I had friends and colleagues who went to "Yummy Interactive" in 1999 to do this exact same thing - initially it was downloaded, locally cached subscription games (ala "Steam"), but my associates were also working on "streamed" games then.

Reliable, low-latency bandwidth was even harder to come by then... (And considering that the latest news releases for "Yummy Interactive" on their site were in 2013, I am pretty sure they also couldn't make it work...)

I was quite upset after paying $3-5 for a movie off Youtube that was labeled as "HD" which ended up being 480p. It turns out that 480p is technically considered "HD"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_video

> any video image with considerably more than 480 vertical lines

480p is not considered HD, technically or otherwise. Demand your money back.

>While there is no standardized meaning for high-definition, generally any video image with considerably more than 480 vertical lines (North America) or 576 vertical lines (Europe) is considered high-definition.

If there is no "Standardized Meaning" can you really go back and demand a refund?...curious, not trolling. :)

I think if you fail all common post-1970 definitions, then yes. Absolutely.

It's also a customer services process; there's never anything stopping you from demanding your money back. Just as they can tell you to buzz off. This seems well within the "worth a punt" category, here.

Out of curiosity, what happens when you buy a movie on YT? Do you download a physical file in a DRM-free format? Or is it something you can only watch inside the YT app, and only when you're logged into your account?

>Out of curiosity, what happens when you buy a movie on YT? Do you download a physical file in a DRM-free format?

Oh sweet summer child.

>Oh sweet summer child.

who? the person with the legitimate question , or the person who doesn't seem to realize that some folks download anything they want from youtube, purchased videos included?

youtube-dl is great, and it makes you realize that video streaming sites aren't as ephemeral as the owners wish they'd be. Similar tools exist for Netflix.

Anyone that trusts these groups after things like the Amazon e-book removals probably should re-evaluate how they think property can work. Save what you can -- it won't be there tomorrow.

I download anything I want from youtube, but, for obvious reasons, I don't expect youtube to serve me with a direct download link for a movie I've rented.

>Oh sweet summer child

Patronizing comments like this don't really have a place in any meaningful discussion.

Doesn't hurt to ask. Even Apple eventually made iTunes music downloads DRM-free, but I doubt they'd even consider it for video.

You can only watch it on YouTube when logged in; that's been my experience of buying films on there.

That's what I figured. Sad state of affairs. It's the same on Amazon Prime Video. You can download for offline viewing, but it can only be watched inside the app.

Are they upscaling on the server side then encoding it as 4K?

That seems weird. You'd think that would add effort and bandwidth for little (if the have a very fancy upscaler) to no benefit at the cost of bandwidth.

Are they sure its not just semi automatically downscaling the video to meet congestion targets? Like if you watch a 4K stream on YouTube and it's not able to supply it at that Res, then it'll drop down.

I also ever that when HD was introduced, some games text was unreadable. How does the service cope with not knowing what the output resolution is going to be?

It says in the article that the copy of the game provided to Google by the developers isn't 4k. So it's literally not possible that it could be dropping quality for bandwidth constraints. It upscales on the players' device. So this is probably about both resource limitations in Stadia and bandwidth considerations.

Well, it might be getting upscaled and then downscaled again.

We'd need confirmation that the PC version was native 4k and not just being upscaled.

I'm not that up on PC but I was under the impression that lots of games didn't run internally at full output resolution, even if your HDMI output is claiming a specific size.

Downscaling is widely employed at stages of the rendering pipeline where a full resolution buffer wouldn't make much difference (eg. reflections, post effects), but overall when you turn on 4k, you're mostly getting 4k. This is trivially verifiable by zooming in on a screenshot.

My current guess is that none of the games that have the contracts signed are actually optimized very well at all for Vulkan. Hell, it could even be that Google had to write some kind of compatibility layer so that games could just use whatever engine they happen to be using, which would obviously mean that 10+ teraflops means nothing. I appreciate the use of Vulkan, since the current situation of a brand-new graphics api for every OS/hardware combination is terrible, but it is the more difficult road.

So this means that they are _technically_ keeping their promise, since they are recording the game at 4k 60... but that obviously doesn't matter if the game can't get close to outputting that. Gylt is an exclusive, so if anything is running at 4k it would be that, but I'll have to wait for my controller to show up tomorrow to find out.

EDIT: Just looked it up, and RDR2 supports Vulkan since the PC release, apparently. That's interesting, and kinda blows up my argument.

This basically sounds like the Chromecast ultra will always output at up to 4k60 and will upscale, and somehow people thought they could claim that had any relevance to the actual stadia service.

Well I guess there was a product manager who didn't understand the difference between streaming resolution and rendering resolution and eng didn't catch it fast enough.

Something something paycheck depends on not understanding something...

This company should outsource all engineering to infosys

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