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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

Stadia is just a bad idea and a bad product. Consumer internet access is nowhere near capable enough for it to make sense.

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Can't disagree more. I don't live in a big city. My best guess at where the data center is would be a mid-size city about an hour away, or more likely, a big city about 2.5 hours away (driving time). I didn't have high hopes for Stadia but wanted to check it out. I have zero problems with latency, and never think about it when playing. It does have its bugs...random crashes, a few seconds of LoFi here or there probably due to jitter somewhere...but overall, it really works well for me.

Stadia is a bad product, not because of the technical difficulties but because it makes no sense to pay for a service and then pay for access to the content in that service (the games) and if you stop paying for the service you lose access to the content (for which you payed full price by the way). I wouldn't mind a "Netflix for video games" but Stadia isn't it.

You do know that they are going to release a free 1080p version this year right (although you still have to pay for the games)? You only need to pay the subscription if you want 4k @ 60 fps.

Seems free to play will follow that release, along with AD supported gaming.

I mean, it's not that different than the current model. With XB1 for example, you lose access to the 'free' games, as well as the ability to play online, if you don't have a monthly subscription. For single player offline games, it might be ok. But Stadia supposedly will have a free tier I think, I don't keep up with its news much.

There is a free tier coming, so you even if you stopped paying for "pro" you would be able to access any games you had purchased.

This is the same as Xbox and PSnow, etc. You have to pay for the service via a game pass or pro membership on top of buying the game and possibly the system before you could stream it.

Even in the case of shadow, you'd have to pay for the service to stream games you'd buy and access off your own/their system.

I would not get it for this exact reason. However to counterpoint your argument this will work for some people like my high school kids.

They stream spotify because they don't want to buy songs and after that current song is no longer popular they move on to another one and forget the first song ever existed. They play video games and when they are done they sell them and buy a new one, never wanting to revisit the old one. They spend $50 on the new game and sell it for $15ish. For that mindset of people this is a great product, along with the digital only xbox one.

I am not implying all kids or youth are like this, mine are and a bunch of their friends are. I prefer gog or a physical copy, but then again i don't buy that many games.

That's completely wrong. Any games you paid for are yours to play without any monthly subscription. The monthly subscription does give you access to a free game or so a month that you'd lose access to and you wouldn't be able to play at 4K but you wouldn't actually lose access to the games you paid for.

But the issue isn’t bandwidth, really, is it? I would think the ping would be the killing factor. Do they have a plan for that? Server farms no more than 20ms away from anywhere in the US?

Negative Latency

https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/10/google-stadia-negative-l...

it will be shocking if this actually works without being a glitchy mess. I think it’s mostly an excuse to get people to stop talking about it.

They use it in games like thumper. Also, this same technique is already used in many street fighter style fighting games. Its not new - and it works.

GGPO (the fighting game rollback implementation) simply predicts that each player's inputs on frame N+1 is the same as frame N. This works well enough for fighting games but may not generalize, especially in games with precise analog inputs. Also, there's a hard requirement that in order to roll back 3 frames the engine has to be able to simulate re-running those 3 within the timespan of one frame, which is sometimes an issue when trying to patch this onto a finished game.

It exists. RetroArch has it in some cores, for example. It was originally conceived of and made by emulator developers.

Of course, it gets really hairy really quickly. Technically, a perfect runahead/negative latency requires ([all possible input states] to the power of [amount of frames of lookahead]) frames to be rendered.

A single player NES game has 8 binary state controller buttons, so 2 to the power of 8 input states. You need to render 256 frames for each frame of runahead.

Now surely you're thinking you'll just prune the set of possible input states through smart prediction of what the player will probably do next, but it doesn't matter. The number very quickly grows to ludicrous amounts of processing for anything that isn't an antiquated console. Let alone for 3D FPSes that use float values for e.g. mouse state.

Edit: and I should add that if they even try to do this, the amount of CO2 they'll waste is going to be horrifying.

>> Consumer internet access is nowhere near capable enough for it to make sense.

> But the issue isn’t bandwidth, really, is it?

No, bandwidth isn't the issue, I believe the op was referring to Latency.

I have 75mbps DSL and the Latency is garbage with 29ms being best case. I get frequent periods of 90+ms latency.

These seem like pretty common latency numbers for online gaming. I guess it feels worse when there isn't the movement prediction and other techniques to make the latency feel better since the game isn't running locally.

Those latency numbers are just for the connection to a test endpoint optimized for low/zero latency.

My "ping" on games like Battlefield are in the 150+ms range and I frequently get high latency dropped from matches.

When I had Cable my latency was around 15ms and my ping times were 90-120ms in Battlefield.

Well the issue is that you have input lag on your controller inputs. When I move my crosshair it takes a long to actually show the crosshair moving on screen.

In normal online gaming you do not have that issue. When I move my crosshair in cs:go it moves instantly.

Right, yeah that's kind of what I was trying to suggest. Honestly, I don't really see how this can work in the general case all that well given exactly what you are saying. I have seen some examples of fighting games being played over stadia, but many fighting games rely on frame-perfect input (and purists in communities like melee dont even use certain monitors due to this...)

It's primarily latency but bandwidth can also be an issue. Assuming you have a fast enough Internet connection (possibly not a safe assumption here in the U.S.), imagine your PC or mobile device(s) decide to update themselves or just generally get 'chatty' while you're playing. I've had this create problems for relatively bandwidth-sipping VoIP sessions so I'd imagine it would be much worse for a game experience.

You hit the nail on the head. The distribution of local server farms in Google's network is much, much larger than people assume (has been for awhile).

There's also a chicken-egg effect that Google's still interested in for secondary reasons. Reverse the question: assume Stadia takes off and becomes the "killer app" of gaming (big assumption, but still). Will local municipalities continue to tolerate crap networks if it means they're left out in the cold on this thing? Google's still interested in improved network infrastructure and has the clout to play incentive games to make that scenario more likely.

True but because of bufferbloat[1], bandwidth problems often also materialize as latency problems unfortunately.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

Some games can be far more demanding than video streaming. HDR content, 4k, >60fps, 4:4:4 chroma (text looks horrible on 4:2:0). The requirement for realtime encoding instead offline encoding also means the codecs get less lookahead (as few frames as possible) which results in higher bandwidth requirements for a certain quality level compared to VoD.

Absolutely. Doing realtime video encoding is costly as it is, and the kind of hardcore gamers Stadia seems to be marketing for are definitely going to notice this. Some games are absolute codec poison, too.

Check out some of the Games Done Quick runs from last summer on Youtube, for example. A lot of the FPS games especially look dreadful. I'm sure Stadia can do better, but there's only so much bandwidth you can throw at this problem before it becomes untenable: https://twitter.com/dada78641/status/1207751665752911872

To me, the main issue with Stadia is not the product itself but the massive amount of extra CO2 that's generated trying to solve all these issues that were already solved decades ago by having your own cpu in your own personal computer in your own house.

Yes, the problem is latency. Which is actually not that big of a problem in some parts of the world. Also, if you have a metered connection bandwidth can become a problem. I have tested stadia at family and I was really impressed how well it works. Personally I am not going to pay for it and will keep using my consoles, but Stadia certainly works.

Google is thinking globally.

Local conditions (US for example) are not necessary a showstopper in Japan, South Korea or parts of Europe. Low latency extremely high bandwidth is the new playground.

No it's not haha. I live 20 mins from the center of London and the best broadband I can have at my address is 18Mbit. Yes, Megabits, not Megabytes. And this sort of shit-tier internet is very common in England, Stadia is a non starter for many people here.

How is that even possible?

I mean, you should get 50 Mbit/s from very affordable mobile broadband. If you have ASDL landline, you can get hybrid solution (combined mobile + landline that works as one) and you should get 100 Mbit/s

Have you tried it? Works awesome for games like Tomb Raider.

It works great on many games. Pro fortnite players would cringe at the latency, but it is good for a large portion of games out there.

I've played Destiny, Thumper, Ghost Recon, Tomb-Raider etc on it and only Thumper was tricky when I tried on a pretty crap connection.

Having played games on stadia, I cannot disagree more.

Seems a bit dismissive when MS, Sony, Nvidia, and Google etc having built streaming services that consumers have enjoyed.

As long as you're on fibre, I don't think the link is relevant. You've got much more latency to nibble elsewhere. AFAIK the rendering pipeline is where most of the work is. It certainly seemed that way back when Online was a thing (the first service of this type I can think of).

Not very many people are on Fiber, as a proportion of Google's customer base.

I'm sure plenty of people in this thread have fiber but Hacker News is not really the target audience for Stadia.

Stadia requirements:

35 megabits per second: 4K, 60 fps, HDR, 5.1 surround sound.

Consumer internet is fine for this in a lot of the developed world.

youd be suprised how alot of people in developed world don't even have access to this

Surprise me, how many people in the developed world don't even have access to this?

Most of the seattle area. Anywhere there is only comcast, or frontier or non ATT Uverse fiber in orange county (Orange, Santa Ana, Anaheim, etc. im sure most of irvine is there). I have doubts about shared google fiber in high density housing as well. 35 MB is a big number.

So it's not a good product for one US area. What's your exact point?

Product doesn't have to cater to every single place on earth to be viable. It's like arguing that ARPAnet was a terrible product because not everyone had T1 lines.

FWIW, Seattle's always been behind the curve. I don't know why, but even in the AOL days they were bad relative to the mid-sized east coast town I grew up in.

Based on some of the comments i've seen in this thread i'm surprised to hear the AOL days have ended in Seattle.

35 Megabits/sec is about 4MB/sec

I'm mainly talking about countries with less shitty markets, the US is a glaring and awful exception.

200mb uncapped internet in the UK is super common and pretty cheap (£30-£35 a month), as it is in most of western Europe.

I know this is an america-centric website but please don't apply your standards to us, its terrifying.

"200mb uncapped internet in the UK is super common and pretty cheap (£30-£35 a month), as it is in most of western Europe."

This isn't accurate coming from someone living in London. Most of my co-workers do not have access to "200mb" internet and most common is 25mb or less. I personally only get 18Mb on my home connection, i.e. roughly 2MB/sec and this was the best I could get from any provider.

The state of Internet infrastructure is fucking terrible in the UK given how small a country it is. Coming from California to the UK felt like going back in time in terms of Internet speeds.

35MB is a big number but luckily the requirement is 35Mbs. My experience with Comcast is limited to 2 areas. Northern Virginia where Comcast has competition and rural central Florida where they don't have any. In both locations Comcast is more than able to provide the required 35Mbs even during busy times of the day.

The Stadia requirements state 35 Megabits - not bytes - which is more like 4MB of throughput - and that is just for the 4k stream.

If you can stream video at decent quality, you have the bandwidth for Stadia.

Most of America that isn't in a major coastal city. Cable internet promises more, but it's a shared backbone that is not properly provisioned in most locations during primetime. Streaming from Netflix and YouTube in 1080p is problematic in many of those areas.

To pick a state as an example, Iowa speed tests had a mean download speed of 71.39 Mbps in 2018. That is twice what Google says is the requirement for 4k Stadia. So even if prime time speeds are lower, there is still a healthy margin.

https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/2018/#fixed

Like half of Germany (+): Select >30 Mbit/sec and see how the map color changes to light blue in many places https://www.bmvi.de/DE/Themen/Digitales/Breitbandausbau/Brei...

(+) only slightly exaggerating

I have difficulty matching the shades of blue in the legend with those of the map, but I think most areas are at ≥ 75% coverage, no?

If you zoom in you'll see that the average is misleading: There's a lot of areas with little coverage hidden in that average. It also includes LTE connectivity which theoretically gives you > 30GB and covers a large area, but practically doesn't.

Germany is pretty bad when it comes to internet speeds. Broken market.

In 2017, an average 20% of households in the EU did not have access to internet connections faster than 30 megabit/s and a report a year ago found that the original goal of 100% coverage by 2020 would not be reached.

Figure 2: "30 Mbps coverage in all Member States in 2011 and in 2017" https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eca/special-reports/broadband-12...

You can get cheap 1 Gbps wired Internet in France, yet, in the 5 cities I've lived since 2016: - I actually have > 100 Mbps in 2 of them (both in the 20 biggest cities); - I painfully had > 5 Mbps in 1 of them (in the 20 biggest cities) - I painfully have > 500 kbps in 2 of them (much smaller cities, but still in big urban areas).

I assume France is in the developed world as of 2020 and I believe I've more luck wrt Internet than most people here.

You're missing latency which is arguably more important.

Latency is something Google already has a large, distributed network with low-ping datacenters to major population centers to address.

It's hard to beat local compute for latency.

Absolutely. One could even make a decent claim that (barring some truly ancient hardware between input, CPU, and monitor / audio circuits) it's impossible.

It's surprising how much latency a human will tolerate without notice, however.

>One could even make a decent claim that (barring some truly ancient hardware between input, CPU, and monitor / audio circuits) it's impossible.

I think that's only if we ignore monitor refresh rates. Most of us are maxed at 60 FPS which with a lot of hand waving is equivalent to ~17 ms latency. It's relatively easy to get a network with latency better than that. If you can achieve the rendering + data round trip in under 17 ms you're going to be functionally equivalent to a local computer.

Funny, I have around 90ms latency to Google (from my home fiber). So, no, their network doesn't really address it in reality.

Just because you have bad latency doesn't mean everyone else does.

Given that I'm running fiber that connects to the local university backbone, I'm running the fastest possible link in my area (excepting those in the university).

So, I'd say that I'm running the best case scenario available within my area.

That's not accurate. A university is a relatively small population and not something that Google will necessarily optimize for. And there's no guarantee that the university isn't doing something wrong that is artificially increasing latency.

My anecdata counterpoint is that I pay for the cheapest/slowest broadband available in a midsized city and my ping to google.com is 14ms.

My ping to google.com is 9 ms at home and around 5 ms at work.

I live near London central (20 mins from Oxford circus), the best internet I can get is 18 Megabit, and this is in a relatively modern building (< 15 years old). My situation is not uncommon here in the UK, Internet infrastructure here is terrible. Google Stadia is a non-starter for me.

I have 250/100 mbit/s, my brother has 1000/1000 mbit/s. Both are included in our rent.

I don't like Stadia for other reasons but saying that consumer access is not capable because you live in a country that sucks on that part is not really a good argument.

Do you think modern cars are a bad idea as well because there are parts in Africa that doesn't have good roads?

Mmmh for stadia to work well, the bandwidth necessary is pretty high.

Unless you have fiber, it's not worth it. Some DSL internet still suck today.

> Unless you have fiber, it's not worth it.

You don't need fiber. Feels as good as local play on my 220 Mbps down/15 Mbps up internet.

you have that without fiber? without DSL?

anyway most users don't have such a high bandwidth...

Megabits, not bytes, if that's what you are thinking. That's about 27 MBps down and a lousy 1.9 MBps up. Decent, but its not even close to fiber.

And I don't think its particularly greats bandwidth... just about every medium/major metro in US is going to have comparable internet or better.

I know. 1.9MB/s is still a very good DSL. Many users don't have such good bandwidth.

What I am saying in northen europe where I live, it's uncommon not to have access to fiber.

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