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?
> 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.
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.
In normal online gaming you do not have that issue. When I move my crosshair in cs:go it moves instantly.
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.
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.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/10/google-stadia-negative-l...
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.