Comment by alexgmcm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexgmcm | Hacker News Reader

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I have Stadia. The input lag is negligible. Especially when using the Chromecast Ultra on the TV (it seems this has better support than the browser-based option on the PC).

Honestly, they nailed the 'hard part' - technically the platform is incredible, I can pick up the controller and be playing almost immediately with short loading times, no updates etc.

And then they screwed up the launch itself, all the marketing and failed to get a decent library of large games.

It might sort itself out though as they are set to launch the free version next month which will add many more players (so multiplayer without crossplay won't be dead) and equally there are some huge games down the line like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldurs Gate 3.

I bought it because before I had a gaming PC but to upgrade it I'd have to replace the motherboard and practically every component - whereas with Stadia I can play on my PC with kb+m or on my TV with controller etc. depending on how I feel and it's easier to get in and play.

I hope they sort out the problems as I feel it has a lot of potential.

Apparently they also heavily botched the developer experience, when reading across some of the sources on the dev community.

Think Android NDK, just worse. At least that is what I get from those comments.

Not giving Microsoft a few million dollars so the server backend was built on Windows instead of Linux was a catastrophic error.

It vastly increases the work required by devs for very little incentive.

If they launched and made a go of it? You could make a slow transition. But up front? Insane.

What reason to Microsoft have to play ball, though? They would be enabling competition with the XBox line.

Microsoft signed a deal with Sony to support their cloud initiatives for gaming, so clearly Microsoft does not see it as an issue.

It's possible Microsoft doesn't have an issue dealing with the incumbent, but won't help a challenger; the Play Station has outsold the XBox for the past 2 generations.

The way I see it is the competition is happening anyway, why not make money from every major player in the market?

> I have Stadia. The input lag is negligible.

I don’t see how this is possible if they are sending player input to a server somewhere with a 50ms ping. That’s a full twentieth of a second, not counting any lag at all from the server side.

I guess if you play an MMO or something that doesn’t care about lag it wouldn’t matter but I don’t see how you could play even a simple fighting game like Street Fighter 2 with that kind of lag, except at the most basic level.

It's Google. They seem to have hundreds or even thousands of edge data centers all over the world, and it's plausible they'd put Stadia servers into all of them. Which means that a decent fraction of the population will have ping times that are much lower.

Most people do have 10-25 ms latency to their servers. Ping isn't the problem here though, the problem is that you have to download the frame. That just takes a while. Input lag is like 150 ms.

The reason some people think that is absolutely insane and ridiculous is simply perception. I switched from 100 Hz CRTs to 120, then 165 Hz LCDs. Console games to me are unplayable already. Obviously, Stadia in it's current form is entire useless to me, no matter what game I'm playing because it just feels bad.

However, people who mostly played 30 FPS console games their entire lives, can usually play on stadia perfectly fine. The input lag isn't that much worse.

It really is negligible. The controller is a wifi controller connecting directly to the player's Stadia instance which helps combat latency.

As for a game like SF, I am not sure. They have MK on Stadia and I hear people enjoy it but I don't know what the latency is like.

I got a Stadia though some re-seller partner program at work. Honestly it plays really well for me. I often forget I'm playing a game in a browser. The problem is lack of games and the controller on PC still has to be plugged in.

Geforce Now is free for 3 months, go try it and you'll see. Input lag is negligible. 50 ms is not representative either, it much less than that.

I get 20 ms to paperspace (using it with parsec). The lag is good enough to play super meat boy.

This is with wifi hitting a local router, to a separate wifi access point, then wifi to my desktop. None of the network equipment is “gaming grade”.

FWIW: At 60 ms (due to a misconfiguration) super meat boy was unplayable.

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