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Comment by aequitas | Hacker News Reader

I'm playing this game on Google's Stadia and must say I'm impressed and having a blast. Besides some minor bugs this game streams flawless in 4k to my Mac (which technically isn't even a supported platform for the game, but is for Stadia). I bought the game during last weeks promotion with a free Chromecast Ultra and controller, so I would have at least had some hardware for cheap should the game itself suck, but the game is fun as well. I also no longer have any doubt that streamed gaming has a future and am actually looking forward to 5G coverage so I can play on mobile.

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How are you getting 4K on a Mac?

I'm also playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia and I've been quite positively surprised by it. However, I'm not really sold on Stadia generally yet. There's definitely some input lag and I can feel my mouse movements being "spongy". I'm also having a hard time driving, but I don't know if that's the input lag or just the game. Also, even if the game is running at the best possible graphical options (which Cyberpunk 2077 isn't), you're still just getting a compressed video stream, so dark gameplay doesn't look good (https://0x0.st/iFRT.png).

No regrets though, since I paid 50€ for it and I'm getting a free Chromecast Ultra and a free Stadia controller.

You can use Chrome extensions to modify Stadia, I used Stadia+[0]. You can force 4k that way even though it's not supported.

I don't have any noticable input lag but I'm on 70/30mbit fiber with 3-4ms ping to stadia.com. Sometimes the stream quality drops for a sec, but no noticeable frames or audio dropped.

I agree with the darkness being to bright, couldn't fix it with the gamme correction either. I have a feeling the 4k does a little better job in that regard. But overal it's not bothering me to much.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stadia%20-extensio...

This makes more sense now. I also noticed lag. Not everyone has access to fiber internet for various reasons.

I'm really lucky we got fiber connected a few weeks ago, I'm in the Netherlands so broadband is pretty decent overall, but in rural area's connection options lag behind. I tried the game Control streaming demo on a Switch on my previous connection (15/1Mbit DSL with 30/30Mbit 4G backup, avg 30-50ms ping) and though it did work, but it was far from how I experience Cyberpunk now. I wouldn't have bought into streaming gaming with that connection.

In the US, poor internet is mainly due to political reasons. We have a duopoly when it comes to telecoms and ISPs. I’m still disappointed that Google gave up on a nationwide Google Fiber rollout.

W're heading to a duopoly here as well, but stuff used to be pretty regulated. So w'll have to see where w're heading, but I think regulators/politics will pick up the pace in a few years again. Also it's not as big over here, you can compare our entire country to a American big city metropolitan area. Rural here is maybe 2-5km from the nearest city.

I have a 1000/100 fiber connection and the best ping I've gotten is 6 ms. Most often I get 16 ms though.

16ms is basically 60fps. That should feel pretty smooth.

Gotta multiply it by two though, since you need a round trip from your computer -> Stadia -> your computer to get feedback right?

Ping is measured round-trip. So the game should get your input in ~8ms, process it, then it will take ~8ms for the feedback to return to you.

Depending on how user input is processed in a game, this problem can be mitigated.

Oh wow, never realized this..but I guess ping in one direction is hard to measure anyway since it'd require sync'd clocks. TIL!

Not just hard, impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light#Theorie...

Ping to stadia.com? Is that where the stream is coming from?

No, but I thought it would be a good reference. I just ran a game and pinged the instance that was streaming (120.37.116.136), funny enough it ping was worse (8ms) than the ping to stadia.com (3ms). Also the IP is no longer pingable once you stop streaming the game. MTR shows something like 20 nodes inbetween me and the instance compared to 6 with stadia.com.

Hm, interesting. Thanks for the details.

Same here, playing on Stadia (4k). I tried it on 3 devices: - windows 10 PC over Ethernet - no lag - MBP 16 over WiFi - lag - pixel slate over WiFi - lag

The lag is not too bad, but still noticeable. I only play on the PC now. I have no idea how to fix WiFi lag.

I've played a little on my TV with the CCU over Wifi but not enough to determine lag, my Mac is hooked to gigabit straight to my router.

They do recommend 5Ghz for Wifi and being as close to the AP as possible. I can image if your AP is behind a wall or in a closet or different floor you get noticable delays as signals come in via reflections rather than directly.

Both were 30cm from the wifi access point, it's on the desk next to them :)

Mac wifi lag happens due to location services. Disabling it fixes most of the lag.

https://community.stadia.com/t5/Stadia-on-Chrome/Fixing-stut...

Huh. That's a good trick, but I wonder what the reason is. What's going on under the hood with the location service?

This. At work, on a Windows PC with a wired connection, the experience is seamless. At home, on macOS over WiFi, it's only playable (without hiccups, I mean) during the night when people are asleep, but it's still not as smooth. I've played through the entire game, as well as RDR2 and the Metro series using Stadia. I have a high-end gaming desktop and would still not want to install these games. Makes the work/play distinction clearer and my machine cleaner.

Same case for me, I never do preorders but the offer of Chromecast + controller was good enough, the game runs amazing, I don't have to bother with updates, space on my device, all games can be played in any screen I have without having to worry about hardware requirements.

Honestly the only case where I don't see this having adoption is for competitive gaming.

Runs great on Stadia compared to PC (in my experience playing on both platforms). Google needs to make something of this. I even tried running it from Chrome on my old MacBookPro 2015 and was thrilled it worked and was a great experience.

Out of curiosity what are your PC’s specs?

Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-7960X CPU @ 2.80GHz 32.0 GB RAM Windows 10 Pro, 64-bit 20H2 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, ver 460.89

Makes sense. You need an RTX Nvidia card minimum. Do you have fiber internet? I have a higher tier cable subscription and I’m seeing lag

I suppose you played on Stadia from a friend's account right? Otherwise you would had to have to buy the game twice, once in GOG/Steam/Epic and another in Stadia. For that reason if I were to consider cloud gaming I would prefer something like Geforce Now or Shadow rather than Stadia or Luna.

I suppose I need to explain myself. Alas I purchased the game on PC/Steam, Stadia and PS4. And yes I play on all of those, depending on what OS I am booted into and running and which part of my house I feel like playing.

Interesting... it sounds like an odd choice though, because you wouldn't be able to progress the same story in all 3 platforms, as you can't sync between them, right?

Also, I really think that Steam is the superior platform at the moment in terms of features compared to Epic and GOG, but in this case I think it would be better to buy it in GOG since not only all of the money goes directly to CD Project Red instead of 30% for Steam, but also there's some goodies if you buy it in GOG...

Anyway, I think if you bought the game 3 times you more than make up for that 30%.

I do hugely recommend playing it on GeForce now instead. It works like a dream, you can max out all the settings, and you don't get locked into an ecosystem that Google will inevitably abandon in the next couple years. I've been playing Cyberpunk using it and have no complaints, very little if any lag on my 100Mbps BT line.

Every time I tried GeForce Now it put me in a long queue before letting me in. Never happened with Stadia and the whole "take up your controller and play" experience feels more polished on Stadia.

Hopefully we'll get ray tracing and maxed out settings with the next Stadia hardware upgrade.

If you pay £5/month then there are no queues, I hugely recommend trying it.

People on Reddit are reporting long queues on the paid tier too.

Likely depends on region. I never experienced queues as a paid user in the midwest.

This has been my experience too.

There's something futuristic about playing the game at 1080p/4K on a 32" external display connected to a 13" MacBook Air with an M1 CPU. It feels like it shouldn't be possible nor work as well as it does, and yet apparently I'm having a much better experience than people with much more capable hardware.

I'm still keeping a PS2 and some old games for when I want to enjoy a local gaming experience that is completely my own, rather than a service. But for Cyberpunk 2077, treating it as a service works well for me.

> It feels like it shouldn't be possible nor work as well as it does, and yet apparently I'm having a much better experience than people with much more capable hardware.

I often use screen sharing to work on my laptop from my desktop. Both machines are connected to the same switch with gigabit ethernet, but it performs worse and has more noticable input lag than the Stadia games I'm playing over the internet. It must have something to do with the video encoding I guess, Google doing things in hardware and my laptop trying it's best in software.

With my ThinkPad I had lots of problem with Stadia. My connection is perfect. But it seems because I don't have hardware acceleration for Chrome it doesn't work.

I was unable to figure out how to make hardware acceleration work on my T490.

I also bought the game on XBox, but I returned it to the shop.

How is the latency? Do you feel any lag when moving your mouse / character?

None at all. I've had a few action sequences in the story now and they all went smooth. Sometime quality notably drops, but not pace/framerate. The one time I had an issue with frames dropping was because a local computer downloading files and causing bandwith spikes. But I think with some Qos on the router that should be fixed. Average bandwith usage of the game is between 10-20Mbit.

So I just played Celeste, a platforming game which I have both native and on Stadia (it's free with the Pro subscription) and I don't notice any difference in playing either version in terms of input lag.

It’s not a unplayable, but there’s definitely noticeable latency / lag compared to playing something locally. The resolution is also lowered compared to a decent midrange PC. Obviously, this depends on your internet connection and what you’re streaming to

The resolution is also dependent on your subscription. Without Stadia Pro, it's 1080p max.

In my experience some games are just very laggy, where others appear "optimized" for Stadia network. I can't put my finger on it, but my comparisons come from playing the same title on PC/Steam. Cyberpunk seems to have none to very little lag. And that's playing with the chrome cast device on my wireless, Chromium on Linux via ethernet and Chrome on macOS. All platforms work great with Cyberpunk, but Destiny 2 is another story.

I got a 5g phone recently and still only get around 400kbps on average. Don't hold your breath for it streaming Stadia well

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