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Comment by actf | Hacker News Reader

Stadia, the initial reviews were actually pretty bad, but I'm blown away by how good it is. There's something undeniably cool about playing cyberpunk on a macbook air with full graphical detail, and then switching over to play on my TV exactly where I left off. The latency is virtually imperceptible to me, and I love that I don't need a 50 GB download just to try out a new game. Everytime I use it I'm honestly impressed that it works as well as it does. My only concern now is whether I can trust Google not to eventually kill it, given their recent track record.

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Came here to say the exact same thing. I can't stop talking to everyone and their brother about it. It feels like a clear leap into the future. For the uninitiated, here are some highlights of what it enables you to do:

- You can go to a friend's apartment with a Chromecast and just start playing games YOU own like CyberPunk & Assasins Creed within seconds on their TV (assuming they have a controller or you brought your own)

- You can go to Stadia.com on Chrome and just start playing these games from the browser using the Keyboard/Mouse

- The other day I was parked at a Target and I was able to play Cyberpunk on my phone using my phone's internet connection

- You don't have to keep worrying about constantly updating hardware, downloading game patches, deleting stored games etc.

- Time to load the game between saved checkpoints and missions is also much faster since the games run on a superior hardware.

You don't really own the games however, it relinquishes user control. If that's fine to you then sure, but I don't want to play games as a service, I just want to play them on my own hardware with minimal latency.

People used to go to the arcade parlour to play coin-op games. In one perspective, that was also games-as-a-service.

And it was a terrible experience. Just because it was all we had, doesnt make it good.

Many games had special peripherals or were impractically expensive for home usage though.

For example, the Neo Geo AES launched at a cost of $650 (~$1300 in today's dollars), with games costing $200 or more back then. Some versions of afterburner climax have a servo equipped chair which can tilt on multiple axes as well as vibrate, police 911 has body position sensors, and many of the music games have hardware that's completely impractical for home.

From that perspective, the games as a service makes more sense. Stadia doesn't really offer any of that, the games are the same as any other platform.

Most people gave that up a long time ago anyway, when they started buying all their games on Steam.

Not really, some games on Steam don't have DRM, and Valve has said if Steam ever goes down that they'd break Steam DRM themselves. This cannot be said of Stadia, I can't imagine Google would refund people that money or give them another copy of their games.

It sounds great- but do you trust google not to shut it down, increase the price or embed a bunch of ads everywhere?

You can’t take the games out (or resell them) so it’s a hard sell for me.

Yeah, I just got burned by the cancellation of Nest Secure. I’m no longer keen on investing time and money in new Google products and services

> start playing games YOU own

Except YOU don’t own them, google does, which exactly why I would never get stadia.

This doesn’t seem materially different than Steam+DRM. I do like getting games from GOG or itch.io when I can, though.

I really like Stadia but I've been using GeForce Now and it's a VERY similar experience but I like the model of buying the games on libraries you already have. Stadia is a tiny bit better in the networking but GeForce Now has better graphics I feel like. Both are an amazing experience on a good internet connection. I actually think that once 5G is wide spread there is a chance it could have a MASSIVE impact on the gaming market.

I signed up for Stadia and was really confused about the value proposition. You stream games, and yet you have to... buy them?

There are some free games included, of course, but I didn't find anything I was interested in playing there.

What I want is something like Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, where you pay a fixed price per month to play the full library of games, with nothing else on top of that. A Netflix for games, if you will. I don't want to shell out $60 for Cyberpunk 2077.

(The absence of an easy way to trial games on consoles is problematic, in my opinion. I purchased Cyberpunk on my Xbox One before I realized how bad it performs on that console, and fortunately I was able to get a refund.)

Unfortunately, Xbox Game Pass is predictably hobbled by a very limited library (and they keep removing good stuff), and the fact that the games are tied to the platform they've been developed for.

What I'd like is basically Game Pass + Stadia.

Game Pass has streaming for Android. It's coming to more platforms in 2021.

Respectfully I disagree. I tried Stadia a couple months ago. Note: I’m on a Gigabit connection.

I found the library of games generally unappealing. I did play a few titles, including Player Unknown. The stuttering and lag in the game reminded me of playing Quake 3 Arena on a 56K circa 1999.

Also, graphically the game wouldn’t run at my monitors 1440p. The graphics generally looked washed out. I thought it was just a poorly built game, but then I saw gameplay (non Stadia) on YouTube and realized the Stadia version was itself awful.

im a bit confused with your comment, doesn't Stadia Pro supports 4K and HDR ?

Officially I think it supports 4K and HDR, but that doesn’t mean every game runs at 4K or offers HDR.

I agree that Stadia sounds like it works awesomely, but Google's history of killing off products is what's keeping me away. That's Google's own fault and nothing on the Stadia team. I know eventually all services likely disappear, but there's a big difference between "most likely within a couple years" and "some indefinite date way off in the future".

I just went down a rabbit hole of streaming for a couple of hours. I tried out Stadia, Moonlight, and GeForce Now.

I want is a service that:

* Lets me play my existing library of games (what I own on Steam, Origin, Battle.net)

* Has League of Legends

* Streams in 1440p 144fps

I haven't found anything that does this.

Rainway? https://rainway.com

Have you tried shadow? (I haven't, but have heard generally positive things)

1440p 144fps is ridiculous. Tough enough getting a 720p low latency feed, which is what stadia does. It then upscales to 1080p and 4k

> Tough enough getting a 720p low latency feed, which is what stadia does.

Do you have source for this? This sounds incorrect. My impression is that the Stadia Pro is capable of sending 4K, assuming the game developer can optimize their game to run at a good framerate with 4K.

It might be ridiculous but it's what I want if I'm going to use cloud gaming software. I'm probably not the target demographic.

I have nothing against personal tastes, but I would prefer if the gaming community gave more appreciation to low-poly, artsy, cartoony, and/or stylized graphics that would donwscale better rather than (IMHO overused) hyper-realistic highdef textures and sophisticated lighting effects (that often end up making panorama views "foggy"). I have nothing to say about FPS, more is always better :)

It is also worth mentioning that ray-tracing will offer new depths for highdef textures and sophisticated lighting effects so I don't expect this trend to change soon.

Moonlight will do this except for 144hz, trick is to 'stream' your entire desktop[1], allowing you to access any game/launcher regardless if nvidia detects a game or not.

[1] https://github.com/moonlight-stream/moonlight-docs/wiki/Setu...

At least as far as Steam goes, I've had reasonable success using Steam Link over Wireguard (since it's designed to be used locally); though I don't play games where lag is critical (like FPS's).

You could try wrangling 1440p144 from your hardware, not sure how high quality it can get

> Streams in 1440p 144fps

144 fps is one frame every 7ms. Are there even any residential internet offers where you can get a ping that low to anything on the internet?

The resolution and FPS is only limited by bandwidth. The long is only relevant for latency/interaction.

I'm on a cheap fiber plan in a European capital and consistently get a ping under 3ms to Google/Stadia. It's nothing uncommon.

Stadia had hype?

You got me interested, What controllers does stadia support?

recently found out it works with switch pro controllers

https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9578631?hl=en

To play on a TV you’ll need a chromecast ultra and the Stadia controller ($100) https://store.google.com/us/product/stadia

Source: I also bought Stadia for Cyberpunk

You missed a good deal. Prior to cyberpunks release if you pre ordered they gave you a controller and a chromecast for free (retail is $100). It got me hooked. Since then I bought red dead 2 and octopath traveler. Playing on an iPad in bed is nice.

Yep, this is what got me hooked as well. I've also played using a PS4 controller using my laptop, and phone. I don't think the PS4 controller would work playing from the Chromecast though.

It would not. But it would work with a pc involved that had the controller paired.

I use an 8bitdo in xbox emulation mode -- I think as long as the controller emulates an xbox controller (I imagine a lot of them do), it'll work fine.

It just has to be recognized as an HTML5 gamepad (there are various HTML5 tester sites online)

Maybe technology-wise, but the games are all super expensive and there aren't enough of them to justify a subscription.

You don't need a subscription, it's free to play games you buy. The subscription gives 4k and surround sound + free games.

The current sale matches steam for the games I checked.

Library size is still a concern.

Yes I know. I didn't imply otherwise. The games are too expensive to buy outright (IMO) and too few to justify a subscription.

I think a good experience depends on the quality of your internet connection. Unfortunately, in the US this is hampered by the ISP duopoly

Yes unless you use the controller and it gives you carpal tunnel syndrome and rsi

> The latency is virtually imperceptible to me

Lucky you, I can't even play on most TVs hooked as-is via HDMI because of horrendous render lag.

I do not understand how people say there's virtually no latency. There is, and it's _huge_, because light is actually quite slow and no tech can improve on that.

Makes me think people that say this have never played on a high end PC, which in turn has lower latency compared to a last gen console. And that's considering the fact that even modern PC have a TON of latency. NVIDIA seems to be working towards that, thankfully.

I bet playing Quake 3 Arena multiplayer on Stadia would be noticeably worse that on a PC from 20 years ago.

I'd say there's effectively no latency, since most games don't need or benefit from <10 ms response times.

I mainly play twitchy shooters on a fairly high-end PC (CSGO, Tarkov, Q3A back in the day) and was super impressed with Stadia to play games like Assassin's Creed. It felt like I had my PC anywhere, but I attribute that to the forgiving latency requirements for the game.

I wouldn't expect CSGO to work as well (though I'd definitely try it).

Doesn't it depend on the person's network setup?

No. However fast is your Internet, it is still slower to send data out on the Internet pipes and back again than doing local computation.

5ms ping to your local Stadia server is at least 5ms of additional latency compared to a high end PC. Add virtualisation costs, CPU steal time, packet loss, video compression and decompression etc for another measurable increase.

How long is the rest of the latency chain? For example, keyboard input over usb is gonna be ~15 ms, processing time is gonna be >5ms, and display time like 12ms. Adding those comes to a minimum of around 32ms. [1]

I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between 32 ms and 37 ms.

[1] https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

Your 37ms is based on 5ms roundtrip and 0 CPU time, which is impossible. And add network jitter which might be worse than static latency.

And the Stadia market isn't people with fast monitors, Ethernet connected and ultra stable internet, but high latency TVs, avg tier Wifi, slow hardware to decode video.

> 0 CPU time

I meant to assume 5ms CPU time: 12 input + 5 processing + 15 output = 32. Add 5 for network round-trip to get 37.

> 5ms roundtrip

5 ms network round-trip or less is common in offices or homes with fiber. Here's ICMP ping 1.1.1.1 from my office just now: rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4.075/4.700/6.407/0.459 ms. (UDP wouldn't be so different.) Of course, on wifi or low-speed broadband it wouldn't be so fast.

> high latency TVs

High-latency displays makes network latency less noticeable relative to a conventional console game (but more noticeable relative to a PC game on a fast-updating screen).

This is one of the reasons why Stadia is only available for these countries:

https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338852

Why do you think light is actually quite slow?

Because sending a light beam 10 miles away is slower than not doing so, obviously. Light isn't instantaneous in this universe.

It's surprising people still don't get this. Operating a computer miles away will always be slower than operating a computer centimetres away. You can be smart about it and optimise as much as possible, but Google isn't running alien tech that magically is orders of magnitude better than consumer hardware so that it overcomes the distance issue.

Light takes about a millisecond to travel 200 miles. Compared to the latency introduced by computation, it is pretty insignificant, unless you are connected to a server very far away.

My ping is 2. As the other responder notes there are more significant sources of latency on a local gaming rig.

Turn on game mode and problem solved unless you can perceive low double-digit ms latency

Yeah, not surprisingly it’s not really that simple.. Some TVs just aren’t made for low latency, “game mode” enabled or not.

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