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Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

All of you people that are bullish on Stadia, explain to me why DisplayPort 2.0 provides up to 77Gbps of bandwidth? Google cannot possibly encode/decode that stream with high fidelity using an internet connection available from any residential ISP in the next couple years. Maybe within this decade you could accomplish that. However by that point, local compute will have already exceeded this standard.

The fine folks at Google know their computer science well so this isn’t news to them, but it kinda lays bare that eventually they will be selling consoles to execute games locally since it’s clear they do not have the appetite to get 10Gbps+ fiber to the country. Steaming-only Stadia made sense paired with a mature Google Fiber deployment, but alas that is not the universe we reside in.

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I honestly just don't care, and I suspect most don't either.

I live in London, so probably not far from the GCP data centre, I have a 50mb connection (pretty average and affordable for London) and I don't see myself ever investing in a console or gaming PC again.

My gaming experience with Stadia is better than "good enough", and that's all that matters. If they can get the good titles, they have me as a customer.

I would settle for a lower quality service than I'm currently getting before I think about buying my own hardware again.

I live in London with 1gig connection (G.Network) and I find Stadia unplayable for so many titles.

Shooters are out, skill based games (e.g. rocket league) are out, racing games are much harder due to latency as well and quite a few platformers become an infuriating experience.

Slower paced games work just fine but until the latency gap is closed or until games will be designed with it in mind Stadia is dead in the water as far as i concern, 5+ frames of latency at 60fps isn’t a good experience.

> explain to me why DisplayPort 2.0 provides up to 77Gbps of bandwidth?

At the risk of being called a ludite or a peasant, may I suggest most people don't actually care that much about reaching the height of visual fidelity, at least in this aspect?

The reality is this same argument could be made against any kind of video streaming. But the reality is that people are pretty satisfied with the fidelity that video encoders can produce. Yes, it will always be inferior in several respects to the uncompressed, ~33Gbps 3840x2160@60hz your local rig can push out, but will it be a deal breaker for everyone, or even most people? I don't think so, personally.

Part of the DisplayPort spec (that I love) is Multi-Stream Transport, which allows you to daisy chain monitors off a single connection. I need that much bandwidth if I'm going to be running, say 3x 4K monitors with a single cable. HDMI doesn't support this and has less bandwidth.

What devices have you seen that actually support MCS? I haven’t seen a single monitor even those that come with USB-C that support it...

I'm not sure about monitor support. I've seen some higher end Dell monitors have it.

I use MST with a mini display port hub for more outputs on my laptop.

Just bought one that will: F32tu87 Samsung albeit via the lightening 3/usb-c interface

I use MST to run my dual HP Z27Q monitors (5K 27-inch). Their only connection is a dual DP1.2 inputs - so I have four hefty cables coming off my GPU.

I believe what you’re describing is a feature of Thunderbolt, not DP.

I dont care much in either direction about Stadia but, I think there is certainly a big market for people who just want to play some games now and then without having to own a gaming rig or even a console. High fidelity will not matter so much. Simply being able to play some AAA games that you otherwise might not have been able to play will matter.

40gbps is the nitrate for for 4k at 120hz at 10bit colour. This is uncompressed video.

Displayport isn't even available on displays or GPUs.

These services use hardware acceleration for encode and decode of the video to H.264 (perhaps HEVC as well)

Clearly the bandwidth requirement is lower.

It is..?

3840 x 2160 x 120 x 10 x 3 = 29,859,840,000

That's not even 40Gbps

https://k.kramerav.com/support/bwcalculator.asp

35gbps

But my point still stands. Streaming doesn't need such a high bitrate

They don't need to compete with a state of the art local setup, they just need to sell something better than what the user happens the have. There's a large delta between those two things that Stadia can live in.

I still have fun playing N64.

How many people play Minecraft?

edit: There's a population that cares about graphics, but the population that doesn't is bigger and collectively has more money. Just look at the mobile gaming market.

I agree that people will settle for less, but I am arguing Google has always been aiming for AAA titles and markets it that way.

Also DisplayPort 2.0 bandwidth is mostly for supporting VR where visual artifacts and low fidelity lead to motion sickness for a huge demographic.

I have Stadia, love it, and don't care that much about quality. I care that it's console-free and on the two TVs I bounce between, or wherever else.

What's VR got to do with it? Sure, Stadia might never work for VR.

Sure, VR might one day be a big part of the gaming market. It won't be soon, and it will probably never be the entire market.

Marketing AAA titles does not mean catering to people who are into high end graphics... e.g. I have a MBP, a PS4 and a Switch. None of these can run Cyberpunk 2077 (properly) or MS Flight Sim (at all). I have no plans or wishes to buy a high end Windows rig... BUT I would play via the cloud, just to experience these games, and would not care if there are some compression artifacts (currently unnoticeable when I stream 4k movies) or if they are capped at 30fps.

I only fear latency, which is what makes games unplayable to me... I live in Argentina and the best ping I can get on Fortnite is 50ms, using servers in Brazil. There are few territories with low ping in the world.

I dare you see to the difference between a properly encoded movie in h264/h265 vs the raw version of a BluRay in 1080p. Same could be said for audio and mp3.

The simple answer is that you don't need the full bitrate video to have a decent experience. I use Nvidia gamestream locally at 30 to 50 Mbps and it's basically indistinguishable from the real thing. For most people, it doesn't matter if they can't tell the difference.

Im sure you or I can tell a huge difference between 240hz and 60hz. How can other people not notice? Or 10-bit or higher color? Maybe people don’t yet know what they are missing, but when they do, Stadia won’t be competitive.

Do you need 240hz for a story-driven game? Will Final Fantasy 15 be better if it's that smooth?

> How can other people not notice?

They notice with their wallets. A battlestation capable of 10-bit color, 240Hz, at 4K, for a single graphics generation, costs more than a monthly subscription service.

Stadia sucks, don't put me on the pro-stadia side of the debate, but:

Google generally operates with 5+ years of foresight. If you think at all that cloud gaming will become viable in the next 5-ish years then you should not ignore or rule out any cloud gaming platforms as unreasonable.

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