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Comment by breakfastduck | Hacker News Reader

Do you have amazing internet?

These services are basically unusable to everyone I know, and we have pretty decent connections. The input lag is just horrific.

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You don't need amazing internet. I played Stadia (and other game streaming services) in 8+ different places across Europe.

OTOH, what really kills the experience IME is the jitter. Even if you have decent latency with Wifi, a brief spike in latency can ruin the race that you've been competing in for the last 5 minutes, for example. Wired internet obviates this, and powerline adapters are cheap and fix this for good.

It works well for people who

1. Have fiber.

2. Live in a major city that has a direct line to their datacenter.

You can literally get 1-2ms latency from your home to AWS/GCP/Azure with such a setup, as it's all fiber from your home->ISP->IX->datacenter and there's no additional inter-city routing. This is compared to DSL/Cable which pretty much has a ~10ms delay to the exchange in perfect conditons, and the even larger delays involved in routing a packet over multiple hops across the country.

Would you happen to know how I can easily figure out which cities would satisfy those 2 conditions? Hopefully there's a list somewhere instead of having to manually check.

For the first condition, that depends if you're able to get residental fiber service there. Most cities have fiber service in the downtown core but that's not always true in the suburbs.

For the second condition I think that those cloud gaming services publish their available server locations or provide some sort of speed/ping test service to test your connection. Being so dependent on latency it would make sense for them to have this available to their potential customers. You can also check for IX peering info and the like but there's no guarantee that having a presence there means your game server is located there (e.g. Google may have a datacenter in the city and peer with your ISP but the Stadia servers may be somewhere else).

Probably depends on where you live as much as how fast your connection is. Hard to get adequate ping. 100ms ping means the equivalent of a 6 frame input delay at 60 fps. That's very noticeable.

And that's on top of USB input delay (up to 40ms [1]) or Bluetooth 5.0 (20-100ms), plus your monitor (4ms+).

[1] https://epub.uni-regensburg.de/40182/1/On_the_Latency_of_USB...

Yeah dude, if you're playing on a TV as well, one that doesn't have a way of disabling its postprocessing, you may be slapping another 250 ms on that.

It doesn't: the controller uses Wifi, not USB or Bluetooth. It communicates directly with the Stadia servers. It only has it's own internal lag + Wifi.

https://stadiafever.com/why-does-the-stadia-controller-use-w...

Note: if you want to give your Stadia controller a second life after the service shuts down, you can do that using USB. Reportedly rumble works on Steam and Xbox. Bluetooth does not work, even though there seems to be a lot of demand for that.

I've spent quite a bit on WiFi in my house and I can get almost gigabit speeds over 6e. But latency is terrible. I have no idea how they'd manage that.

If the latency is terrible, you might want to try disabling old devices or seeing if you have interference from another network - it’s normally a couple of milliseconds, maybe 4-7 if you’re using a mesh.

Latency isn’t the only issue. Bandwidth is another. MetalJesusRocks has an interesting video[0] on it.

[0] https://youtu.be/01ZTOyx-q7s

I tried Stadia several times, and it just never worked well.

In my case I'm pretty sure it was wireless congestion despite only having a low tier cable service. I live in a town home right beside some condos and the throughput sinks like a stone as soon as I move away from my router. If I stood right beside the router it actually worked fine despite the relatively slow nominal performance of my internet connection.

I imagine this wouldn't have been an intractable problem. I could have spent the time and money to optimize the networking in my house. But the fact is, everything else I want to do works well enough for my purposes - except Stadia. I can't imagine a non technical user would bother to diagnose this class of issue before just giving up and buying a console.

Eventually my Steam Deck pre-order shipped and I never looked back.

My neighbors constantly complain about the connection quality in our neighborhood. We almost all use the same provider since there aren't many options in our area. During most gaming sessions, I didn't have any real problems. Of course, part of that has to do with the fact that I'm not a very skilled gamer, so I'm not as likely to notice lag.

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