Decline Playing games on Stadia (Cloud Gaming)

[Andhaira]

Mini Rant: So, this does seem to be the future of gayming. Sure people will bitch and moan about decline (which it is) but eventually they will come aboard, just like folks did with Steam back in the day (steam was the harbinger of this decline, basically ending physical copies of PC games forever) No need to purchase expensive PCs, or games on Steam, now you just pay for monthly access and the games you want to play (all of which willy end up costing more than just upgrading/buying a new PC once every few years). Also, this will effectively put an end to Piracy, at least until pirates figure out a way to get their own Cloud Gaming services up and running.

Main Post: Has anyone here tried Stadia? If so, what was your experience with it? Is it viable for single player games and if so, how fast of an internet/ping do you recommend?

 

[madhouse]

I got an X250 ThinkPad, and I can't run anything with decent graphics or system requirements. Pretty much only play DOS titles and emulate PSX games. Seconding interest in this.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

need for a properly working broadband and mandatory, unavoidable ping will probably bottleneck this forever. we already saw how popular was onlive.

 

[Andhaira]

need for a properly working broadband and mandatory, unavoidable ping will probably bottleneck this forever. we already saw how popular was onlive.

Famous last words. This was the same thing said about MMOs in the early 90s, before Everquest came and proved that wrong, and then about streaming shows, etc.

Onlive was ahead of its time; you may not have noticed but corps like Google certainly did (thus Stadia)

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

yeah. big corps never make a mistake.
crucible.
no, wait, i have better.
google+

 

[DalekFlay]

I think the future is 100% subscriptions just like television and music, but streaming... I dunno, it has unique challenges. Also with Micrsoft releasing a $300 console you can get free upfront with a slightly more expensive Live subscription streaming becomes relatively pointless in most cases. There was a time when I thought we were destined to be fucked in the ass by dads who just want to fart around in Assassin's Creed for a couple hours after the baby goes to bed, but the Series S kind of changes my view on it. We'll see though.

I do think the thing that usually forces people to comply is exclusive titles, which Google (or a competitor like Amazon) might leverage to better effect someday. They have so much money they could pay Capcom to make an exclusive RE game for streaming and not break a sweat, for example.

 

[Daemongar]

I always figured these online gaming systems are purely to move folks to thin-client computing (in a nutshell, no local storage) so everything you have is a profile in the cloud, complete with applications, games, files, everything. The last holdout is graphics intensive computing. This will be eventually mitigated with certain current advances - and in the meantime, gamers will be doing the testing for Google and paying for it. This is where it will go, but I don't want any part of it.

 

[madhouse]

I tried it. Barely gives you anything for your subscription fee. Onlive was much better because it had a much larger and higher quality library coming in with the subscription. I'm comfortable playing DOS games and emulating Playstation for free.

 

[SerratedBiz]

>Ignore thread.

 

[madhouse]

>Ignore thread.

What did you mean by this?

 

[karoliner]

Streaming is for cucks.

 

[Andhaira]

I tried it. Barely gives you anything for your subscription fee. Onlive was much better because it had a much larger and higher quality library coming in with the subscription. I'm comfortable playing DOS games and emulating Playstation for free.

I believe you have to purchase the game you want to play in addition to the subscription fee.

 

[madhouse]

I tried it. Barely gives you anything for your subscription fee. Onlive was much better because it had a much larger and higher quality library coming in with the subscription. I'm comfortable playing DOS games and emulating Playstation for free.

I believe you have to purchase the game you want to play in addition to the subscription fee.

Yes. They give you ~15 or so free games, majority of them being crap.

 

[J_C]

I've tried Geforce Now and Stadia as well.
Yes, you can feel a little bit if latency between pushing the button and the character reacting to it. There is no argument about this. But don't imagine it as a second or half a second. It's about 25-30 millisecond, which is only a bit worse than using a wireless controller or mouse (which are around 10-15 ms latency). So you will not play competitive games on these, but every other genre seems playable if you get used to it. Shooters suffer the most from these, other slower games are barely different from playing on a regular PC.

Sorry to report this, but this will stay and will be more and more popular. The tech is already working and we all know that mainstream gamers don't have as high standards as Codexian. And the experience will just get better as internet technology improves, and more datacenters are open. With Geforce Now, the best ping I get is from a German datacenter, if another datacenter would open in Austria or better yet, Hungary, the experience would be great.

Stadia's only weakness is their subscription modell, because you have to buy everything there. Geforce Now is already a good service, because you can play the games you bought on Steam/Origin/Ubisoft Store.

 

[deama]

There's a desktop cloud streaming platform called shadow, it's much better because it actually gives you an entire desktop environment with high end hardware, so you can end up just pirating the games on the shadow platform itself, or hide it by downloading them on your system and transferring to shadow.
It's £13 a month, a bit more expensive than google stadia, but you get an entire desktop environment with it.

 

[J_C]

There's a desktop cloud streaming platform called shadow, it's much better because it actually gives you an entire desktop environment with high end hardware, so you can end up just pirating the games on the shadow platform itself, or hide it by downloading them on your system and transferring to shadow.
It's £13 a month, a bit more expensive than google stadia, but you get an entire desktop environment with it.

Yes, there is also that. I wanted to try it but unfortunately it is not available in my country. (I don't use VPN.)

 

[deama]

I've tried Geforce Now and Stadia as well.
Yes, you can feel a little bit if latency between pushing the button and the character reacting to it. There is no argument about this. But don't imagine it as a second or half a second. It's about 25-30 millisecond, which is only a bit worse than using a wireless controller or mouse (which are around 10-15 ms latency). So you will not play competitive games on these, but every other genre seems playable if you get used to it. Shooters suffer the most from these, other slower games are barely different from playing on a regular PC.

What's interesting is that you might be able to cut the latency down to quite good levels.
Generally, from my measurements and research, computers these days have about 50-60ms of total latency (from you clicking a button to it showing on-screen), this is with a 120hz monitor that doesn't have awful input lag, and with a budget "gaming" keyboard/mouse.
On an optimized system (high quality keyboard/mouse/monitor, high clock CPU 4+ghz that's locked), you can get it down to about 40ms.
If you start then start doing stuff like disabling DWM (is enabled natively on most OSs, adds about 10ms latency at 120hz monitor), then you can cut that down to about 30ms. At this point you can then start doing some crazy tweaks, e.g. installing linux, installing a realtime kernel, or at least low latency kernel, getting very high hz monitor (240+?), and pushing CPU even higher and optimizing RAM timings, you can probably get this down to around 20ms.
So the latency wouldn't be too much of a problem at that point, that would be roughly a total latency of 40-50ms, comparable to an average PC, assuming your internet is decent; might even be lower if you have really good internet.

I haven't quite tested the latency with an integrated intel GPU, it'd be interesting to check it out as it's closer to the CPU, so I'd imagine it would have lower latency? Or maybe the GPUs clock is set too low, so maybe not.

 

[Hafnar the Jester]

Most gaymers are highly mobile casual college kids so it will surely become the most popular subscription service after Netflix and Spotify in no time.
I, personally, don't give two damns because I live in some lame-ass wilderness without any solid Internet connection so I'll gladly stick to physical hardware.

 

[Bester]

unavoidable ping will probably bottleneck this forever

Edge computing.

 

[J_C]

I've tried Geforce Now and Stadia as well.
Yes, you can feel a little bit if latency between pushing the button and the character reacting to it. There is no argument about this. But don't imagine it as a second or half a second. It's about 25-30 millisecond, which is only a bit worse than using a wireless controller or mouse (which are around 10-15 ms latency). So you will not play competitive games on these, but every other genre seems playable if you get used to it. Shooters suffer the most from these, other slower games are barely different from playing on a regular PC.

What's interesting is that you might be able to cut the latency down to quite good levels.
Generally, from my measurements and research, computers these days have about 50-60ms of total latency (from you clicking a button to it showing on-screen), this is with a 120hz monitor that doesn't have awful input lag, and with a budget "gaming" keyboard/mouse.
On an optimized system (high quality keyboard/mouse/monitor, high clock CPU 4+ghz that's locked), you can get it down to about 40ms.
If you start then start doing stuff like disabling DWM (is enabled natively on most OSs, adds about 10ms latency at 120hz monitor), then you can cut that down to about 30ms. At this point you can then start doing some crazy tweaks, e.g. installing linux, installing a realtime kernel, or at least low latency kernel, getting very high hz monitor (240+?), and pushing CPU even higher and optimizing RAM timings, you can probably get this down to around 20ms.
So the latency wouldn't be too much of a problem at that point, that would be roughly a total latency of 40-50ms, comparable to an average PC, assuming your internet is decent; might even be lower if you have really good internet.

I haven't quite tested the latency with an integrated intel GPU, it'd be interesting to check it out as it's closer to the CPU, so I'd imagine it would have lower latency? Or maybe the GPUs clock is set too low, so maybe not.

I haven't done too much reasearch, but isn't that 50-60 ms a bit too much? Here is a practical test about wireless gaming mice, and they show an average of 15 ms latency, from moving the mouse to the movement on the screen.

 

[taxalot]

What Stadia isn't thinking about is that they are betting people will flock to their platform on the future for cheap good graphics.

But with the law of diminishing returns, good graphics on cheaper and cheaper hardware is achievable. The extra shit nobody notices will cost more but only the hardcore will be interested.

The Xbox Series S is proof of the confidence Microsoft has in that idea.

 

[TemplarGR]

I agree with the OP. Streaming is the future, but like Steam, it is not a natural evolution, it is pushed by big corporations and underhanded tactics. Take Cyberpunk 2077 for example. Notice something strange? It is an Nvidia shill game. And like every Nvidia shill game ever released, it runs well only on the latest and greatest Nvidia hardware. Past Nvidia generations and non-nvidia hardware can rot in hell, even though the game really does not look that good even on Ultra. This always used to be the case, hell, even Witcher 3 was the same with hairworks having some outrageous amounts of tesselation for Geralt's hair in order to make garbage Nvidia hardware perform better than AMD at benchmarks.

But there is something different with Cyberpunk 2077. Noticed it? In the past, Nvidia shill games could still run on older hardware and non-nvidia hardware, they were just terribly unoptimized for them and you just had to play them with lower settings. Not with Cyberpunk 2077 you don't. Cyberpunk 2077, not only it couldn't run on PS4 consoles so much so that it was removed from the store (even though really it doesn't look much better than RDR2, Watch Dogs, Creeds, GTAV, etc), but it can't even run on most hardware on PC either. I am not talking "you have to play at lower settings", i am talking "can't even run at 720p with lower settings everything at any decent framerate bruh". The minimum settings for AMD is a 470 gpu. A 470 gpu, or 570 since that is what is mostly sold today (and it is the same minus some slightly higher clocks), is still kinda of expensive even for the 4GBs variant. You need to pay around 130-140 euros (VAT included) to get one here in Greece. That is not small change. In the past generations buying a card at that price range could almost guarantee that you could play all contemporary games at decent settings. But a 570 4GB gpu today can barely run Cyberpunk 2077 at lowest settings at 720p (and this applies to similar Nvidia hardware like the 1050 ti). You need to pay more than 400 euros to get a gpu that could play that game decently, not great, just decently, at medium settings at 1080p. And you need to pay an outrageous sum to get a gpu that can run it 60fps on Ultra. And that is for a game that never impressed me with its visual quality.

Notice anything else that is strange? The game is available on Geforce Now. LOL. Get it now? You either have to buy a new expensive Nvidia gpu, or you could play it on Geforce Now! Yup.

All i am curious about is how much CDPR got out of the deal.

 

[JarlFrank]

So, this does seem to be the future of gayming. Sure people will bitch and moan about decline (which it is) but eventually they will come aboard, just like folks did with Steam back in the day (steam was the harbinger of this decline, basically ending physical copies of PC games forever) No need to purchase expensive PCs, or games on Steam, now you just pay for monthly access and the games you want to play

No I won't.

If this becomes the big thing, I'll just stick to the indie games who keep publishing their games on Steam.
For watching shows and movies, Netflix and other streaming services have also become the norm years ago, yet I never bought a subscription for any of these, and I never will. If I want to watch a show I buy it on DVD. If it doesn't exist on DVD I pirate it.

I will never pay a subscription streaming fee for anything. When I pay money for a thing, I want to download it to my machine so I can own it forever. I will not waste money on a temporary subscription service that cancels my access as soon as I stop paying.

I have a backlog of 1300 Steam games anyway, and a couple hundred on GoG on top of it, along with several old pirated copies of games not available on any modern digital store, so that's enough to last me through the dark ages of streaming only, should they ever come.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I agree with the OP. Streaming is the future

do you see now, people? i told you it was unfeasible.

 

[deama]

I've tried Geforce Now and Stadia as well.
Yes, you can feel a little bit if latency between pushing the button and the character reacting to it. There is no argument about this. But don't imagine it as a second or half a second. It's about 25-30 millisecond, which is only a bit worse than using a wireless controller or mouse (which are around 10-15 ms latency). So you will not play competitive games on these, but every other genre seems playable if you get used to it. Shooters suffer the most from these, other slower games are barely different from playing on a regular PC.

What's interesting is that you might be able to cut the latency down to quite good levels.
Generally, from my measurements and research, computers these days have about 50-60ms of total latency (from you clicking a button to it showing on-screen), this is with a 120hz monitor that doesn't have awful input lag, and with a budget "gaming" keyboard/mouse.
On an optimized system (high quality keyboard/mouse/monitor, high clock CPU 4+ghz that's locked), you can get it down to about 40ms.
If you start then start doing stuff like disabling DWM (is enabled natively on most OSs, adds about 10ms latency at 120hz monitor), then you can cut that down to about 30ms. At this point you can then start doing some crazy tweaks, e.g. installing linux, installing a realtime kernel, or at least low latency kernel, getting very high hz monitor (240+?), and pushing CPU even higher and optimizing RAM timings, you can probably get this down to around 20ms.
So the latency wouldn't be too much of a problem at that point, that would be roughly a total latency of 40-50ms, comparable to an average PC, assuming your internet is decent; might even be lower if you have really good internet.

I haven't quite tested the latency with an integrated intel GPU, it'd be interesting to check it out as it's closer to the CPU, so I'd imagine it would have lower latency? Or maybe the GPUs clock is set too low, so maybe not.

I haven't done too much reasearch, but isn't that 50-60 ms a bit too much? Here is a practical test about wireless gaming mice, and they show an average of 15 ms latency, from moving the mouse to the movement on the screen.

Yeah I was surprised as well, but I went to a friend's place and measured his input lag and got about 50ms, he has a mid range pc now, with budget gaming keyboard/mouse, expensive monitor(120hz), but it's VA and not made for latency, and he was also at the latest windows at the time (19xx), but his windows wasn't optimized, just a regular install.
Measuring mine, I get about 40ms, I got a mid range computer as well with 120hz monitor, but my keyboard/mouse should be pretty decent and I've optimized my windows.
He measures mouse movement in the video, but I only do key press measurements cause they're a lot easier, so maybe you have less input lag by moving the mouse rather than clicking, but I'm not really sure, maybe something on his side changed the results vs for me.