Vapourware Google Stadia - "a game streaming service for everyone"

[Ismaul]

"These Tweets are protected" lol


*Receiving Mindlink transmission: Products package update*
"Stadia? Not found. Product never existed, citizen."

 

[deuxhero]

Since the controller is the only thing that works now: Was the controller even good?

 

[abija]

Actual limit of frames-per-second above which humans cannot notice any difference is 300-400. Nobody would build or buy monitors with 360 Hzrefresh rate if it was all snake oil without any perceptible difference.

That needs some proper testing (using the same 360 monitor for all refresh rates and a game with threaded input) nobody has any interest in doing.

 

[tritosine2k]

Nobody would build or buy monitors with 360 Hzrefresh rate if it was all snake oil without any perceptible difference.

they'd still buy it for input lag mostly, image quality discussions on monitors are long shelved and oled won't change that. Next up: microdisplays+wearables (finally!).

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Stadia now in heaven with OnLive.

Meanwhile Nvidia is like "hey wait for me" Gamestream dies in a few weeks. is Geforce NOW next?

 

[Average Manatee]

Actual limit of frames-per-second above which humans cannot notice any difference is 300-400. Nobody would build or buy monitors with 360 Hzrefresh rate if it was all snake oil without any perceptible difference.

That needs some proper testing (using the same 360 monitor for all refresh rates and a game with threaded input) nobody has any interest in doing.

It's actually very, very easy to test aspects of this, and you can probably see a difference in refresh rate up to at least 1000Hz, maybe way more.

Make your desktop background completely flat black. Make your mouse pointer white if it isn't already. Whip your mouse left and right and you can see individual frames. Now imagine how fast the frame rate would have to be to give you a smooth number of mouse frames in between that. I have a 144 Hz monitor and I can easily see room for at least something like 30-50 more frames there, maybe more.

Of course, this a very specific scenario that you don't have virtually anywhere. Complete white on black is rare, moving back and forth is rare, moving back and forth across the screen 5x per second is essentially unheard of in games. But it's very, very easy to see individual frames and see where you'd need more to get smooth motion.

 

[Dexter]

It's actually very, very easy to test aspects of this, and you can probably see a difference in refresh rate up to at least 1000Hz, maybe way more.

Saw this recently by Microsoft Research, Specifications for a "Life-Like VR-HMD" indicating 1800Hz: https://cuervo.dev/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/perfect-illusion.pdf

There's also this: http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

Imagine yourself in a very dark room. You have been there for hours and it's totally black. Now light flashes right in front of you. Let's say as bright as the sun. Would you see it, when it's only 1/25th of a second? You surely would. 1/100th of a second? Yes. 1/200th of a second? Yes. Tests with Air force pilots have shown, that they could identify the plane on a flashed picture that was flashed only for 1/220th of a second.

That is identifying. So it's pretty safe to say, that recognizing, that SOME light was there is possible with 1/300th of a second. Now if you take into consideration, that you have two eyes with different angles and different areas of sensitivity (you probably know, that you see TV flickering best, when you don't look directly into the TV screen, but with the sides of your eyes) and you can move/rotate/shake your head and your eyes to a different position, you probably needed flashes as short as 1/500th of second to make sure, nobody sees them in any case.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Just about to go on the Stadia reddit, and ask if its still worth buying any second hand Stadia gear to get any deals before it finally closes.

The controllers are probably cheap since you can turn them into a regular controller for PC, but the firmware update is only available for the rest of 2023.

https://stadia.google.com/controller/

 

[Lutte]

Complete white on black is rare, moving back and forth is rare, moving back and forth across the screen 5x per second is essentially unheard of in games. But it's very, very easy to see individual frames and see where you'd need more to get smooth motion.

Note that perception of a movement being "smooth" isn't the same as seeing as many frames as the human eye can perceive, and we've lost a lot when we moved from CRTs to LCDs there. I have never understood how people can truly be satisfied by the quality of motion on a LCD screen, even if it's a 144hz, even if the panel is good without ghosting it's still dogshit compared to a CRT or a Plasma.
OLED don't do any better in that regards either.



The act of drawing images lines by lines while leaving the rest of the image dark worked incredibly well in tricking the human eye. It will probably take a 500hz or a 1000hz LCD to look as good as a CRT in motion. But no computer will be able to produce the framerates required to take advantage of those refresh rates.

What we need is not higher refresh rates. Developers will always find a way to make games run lower than 100 fps on a 4090 RTX or whatever gpu of the future with graphical options turned on.
What we need is to get rid of dogshit display technology like LCDs.

All OLEDs are currently sample and hold, but I believe it should be possible to make them work like CRTs in that regard, since each pixel emits light on its own, you could drive them with a renderer that works line-by-line like the electron guns, brightness might be the issue that holds this back because you would need a panel with a decent maximum brightness to make this work.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/ex-stadia...google-following-cloud-gaming-services-demise

Ex-Stadia head Phil Harrison departs Google following service's demise​

Had been with the company since 2018.

Phil Harrison has departed Google, where he served as vice president and general manager of Stadia, following the beleaguered cloud gaming service's demise earlier this year.

Harrison joined Google in 2018 and shepherded Stadia through its high-profile - if increasingly problematic - launch in 2019, remaining onboard during the service's slow, steady decline. It was Harrison who announced the closure of Stadia's internal game development studios in 2021, and, ultimately, shared word of the cloud gaming service's impending demise last September, admitting it hadn't "gained the traction with users that we expected".

Ahead of Stadia's closure this January, Harrison said the underlying streaming tech would live on at Google, and would be made available "industry partners" - but Google later clarified its white label streaming offering had also been axed alongside the consumer-facing side.

News of Harrison's departure from Google comes via Business Insider (and is supported by an update on Harrison's own LinkedIn profile), but neither Google or Harrison have released an official statement announcing the news at the time of writing.

Prior to Harrison's involvement with Google, he served as president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios until 2008, departing during the PlayStation 3 era, and would go on to join the boards of Atari and, later, Sony, advising on cloud gaming service Gaikai. In 2012, he took a role at Microsoft, running its European Xbox and Interactive Entertainment divisions, leaving in 2015 while the company was focused on Xbox One.

There's currently no news of where the former Stadia general manager might be heading next.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

YOU AIN'T TAKING MY STADIA CONTROLLER OR CHROMECAST! THEY'RE MINE!!!

 

[Norfleet]

Make your desktop background completely flat black. Make your mouse pointer white if it isn't already. Whip your mouse left and right and you can see individual frames. Now imagine how fast the frame rate would have to be to give you a smooth number of mouse frames in between that. I have a 144 Hz monitor and I can easily see room for at least something like 30-50 more frames there, maybe more.

I have a much more easy test: Spin a wheel. Observe when the wheel appears to cease spinning and then starts to go backwards: It happens when the wheel matches your framerate, as it turns out, for me, around 30. Once the wheel is making 30 revs, it appears to stop and just sit in place as if it were not spinning. As it goes beyond your FPS, it will appear to spin backwards slowly, then faster, until it passes about 1.5x fps and then starts to move forward, but more slowly, speeding up until the cycle repeats itself when it stops at 2x FPS.

 

[Norfleet]

What we need is not higher refresh rates. Developers will always find a way to make games run lower than 100 fps on a 4090 RTX or whatever gpu of the future with graphical options turned on.
What we need is to get rid of dogshit display technology like LCDs.

Yeah, refresh rates do not matter for shit when your game isn't capable of actually going that fast. It doesn't matter if your monitor can render over 9000 FPS, fast enough to satisfy even high-FPS creatures like a cat, if your game can't do better than about 30-40 FPS anyway, and therefore, isn't generating any new data to render so you're just spitting out the same frame over and over to fill in the deadspace as the draw buffer hasn't been altered.

 

[tritosine2k]

The problem is not sample hold itself but how the hold time is so long the previous frame is still present and appears simultaneously. And now they went for HDR without framerate for short hold time to work anyway. It won't be solved until wearables most likely because if you want motion out of oled it's necessary to give up intensity and all worthy engineers went to work on wearables by now so I doubt they'll fix LCD scan out (which is perfectly doable with high intensity unlike oled).