
Testing Google Stadia [video] - worldofmatthew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6pf988yFSc
======
grenoire
I seriously did not understand how there could be no input lag, and even
though I was asking people who both tried and watched it they all said that it
was not noticeable. I had a hard time believing it, and still can't...

Stadia should, theoretically, be like playing an online multiplayer game with
no lag compensation. Your inputs are received and processed, and the output is
sent back at the network delay; this is going to be _at best_ three to four
frames late (60 ms on a good day, with 16 ms per frame at 60 FPS). Unless you
run multiple instances of the game at the background and do input prediction
at different modes (much like CPU branch prediction, I suppose), you will
encounter this significant lag. Even with prediction, the experience just
cannot be smooth.

~~~
taneq
The best they could do is enforce a constant latency equal to your worst-case
actual latency, so at least it was consistent and you'd be able to compensate
for it. (This was a thing that RTS games used to do, consistent mid-level
latency feels way better than variable latency.)

~~~
me_me_me
Yes this is a key, consistency of lag for some is crucial for experience.

I can see a lot of games to be playable with Stadia.

However anything competitive PvP is a no-no. Playing TF2 I could tell whats is
server ping with accuracy of around 30ms by using projectile weapons. Adding
best case scenario 60ms is a big deal.

Stadia simply can't ever compete with local setups. Currently multiplayer game
will play with your local input and then resolve any inconsistencies on server
side (this is the reason you were 'killed' when clearly behind a wall). While
the resolution of the local input might differ to server the responsiveness
feeling of local input is part of good play experience.

There are corner cases for some games (RDR2 - all actions have long
unskippable animation) or game play style racing games (input lag is hidden by
the 'responsiveness of a car').

All that said, its still very impressive how low they got. I was expecting no
less then 100ms.

~~~
Paradigma11
But what if the TF2 server runs on the same Google machine?

~~~
grenoire
Then there's two ways to work with that:

1) It's only Stadia users against each other;

2) People who are directly connected to the Google machine _still_ have an
advantage over the Stadia players.

The first is... OK. You'll be fine, the playerbase will be tiny and you won't
be able to play with your non-Stadia friends.

The drawback for the second one is a little less obvious, but the result is
that the Stadia users will not benefit from the client-side lag compensation
measures that Source (TF2's engine) implements. Most people in this thread
miss the fact that in multiplayer games you're always ahead of where the
server thinks you are, because you're playing on your timeline, and the server
perceives you at RTT/2 behind. When you think you perform an action, the
server travels back in time to determine whether how it played out (as opposed
to actually executing your actions in what is relatively RTT/2 later).

~~~
Paradigma11
@2.) I disagree that this would necessarily lead to a disadvantage for Stadia
users. When the prediction turns out to be wrong, your client has to correct
which can be disconcerting. This is not the case for Stadia users. Prediction
is certainly more comfortable, but i am not sure it is an advantage. What you
are describing is just moving the prediction from the client to the server. If
the server receives input from t-10 and recalculates the state(t) and sends it
to the client then obviously (t-9) - (t-1) inputs are missing for the final
state calculation at t.

~~~
me_me_me
That's what I described in my comment. And while it is ture that you might
feel cheated because something else happened on the screen (your character was
hit while already in cover). This is 'rare' event in terms of perception.
Client makes a lot of predictions but most of those misses are invisible to
user.

What is visible and perceivable is the lag effect and it is constant and
unavoidable.

The client - server differences are handled differently depending on the game.
AFAIK there is a trend of 'attacker' advantage ie client input is more favored
when resolving delta, incentivizing active play vs camping. In that case
Stadia fares worse then local.

~~~
Red_Leaves_Flyy
Rare? Depends on what you play. Overwatch, cod, and destiny are terrible for
this. Happens to me several times, per 10 minute game. Csgo is the best in my
experience.

Trading kills can theoretically happen, but it's like lightning. If it's
happening a lot there's something wrong. My guess is the fuzzy calculations in
the earlier mentioned games err on the side of killing everyone.

~~~
me_me_me
Overwatch is just badly made game, half of those are engine issues rather then
buggy netcode.

------
ablation
Eurogamer also did a tech review, and actually did find it laggy:
[https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-stadi...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-stadia-
tech-review)

Also, they found that to get the best performance from it, it sucked down in
the region of 20gb per hour of data. Which is a lot for countries with capped
internet allowances.

~~~
dharma1
It's streaming video, so depending on your settings, about the same as Netflix
I would think?

~~~
ealexhudson
Pre-prepared streaming video will compress much better: amongst other things,
modern codecs will send frames out-of-sequence in order to better compress,
have motion prediction, stuff like that. Even if this system is willing to
spend the compute to do high-level compression, they don't have the data from
future frames yet that will allow them to get down as low as you can go.

Equally, because you know so much about the scene, there are many more
opportunities to do smart video compression - however, those would be
extremely difficult to take advantage of.

~~~
taneq
> Equally, because you know so much about the scene, there are many more
> opportunities to do smart video compression

Ultimately they could cache textures, models etc. on the client system and
only transmit data about the players' locations and inputs. Then the codec
would render the game on the client... hey wait.

------
systemtest
The problem I have with Stadia is that you need a monthly subscription and
also need to pay full price for all games. Games that can't be sold on the
second hand market, unlike the current console games. And at $129 it's not far
off from the €200 I paid for my PS4 during Black Friday 2017. The TCO of the
Stadia seems much higher than traditional consoles.

The upside is using it on a mobile device but to me this doesn't add value, as
the network connection outside my house is either a high-latency 3G connection
or someone else's unreliable WiFi. And with Remote Play on the PS4 I have
similar capabilities.

~~~
macspoofing
>The problem I have with Stadia is that you need a monthly subscription and
also need to pay full price for all games.

Yes. The problem with Stadia is Google. Google hates hardware and they pretty
much half-ass everything that is even an inch outside of their core
competency.

There is something exciting about cloud-gaming, even in the present state ...
but to make it a success it would have required Google to make better deals
with content providers (maybe turn it into a true Netflix-for-games), and
potentially pour some significant resources to subsidize it. For example, they
could make the controller/hardware really cheap, subsidize content-provider
licenses (so games are available via an Xbox-pass type service, or are half
the price of their PS4/Xbox counterparts), or, god-forbid, invest in first-
party studios to create original games. But that's not the Google way.

~~~
skinkestek
> The problem with Stadia is Google. Google hates hardware and they pretty
> much half-ass everything that is even an inch outside of their core
> competency.

You make it sound like their core products are good.

Search is worse than in 2009.

Ads has been useless for me for years, even when I tried to help..!

Anyone here who buys Google ads, expect to be fleeced for nothing:

There exist ads I want (events, local) , but I never see them.

On the contrary: for years I've seen irrelevant but probably very expensive
ads that aren't even remotely interesting but rather insulting.

~~~
dariusj18
> Search is worse than in 2009

To be fair, the internet is worse as a whole. Google is at war with SEO and
bad actors.

This is not to reduce how bad/evil their ad model has become.

------
gnuarch
Dan Luu recently measured latency of computers of the past, keyboards,
terminals. See posts listed on [https://danluu.com/](https://danluu.com/)

[https://danluu.com/input-lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)

[https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/](https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/)

[https://danluu.com/term-latency/](https://danluu.com/term-latency/)

[https://danluu.com/latency-mitigation/](https://danluu.com/latency-
mitigation/)

------
cyborgx7
The stream I saw said there was barely any noticeable lag. Not discounting
this experience, but I suspect the specific corporate network might play a
significant role here.

~~~
delfinom
Corporate networks don't magically add latency. You would need a corporate
network that idiotically sent things over the wire to a corporate office on
another continent.

~~~
jcfrei
They are also not magically low latency. Maybe there are some QoS rules in
place that deprioritize Stadia's video stream. According to the video the
mobile connection was fine and the router just treats traffic over wifi
differently.

~~~
mikkom
Or it might be that mobile connection is better because the bandwidth needs
are much lower for the mobile-size video feed.

------
m0xte
I can't see how this lag couldn't exist with the network, processing and
encoding overhead. How did they get that far through product development and
still assume it was viable?

~~~
delfinom
They have a whole thing on using machine learning to predict your inputs to
reduce input lag....essentially making it pointless for a human to play at all
but that's another philosophical topic.

~~~
m0xte
Oh wow that just sounds horrible. So it is entirely the illusion that it's
doing what you want. It'd be as pointful as riding in one of those cheap
amusement rides outside a shop. It's all shiny. I want to sit in it. But the
novelty wears of immediately when you realise you're not totally in control of
things.

------
thatguyagain
Been using Nvidia's GeForce Now for a couple of months, playing games like
Apex Legends on a macbook air 2013. Works like a charm! The only issue have
been the waiting time between game updates (I guess they have to update all
their servers, which takes time).

------
whazor
Stadia and other streaming services will be a next unique selling point for
internet providers. It could cost consumers more money to have a
'stadia'-ready connection, where the ISP invests in more stable
infrastructure. Routers and wifi access points could be 'stadia'-ready. Do not
forget Stadia will be a free service next year and consumers are going try out
free-to-play games and blame ISPs for lag.

------
xenog
I have been using Shadow for a couple of months from my fast and stable
gigabit FTTH connection. My ping to their servers is about 20 ms, and I have
to make a conscious effort to notice any input lag. Some of you may argue my
brain is slow. I can assure you it is not.

On the other hand, I got Stadia a couple of days ago, and although graphics
work very well, input lag is unbearable. Some streaming users will experience
input lag because their Internet connections cannot handle it, but that is not
my case.

It's sad because I live in Dublin. Google has servers here. Shadow's servers
are in the Netherlands. I'm very disappointed at the level of incompetence
that Google displayed on this release. They have enough data centres, money
and quality network connections to pull this off properly, yet they didn't.
Shadow, a small French company streaming remote Windows PCs, did a much better
job running standard Windows games that are not purposefully made to be
streamed.

------
Const-me
What might have worked for them, develop a new game engine from the ground up,
designed for their unique environment.

Games do non-trivial amount of processing with relaxed latency requirements:
physics, cloth, many particle systems, fluid dynamics, some other VFX like
weather / time of day, many parts of gameplay logic. Even some parts of
rendering pipeline don’t require low latency, e.g. camera frustum culling
doesn’t. Many of these things even run on CPUs as opposed to GPUs, and cloud
providers have a lot of idle CPU and RAM resources.

Such a hybrid engine might be OK offloading half of the code to the cloud,
while still using local GPU for rendering and dynamic lighting, using assets
streamed from server and cached locally. This still requires a reasonably fast
local machine, but hopefully less so compared to current game engines.

Very expensive to develop and run, though. Also it may consume even more
download bandwidth compared to the streaming video they have now.

------
tiborsaas
Here's a positive demo from CNET without lag issues:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnneXKQFvwM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnneXKQFvwM)

~~~
hartator
He doesn’t seem to test for lag though. You can also see there is a delay
between him pressing the button and the character moving.

~~~
tiborsaas
Compared to the one in the post it looks negligible he even says that it's
fine. I don't claim it's zero lag, lol.

~~~
rasz
CNET video has 8 frames (260ms) of input lag on TV ~6 (200ms) on phone, and it
looks about 720p after compression
[https://mobile.twitter.com/Nitomatta/status/1196485009315520...](https://mobile.twitter.com/Nitomatta/status/1196485009315520512)

~~~
tiborsaas
Where do you have the data from? Did you analyze the video frame-by-frame?
Actually that's not bad considering what are we talking about here. Wish I
could try it.

~~~
rasz
You can pause YT clip and skip one frame at a time using ,.(<>) keys.

------
amq
I remember trying out Gaikai in some 2009, and I was completely blown away
both by the quality and by the latency. It felt like magic, I couldn't
understand why they didn't succeed commercially, and I still can't understand
why there is still no better service out there.

~~~
maest
THer's also GeForceNow, from nvidia - it's been around for a few years now.

I've used it for Prey 2 (finished) and The Witcher 3 (in progress) and I'm
really happy with it. It's still in closed beta (although I think it's
available commercially somewhere in Asia(?)), but it's a no frills product
that does exactly what it says.

There's no platform play, though (like the Stadia integration with youtube and
special Stadia dev framework etc), but that's an advantage to some.

~~~
amq
I also have a GeForce Now account, but somehow, it doesn't feel as smooth as
Gaikai back then. An FPS like CS GO is unplayable for me - because of input
lag.

------
m00dy
The solution is to build mini data-centers frequently placed around
neighbourhoods in an ecological way.

~~~
Luuseens
Micro data-center in each home. Then we can just attach the input and output
devices to said data-centers, and skip the whole video encode/decode step as
well.

~~~
m00dy
I mean we use Uber and book rooms on AirBnb. Why not to share gpu cycles ?

~~~
loriverkutya
I cannot tell of this is sarcasm.

------
highcapacity
From what I gathered, it should be laggy. I mean, you have to have a killer
Internet speed to pull this off and even then - the inconsistency and
fluctuation of speed are just natural. Waiting a bit to see how this will be
solved

------
clktmr
There will always be a lag. The best they can do is hide the lag by doing some
stuff on the client (e.g. mouse cursor or shifting viewport pixel-wise). That
ways I suppose they could get this on a level where most people don't notice.

------
touchpadder
Promised 60fps 4k and no lag. Delivered 720p/1080p, compression artifacts and
200ms lag in best cases. That's like onLive 10 years ago.

