
Google is blatantly lying about the quality of Stadia’s games - Osiris
https://9to5google.com/2019/11/20/stadia-4k-games-quality/
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Xelbair
Depends on how they measure 4k and 60fps.. i mean their dongle can output that
steadily even with 1fps and 800x600 stream..

I seriously see no point to stadia, at all. Main concern is an input lag - you
either have a huge lag(150+ms is huge) or you use some kind of predictive
algorithm.. and then you get input mis-predictions which are very noticeable
and annoying for players.

Not to mention a bit of philosophical approach - is it even you playing the
game? why not watch lets play instead(i hate myself for saying this)?

I've seen side-by-side comparison of RDR2 on stadia and xbone, and it looked
like stadia was running on low details(not to mention that everything was
blurry due to upscaling) - but i have no idea how legitimate that comparison
was.

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pjc50
I'm more wondering: this service has been tried and failed at least once by
OnLive, who were acquishutdown: "Sony has acquired important parts of OnLive.
Due to the sale, all OnLive services were discontinued as of April 30, 2015."

Is the technology now good enough? But haven't gamers' expectations increased
in the meantime? Is there any group of customers more notorious for
unreasonable expectations and anger when those expectations aren't met?

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friendlybus
Both publisher/devs and customers have unreasonable expectations about games
and google with stadia. We all remember molyneux and are experiencing star
citizen.

People see games and its like their brain hits light speed. Expectations warp
to infinity, imagination is set to overdrive and it all seems reasonable
because computers are insanely overpowered compared to anything people can
reasonably estimate. Up until the point you have drudged the hundred miles
OnLive or Doom has been and you understand why they made the choices they
did...

The visual fidelity is not the first step, getting the gameplay working like
normal or better is priority one. Games are an interactive real time medium,
that's the differing point to choose your own adventure books and movies. Even
the majority of slower paced games will feel bad to play with lag.

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alephnan
I was quite upset after paying $3-5 for a movie off Youtube that was labeled
as "HD" which ended up being 480p. It turns out that 480p is technically
considered "HD"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
definition_video](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_video)

~~~
rchaud
Out of curiosity, what happens when you buy a movie on YT? Do you download a
physical file in a DRM-free format? Or is it something you can only watch
inside the YT app, and only when you're logged into your account?

~~~
vsuqf
>Out of curiosity, what happens when you buy a movie on YT? Do you download a
physical file in a DRM-free format?

Oh sweet summer child.

~~~
serf
>Oh sweet summer child.

who? the person with the legitimate question , or the person who doesn't seem
to realize that some folks download anything they want from youtube, purchased
videos included?

youtube-dl is great, and it makes you realize that video streaming sites
aren't as ephemeral as the owners wish they'd be. Similar tools exist for
Netflix.

Anyone that trusts these groups after things like the Amazon e-book removals
probably should re-evaluate how they think property can work. Save what you
can -- it won't be there tomorrow.

~~~
vsuqf
I download anything I want from youtube, but, for obvious reasons, I don't
expect youtube to serve me with a direct download link for a movie I've
rented.

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ZeroGravitas
Are they upscaling on the server side then encoding it as 4K?

That seems weird. You'd think that would add effort and bandwidth for little
(if the have a very fancy upscaler) to no benefit at the cost of bandwidth.

Are they sure its not just semi automatically downscaling the video to meet
congestion targets? Like if you watch a 4K stream on YouTube and it's not able
to supply it at that Res, then it'll drop down.

I also ever that when HD was introduced, some games text was unreadable. How
does the service cope with not knowing what the output resolution is going to
be?

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Traster
It says in the article that the copy of the game provided to Google by the
developers isn't 4k. So it's literally not possible that it could be dropping
quality for bandwidth constraints. It upscales on the players' device. So this
is probably about both resource limitations in Stadia and bandwidth
considerations.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Well, it might be getting upscaled and then downscaled again.

We'd need confirmation that the PC version was native 4k and not just being
upscaled.

I'm not that up on PC but I was under the impression that lots of games didn't
run internally at full output resolution, even if your HDMI output is claiming
a specific size.

~~~
apk-d
Downscaling is widely employed at stages of the rendering pipeline where a
full resolution buffer wouldn't make much difference (eg. reflections, post
effects), but overall when you turn on 4k, you're mostly getting 4k. This is
trivially verifiable by zooming in on a screenshot.

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pkulak
My current guess is that none of the games that have the contracts signed are
actually optimized very well at all for Vulkan. Hell, it could even be that
Google had to write some kind of compatibility layer so that games could just
use whatever engine they happen to be using, which would obviously mean that
10+ teraflops means nothing. I appreciate the use of Vulkan, since the current
situation of a brand-new graphics api for every OS/hardware combination is
terrible, but it is the more difficult road.

So this means that they are _technically_ keeping their promise, since they
are recording the game at 4k 60... but that obviously doesn't matter if the
game can't get close to outputting that. Gylt is an exclusive, so if anything
is running at 4k it would be that, but I'll have to wait for my controller to
show up tomorrow to find out.

EDIT: Just looked it up, and RDR2 supports Vulkan since the PC release,
apparently. That's interesting, and kinda blows up my argument.

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Traster
This basically sounds like the Chromecast ultra will always output at up to
4k60 and will upscale, and somehow people thought they could claim that had
any relevance to the actual stadia service.

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bootloop
Well I guess there was a product manager who didn't understand the difference
between streaming resolution and rendering resolution and eng didn't catch it
fast enough.

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Jamwinner
Something something paycheck depends on not understanding something...

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swedish_mafia
This company should outsource all engineering to infosys

