Exactly right. For what it's worth, Nvidia's GeForce Now is (and has been) substantially better. Interestingly, since this deal, you can now play a number of GamePass games on GeForce Now. There was a several minute long wait time to play Starfield on GamePass but it was available on GFN via my GamePass subscription - with no wait time. Same goes with a number of UbiSoft titles.
I had the best experience, quality wise, with Stadia though.
I have 1 gbps as well and it has worked fine for me. Especially if I'm sitting close to the my AP or even better when connected via ethernet. In some cases, I couldn't tell the difference between locally installed game or cloud. Games like Lego Star wars Skywalker saga or Ghost Recon Wildlands work really well. Although I haven't tried any fast paced online FPS games yet.
I've been playing Starfield and it's been fine for me. Occasionally the quality degrades and you can see this very obvious vertical wipe as it syncs back up, but it happens rarely enough for me that I don't mind it.
I have 100mbs internet and it works near perfectly for me. For me graphics are better on xbox cloud gaming because my xbox one s can't run games with the highest graphics settings. Maybe I'm geographically close to one of the xbox cloud data centers while you're far away?
I don’t know - I started gaming again during the pandemic after trying Stadia on a whim. It worked great over 100 megabit DSL. Amazingly so. I went in super skeptical but was blown away. Perhaps being in the Bay Area helped?
I consider myself pretty attuned to (and annoyed by) compression artifacts in streaming video.
I did end up buying an Xbox instead of using Stadia though - I couldn’t get over paying full price for games I didn’t actually own.