In case you’re out of the loop, Stadia follows last year’s Project Stream test, which Google views as a resounding success. In essence, Stadia is Project Stream, delivering a similar game-streaming service, but done bigger, better, and with more features.
Like Project Stream, Stadia will allow you to play AAA games at super-high settings, with silky smooth framerates, at up to 4K resolutions — at least, to start. It works remotely, with the actual game being hosted on Google’s remote servers, as it’s streamed to your home. This all comes without a major investment in specialized gaming gear, too.
Google is taking this project quite seriously, as it even relies on custom hardware:
Google’s expanded its data centers to better provide an optimized experience, for even “the most demanding games,” and that includes fresh new hardware in those data centers. Stadia’s stack, revealed on the Stadia.dev site, includes a custom 2.7GHz x86 CPU, custom AMD GPUs (rated at 10.7 teraflops), 16GB of RAM, and SSD cloud storage.
If there’s one company capable of building the infrastructure capable of making game streaming a reality, it’s Google. However, I remain skeptical for now, and will adhere to the mantra of seeing is believing.
Already not comfortable with the game habit tracking (with no opt-out, no less) from the likes of nintendo and steam. And those are companies which don’t have information farming as their primary source of income.
Using Chromecast to stream to TVs is pretty nifty feature. Inexpensive.
Playstation Now. Geforce Experience. Valve? There are many players offering game streaming.
Microsoft’s Project xCloud is also coming out this year. Maybe at E3?
DigitalFoundry has a good video preview of the service.
Image quality is still subpar and input lag higher than a console running the game at 30 fps.
This may find a public for the uninvolved gamers that want affordable means of access or convenience for the road warriors staying in different hotels every night. But I doubt this will be able to convince people playing regularly in the comfort of their homes.
benoitb,
Moving the GPU to the datacenter is never going to beat a local console in terms of latency. If the data center is close enough, maybe it could be passable for some types of games. However I’m quite concerned about what this could do to the detriment of prime-time internet bandwidth. Moving resources away from users is inherently inefficient. If too many people start needing high priority traffic to stream HD games instead of rendering them through their consoles, then that additional congestion may well cause everyone’s internet performance to suffer. It could require network upgrades and raise internet prices, but I guess google doesn’t care about those things since people will just blame ISPs anyways.
I guess this warrants a survey, but as a road warrior myself, my experience is that internet performance in hotels, airports, public hotspots, etc is generally quite a bit worse than what I have at home. On our last vacation we couldn’t reliably stream youtube. They’re regularly oversubscribed and latency is bad too (probably from too many people trying to play youtube videos, haha).
This is not a free service as Reader or G+, so likely it won’t be abandoned after a few years. Still, it does not interest me at all, it sounds like it would offer only games I won’t care about.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! And they expect people to go for this? 4K video needs a minimum of 15 to 25 Mbps to stream. At 20 Mbps, one hour of game play will burn through 9 GB of bandwidth. Most cable connections are capped at 300 to 600 GB per month. If you have a wireless connection, those tend to be capped at 10 to 20 GB. This is aimed squarely at the idle rich with expensive fiber connections… who can afford to have a beefy PC in the first place and hence don’t need this service. I don’t see this becoming a “must have” service any time soon.
“4K video needs a minimum of 15 to 25 Mbps to stream. At 20 Mbps, one hour of game play will burn through 9 GB of bandwidth. Most cable connections are capped at 300 to 600 GB per month. If you have a wireless connection, those tend to be capped at 10 to 20 GB.”
Also expect to see cries about net neutrality to once again come from the above mentioned data hogs when the ISP’s like Comcast start telling them “You Wanna To Use These Kinds Of Services,You Gonna Pay For It.”
yoko-t,
I am pro-net neutrality, and I want to be clear about this point: it’s NOT about telling ISPs they can’t charge for the bandwidth that consumers use. It IS about telling ISPs they can’t charge or throttle differently because of what services those bits are carrying. The purpose isn’t to protect data hogs, but to protect consumer freedom.
As a consumer, I pay for X bandwidth with a possible Y quota. It’s none of my ISPs business what I use my traffic for, even if it’s a service that competes with my ISP’s services. If the ISP wants to charge more for a higher bandwidth package, they were always free to do so under net neutrality, so long as they didn’t try to restrict what customers could do with the bandwidth they were paying for.
In any case, the point is kind of mute since the current administration overturned net neutrality in the US, so it is no longer law:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/technology/net-neutrality-repeal-vote.html