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A network analysis on cloud gaming: Stadia, GeForce Now and PSNow

123 points by jsnell 6y ago

nateberkopec 6y ago
I did a good amount of gaming via Parsec and AWS this summer. When it works, it's great. I can absolutely see this being the future of gaming as home bandwidth continues to improve, and more datacenters get built near major population centers. It is _very_ sensitive to the connection, though. This summer, I was about 11 milliseconds away from an AWS datacenter with a 500 megabit connection. Buttery smooth perfection. No video compression artifacts. Now, I am about 60 milliseconds away with a 50 megabit connection and it is unplayable. 50 megabits/60 milliseconds is a good connection by US broadband standards these days!
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  That's the thing with these services. It's not a 'normal' scale of quality like having different levels of PC hardware. It either works perfectly, or is completely unplayable. There's a low cap on the maximum market size based on peoples internet quality.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - vvanders 6y ago
    Pretty much. Anyone who's written game netcode(either as a hobby or professionally) knows that you build the game design and game engine from the ground up to tolerate latency. For action games most of the time it's all about building a game design where you're predicting(either via physical location or other player's actions), except in the few rare cases that do time-rewinding(most fighting games, some FPSes that combine both, most notably Counter-Strike). This is usually handled by dead-reckoning[1] For large scale, low bandwidth games(AKA RTSes and the like where gamestate is deterministic) that's handled via lock-step[2]. The gamestate is 100% deterministic and all clients move together with a shared set of inputs in "lock step". Both of these approaches can be tolerant to latencies up to ~600ms(back in the ole 28.8/56k days of '97 SubSpace[3] was doing ~300 players in one zone with a high skill curve and a robust netcode). They usually mask it with client side reactions that are then reconciled with the server in a robust way. If you're just dropping video frames over a network stack none of that is available to you no matter how fancy your FEC or other tricks are. Somehow I've now got the urge to go dust off the Continuum client again and boot up SubSpace. [1] https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131638/dead_reckoning_latency_hiding_for_.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131638/dead_reckoning... [2] https://meseta.medium.com/netcode-concepts-part-3-lockstep-and-rollback-f70e9297271 https://meseta.medium.com/netcode-concepts-part-3-lockstep-a... [3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...
    - breakfastduck 6y ago
      Latency is the most important thing. There's a reason high refresh monitors are loved by serious gamers. I can deal with 1080p playing old ps2/3 games through an online service, or modern with the same resolution but high settings with snappy controls. I cannot play a game with noticeable input lag whatsoever, even if it was at 4k HDR 144hz.
      - vvanders 6y ago
        We're not talking about input or rendering latency here, networked games are designed to work such that even when you have 100-300ms of round-trip latency the objective of the game is setup in such a way that your success is based on "predicting" events or the server keeps all disparate time domains in memory and can time-rewind to resolve authoritative game state.
        breakfastduck 6y ago
        I know that technically it's a different problem. But the prediction is exactly what makes it feel unresponsive. So the human perception is input lag, regardless of what causes that feeling.
        chupasaurus 6y ago
        The input lag causes both unresponsiveness and prediction. The former is obvious, a simple example for the latter: in RTS/MOBA (both rollback or lockstep netcode) the whole region around the opponent where he could be in the next tick becomes your target, the size of it depends on the latency and if RTT is big enough possible reactions become an additional factor.
      - onion2k 6y ago
        by serious gamers You'd think that "serious gamers" would obsess over the merits of games (mechanics, plot, level design, gameplay, etc), not the technical minutiae of framerates and input lag. That term always seemed odd to me.
  - stemuk 6y ago
    As a nearly daily user of Google Stadia I have to disagree. I use Stadia in two different households, one with a 50 Mbps connection (where Stadia works perfectly) an one with a connection capped at 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. The 10 Mbps connection only allows for 720p gameplay and I get frequent stuttering every 5 minutes or so but this doesn't really ruin the experience with most story driven games like Red Dead Redemption 2 or AC Odyssey. At first I was surprised by the playability of Stadia at such a slow connection myself but even though I cannot play shooter games I wouldn't go as far to call the experience I get with the 10 Mbps connection 'unplayable'.
  - tareqak 6y ago
    I honestly want to have a map of that overlays homes and apartments with Internet connection speed and main Internet nodes/routers/datacenters. If remote work is a big part of the future, then prioritizing optimal Internet connection parameters as a part of a moving decision seems rational.
    - toast0 6y ago
      I suspect such a map doesn't exist, but if you want optimal Internet connection, what you're looking for is: a) in a metro area that has a major internet exchange. Hurricane Electric's list of pops is a decent start: http://he.net/ip_transit.html http://he.net/ip_transit.html Some of those locations are more well connected than others though. In the US, prime exchanges are really LA, SF/SJ, Seattle, Reston, New York, Miami, Dallas, Chicago. If you settle near a lesser exchange like say Denver, you'll probably have good connectivity to many networks, but many services don't have a datacenter in Denver. Also, some companies are trying to put their big datacenters farther north to save on cooling and energy costs, so bias north if possible; however, if you want excellent connectivity to South America, much of that goes through Miami. If you're in Canada, Vancouver or Toronto are your best bets. In South America, Sao Paulo or Bogota (but note, connectivity is sparse between countries, it historically all went through Miami, but that's changed a bit). In Europe, Amsterdam, London or Frankfurt? In Asia, Singapore or Taipei. In Africa, Johanesburg. In AU/NZ, reportedly it kind of all sucks, but Melbourne/Syndey/Auckland are okish. b) not on DSL; usually it's run with settings that guarantee you 20 ms ping to the first hop. Be careful because some of the DSL providers imply fiber to the home, but really mean fiber to the DSLAM (or whatever it's called today). c) fiber is better than cable, but cable is ok as long as the company isn't incompetent. Comcast is much maligned, but their network is actually pretty good; local areas could be mismanaged though. d) you need to actually put potential addresses into the sign up for service pages. Put the one you're looking at, as well as the neighbors; if you get prompts like 'you've already got service, would you like to manage it', that's a good sign that they probably actually service the address. Listed available speeds to addresses that are current customers are more likely to be accurate as well. If there's a public utility fiber, check their fiber map, but don't expect to hear back from them with firm availability or not in time to make a decision on your prospective living arrangement.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    If streaming takes a large chunk of the market that has good internet quality, that's a significant revenue gone for consoles and gaming PC hardware (even if it's not 100% of the market).
- vmception 6y ago
  That is surprising for me to hear. I did cloud gaming a decade ago with OnLive and some Playstation Now a little later and it was never as bad as the gaming gatekeepers suggested. 60ms latency on a 50mbit connection should be good, sad it isnt. With racing games I learned to compensate and anticipate. And there are pleeeeenty of slower games to play.
  - thrownblown 6y ago
    I used OnLive till the bitter end. It was awesome. A little sad the way it ended, also some tears in the rain for the game library I had purchased and the friends I had made in Space Marine multiplayer. I was an early adopter of gforce now and I really enjoyed it while it was in beta. As soon as it was released to the public all the publishers pulled their games.
- jjcon 6y ago
  > 50 megabits/60 milliseconds is a good connection by US broadband standards these days! Average us internet speed (speed paid for - not just speed available) is >120 megabits so I wouldn’t exactly call that good considering gamers are likely to have faster than average connections
  - CraftThatBlock 6y ago
    Estimates I could find put it around 30-170Mbps, but the top end (speedtest.net average) of Canada is >150Mbps, which isn't actually common (living in/near large city). Average likely around 30-60 Mbps from experience.
    - jjcon 6y ago
      Speed test shows average at 170 for USA broadband https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed
- pkulak 6y ago
  I used Stadia for a while, but after a couple months, the compression started to bum me out. It really worked great, and playing the latest Assassin's Creed on a $200 Chromebook is really something else. But when I would switch to my main TV, I started thinking about how I had given up on the last uncompressed input to my TV; my game console. Dark area blocks, color banding, it all started driving me nuts.
  - gruez 6y ago
    Yeah same here. For me it's a bit more obvious. Basically scenes that have heavy foliage + motion turns into a smeary mess.
  - martinald 6y ago
    I agree. I actually find watching game trailers on YouTube pretty pointless, as everything turns into mush and it totally loses the "precision" of the graphics. I found these cloud streaming services similar, though not quite as extreme. I think bitrates need to be considerably higher. 4K Blu-ray uses close to 100mbit/sec, but movies have the advantage of not requiring really low latency encoding which means it is far more efficient with bitrate. I think probably looking at well over 100mbit/sec to get good PQ on these services.
- martinald 6y ago
  50mbit should be enough for streaming games like this. However, it's very latency specific (considering the video encoding and decoding will add a few tens of ms to the latency), so you are probably closer to 100ms overall which definitely feels very laggy. That is considerably more latency than I get on a FTTH connection from London to New York, for example.
- colordrops 6y ago
  60ms is considered good? Is there some data or graphs on connection speed and latency in the US? Would be interesting to see.
antiterra 6y ago
They wrote a whole paper to say that PSNow doesn’t use WebRTC or RDP and is (currently) capped at 13Mbit/s while the others use up to 45Mbit/s with WebRTC/RDP? Am I missing something?
- cyberlurker 6y ago
  RTP, and yea. “However, these companies released so far little information about their cloud gaming operation and how they utilize the network. In this work, we study these new cloud gaming services from the network point of view.” They’re early too, so this paper will get a lot of citations in the future.
laurentdc 6y ago
My bet is that the improvement in integrated graphics (think Apple M1 or Vega 11) will solve the "gaming on a low end laptop" problem far before game streaming.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Games will simply use more power as the average user's rig becomes more powerful. Do you really think we'll solve low power ray tracing before we solve streaming? Streaming also scales better. Rendering double the frames requires double the power but streaming double the frames does not because frames are mostly similar and compression helps a great deal.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    > Games will simply use more power as the average user's rig becomes more powerful. But the need for lower latency is increasing as well (a la VR)
    - ThatPlayer 6y ago
      Over on /r/oculusquest, Shadow's streaming PC is somewhat popular for running full PC VR games on the portable Quest (as not all the owners have full gaming desktops). So it's not like it's impossible.
      - jjcon 6y ago
        I’ve actually experimented with this a bit and while it can be done it isnt at all playable for 90% of games (anything requiring even moderate response times). Oculus has been working on home desktop to quest WiFi streaming and say the experience isn’t optimal yet for release and that is all local.
    - jayd16 6y ago
      This is certainly moving the goal posts... is everything in the future going to be VR? I doubt it. There will be a market for streaming 4K@60 for a long time.
fxtentacle 6y ago
I'm working on building a game streaming cloud service at the moment. In the long term, I believe running your own servers is going to be the future, because otherwise there'll always be license issues, e.g. when you want to play your gog.com games on GeForce Now. Or indie games or business apps in general. Also, all those services prevent you from sharing with friends for their business reasons, meaning absolutely no coop or splitscreen. Anyway, the key for making such services work is custom ultra low latency udp protocols. I'm going with nvenc hardware encoding, cuda for data wrangling, and a boost::asio based c++ core for the network layer. That, and controlling packet loss, for example by self-throttling and spacing to avoid overflows at intermediate relays. BTW, I'm surprised by the bandwidth numbers in the article. Even fast explosion heavy games like BroForce work reasonably well with 5mbit/s if you use h265.
- the_duke 6y ago
  I'm curious how you plan to compete. Microsoft and Sony have a large catalog to offer, Amazon and Google have large data centers, a lot of money to throw at publishers, and a good path to integration with streaming (Youtube and Twitch). Geforce Now has shown the hostility independent efforts will have to face. I also believe the target audience is mostly users who can't or don't want to afford dedicated hardware and will want a good collection of games with a subscription.
  - poisonborz 6y ago
    There is a lot of appeal in "play anywhere" alone. Such software gives you the ability to better utilize your hardware by playing from your laptop, friend's house or phone. Also, imagine only needing a weak device as thin client and doing 3D or photo editing through your main computer.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    I don't plan to compete with those huge services and their catalogues. Instead, I'm building a platform as a service. My ideal customers will be the software publishers that want to run their own streaming cloud. There's a lot of demand for enterprise solutions that allow you to demo things online. With a regular unlimited demo version, you have the risk of people trying to crack it. If the demo is a streaming service, then you can use everything, but copy nothing. In essence, a high performance streaming solution is the perfect copy protection for pricey enterprise apps.
birdyrooster 6y ago
I’ll lead with my peak cynical take, apologies in advance, but I think Google just wanted to entice people with cheap centralized streaming games while it was viable to get them married to a platform they will ultimately have to buy a local console to render games with anyways. Can they even get close to DisplayPort 2.0 performance in the next couple years? I don’t see how this is ever going to scale as bit depth, resolution and frame rates continue to increase. This is a losing strategy because a lossy, slow connection between your display and your controller will only get worse (quadratically so) as those three factors (bit depth, resolution and frame rate) increase. They are going to have to beef up the client hardware and do more of the game engine and rendering compute locally, which will undermine the cost savings they offered being centralized.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  My guess is that they're testing the waters for enterprise software. Think Google Docs but for CAD. There's a lot of money in that market and people are used to paying $1000+ monthly subscriptions anyway. So if you can move that onto a remote desktop server, you'll have amazing performance and healthy profit margins. And if it works well for games, it'll surely work well enough for regular software.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    I agree that is a good fit for a use case, but I’m speaking about Stadia in particular. They are going to disappoint a lot of consumers.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Why would you get better performance from CAD in the cloud? Doesn't a cloud server have essentially the opposite performance profile from a CAD workstation, with many more cores but much slower clock rates? CAD vendors want your workstation to have a few fast cores and several GPUs.
    - birdyrooster 6y ago
      Clouds are starting to focus on HPC machine types which can crank out CAD renders
cecida 6y ago
I purchased a Nvidia Shield Pro before Christmas (an unbelievably slick piece of tech btw) and signed up for GeForce Now. I'm based in Ireland, as are the local Geforce Now servers (presume it's running on Azure). A surprisingly decent gaming experience - The Witcher 3 looks amazing, and performance is extremely decent with only slight delays.
- tgtweak 6y ago
  Yeah the shield can also receive from your gaming PC provided it has an nvidia card. It's a really nice device in general.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    So can any device with Moonlight, I haven’t seen performance differences as far as local streaming goes between my Shield (2018 model) and my A1E (which has a fairly shitty SoC).
  - nullify88 6y ago
    Steam Link can also be installed on the Shield and as long as your PC has steam running, you can use its Big Picture mode to stream games.
birdyrooster 6y ago
All of you people that are bullish on Stadia, explain to me why DisplayPort 2.0 provides up to 77Gbps of bandwidth? Google cannot possibly encode/decode that stream with high fidelity using an internet connection available from any residential ISP in the next couple years. Maybe within this decade you could accomplish that. However by that point, local compute will have already exceeded this standard. The fine folks at Google know their computer science well so this isn’t news to them, but it kinda lays bare that eventually they will be selling consoles to execute games locally since it’s clear they do not have the appetite to get 10Gbps+ fiber to the country. Steaming-only Stadia made sense paired with a mature Google Fiber deployment, but alas that is not the universe we reside in.
- echelon 6y ago
  I still have fun playing N64. How many people play Minecraft? edit: There's a population that cares about graphics, but the population that doesn't is bigger and collectively has more money. Just look at the mobile gaming market.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    I agree that people will settle for less, but I am arguing Google has always been aiming for AAA titles and markets it that way. Also DisplayPort 2.0 bandwidth is mostly for supporting VR where visual artifacts and low fidelity lead to motion sickness for a huge demographic.
    - d0gbread 6y ago
      I have Stadia, love it, and don't care that much about quality. I care that it's console-free and on the two TVs I bounce between, or wherever else.
    - ReactiveJelly 6y ago
      What's VR got to do with it? Sure, Stadia might never work for VR. Sure, VR might one day be a big part of the gaming market. It won't be soon, and it will probably never be the entire market.
justicezyx 6y ago
Cloud gaming is actually far worse than the idea sounds like. From the surface, cloud gaming is absolutely a fantastic idea, I.e., it removes a series of barriers of playing high end games: cost of hardware, convenience, subscription bases consumption to remove upfront cost. However, in close examination, it becomes clear that high end game is costly not because these above mentioned barriers. On the contrary, these barriers are part of the structure to support the high end games. Additionally, the modern high end gaming experience entirely depends on the exclusive ownership of costly computing power. The hidden foundation that supports that comouting power is the low cost local communication networks. And we all know that wide area communication is always more expensive than computing. So for any large scale cloud gaming, the underlying economy is that it's always more cost-effective of having local hardware.
- conceptme 6y ago
  I don't see it, I got geforce now and that's because it's cheap much cheaper then buying a new game pc or console. If you just want to play sometimes it's a great option.
  - woko 6y ago
    For 5.50€/month, it is an extremely cheap way to get to play games with all graphical settings at max with 1080p resolution at 60 fps. However, this price won't last, it is written on the web page that one day, there will be an increase for everybody.
kibwen 6y ago
The tech and infrastructure aren't there yet and the Stadia rollout has been a laughingstock, but cloud gaming is still the future of multiplayer video games (and, since game-as-a-service is (sadly) the future of AAA game models, and because operating a game-as-a-service essentially requires your game to be multiplayer in order to entice people to keep playing (via community-based social reinforcement and the status-seeking that drives the purchase of cosmetics), that's going to be an increasingly large proportion of all AAA games). In terms of latency, having your game in the cloud is worse. In terms of graphics, it's going to be worse compared to having high-end local hardware. Despite all that, the killer app that will tip the scale is cheat prevention. Cloud gaming annihilates nearly every category of cheat. Wallhacks? Impossible. Infinite health? Impossible. Flyhacks and speedhacks? Impossible. The only category that isn't completely eviscerated is aimhacking, and even then it will be dramatically harder and less beneficial to aimhack, since you will need local realtime image analysis to do it properly and you won't even be able to aim at targets you can't currently see. Once multiplayer gamers get a taste of that, there's no going back. Sadly, over enough time I fear this effect will start destroying the market for high-end PC hardware, which will be both sad and a detriment to general computing.
- bordercases 6y ago
  This is an interesting analysis, I'm wondering where the disagreements are coming from.
  - callalex 6y ago
    I don’t disagree with the points made here, and I really appreciate the perspective. However, I do question the magnitude of importance for cheating. It kinda seems like a solved problem, and by solved I mean “good enough to have fun”. Are we really going to reinvent an entire industry to solve a relatively non-existent problem?
ericmay 6y ago
Tried Stadia today and closed my account in less than 15 minutes. Those triple-A games they advertise on the front? Well they aren’t available unless you want to purchase them. You get access to I shit you not like 15 games that are not titles I care to play. It’s a big bait and switch as far as I’m concerned. Those triple-A titles might be available some day, but who knows when that day will be. I left very unsatisfied and didn’t even try streaming anything.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- muststopmyths 6y ago
  I don't know why you'd call it bait and switch. Stadia has always been "you have to buy the games separately" for pretty much all titles. That was the big knock against it at launch, and has been an impediment to its growth. FWIW I consider Stadia and the ilk oversold to the mass market akin to VR. There may be a market for people who want to play AAA games, will pay several hundreds per year and yet have never bothered to pay ~$300 for a game console (tail end of last gen). I'm just skeptical it's actually as huge as it's hyped to be.
  - ericmay 6y ago
    > I don't know why you'd call it bait and switch. Well, I can't even go back and look at the original marketing now because when I do I get a warning that Stadia must be played on Chrome and to download that. Obviously I could go in private viewing or something but why would I even bother with that? It's so user-hostile. But the marketing that I do remember that enticed me to check it out was that I thought that it was for streaming games. When I checked out the site they had this big list of games that it looked like I could stream. If I could only stream, say, 15 games as it appears to be why not just show those? Hmm. I do think there's a market for those (like myself) who have a few games they'd like to play. Cyberpunk 2077 looks cool - I'll pay $10 or $15 or even $20/month to stream that (among other games) because my alternative is buying it for $50 and not having it run at ultra-max settings on my MacBook Air. Not desirable. To your point that this was a knock against it at launch, well, yea. They have all this marketing copy that makes it look so cool and then I have to pay retail price for a new game. Why wouldn't I just buy a Playstation or use Xbox or Sony's online services? Like what value is $9.99/month for some lame games that I don't care to play? Pass. This service doesn't address any market that I can see.
tgtweak 6y ago
PS Now is the continuation of gaikai (purchased by Sony in 2012) - at the time the lead developer of x264 was working there. They (gaikai) - even earlier than 2012 - had a very smooth gaming experience considering the general state of connectivity and gpu/cpu then compared to today. I'm not surprised to see google pushing out fat streams like that since they have POPs in every city and youtube-battle-tested video bandwidth congestion detection but geforce now... that doesn't sound like a recipe for happy streaming. Also echoing everyone else's praise for parsec, it is a highly underrated (free...) software. A
Thaxll 6y ago
There is a big difference of running a PC on the cloud that runs your game vs what Stadia does, that's why Stadia is so much better than the competition, the game is compiled for that purpose. The other thing that no one is talking about is that it removed 99% of the cheats because the game is not running locally and you just use a "dumb" terminal.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  It would also make mods impossible. I have a feeling these streaming services will capture a huge portion of the 'casual' market, and there will be some hardcore people who refuse it or consider it a toy. Kinda like cell phones and mobile gaming. Very popular, not going away, but didn't kill off PCs and probably can't.
  - meibo 6y ago
    I doubt it. Publishers will be pushing for this heavily since it makes piracy absolutely impossible as well. "Gamers" won't like it, but AAA publishers always get what they want if it impacts profits - this is the future and there's no way around it. I wouldn't be surprised seeing the first "cloud-exclusive" release opping up soon that you can play on Stadia or equivalent only for half a year or so. Valve is working on something like this as well afaik.
didibus 6y ago
> We find that GeForce Now and Stadia use the RTP protocol to stream the multimedia content, with the latter relying on the standard WebRTC APIs. They result in bandwidth-hungry and consume up to 45 Mbit/s, depending on the network and video quality. PS Now instead uses only undocumented protocols and never exceeds 13 Mbit/s. Is this relevant without comparing the picture quality?
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  No, you can use rtp with like 50Kbps link (audio only). This statement makes no sense
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  I'm surprised Stadia uses standard WebRTC. It doesn't support Firefox, so I assumed maybe it was some specialized version of QUIC that was tightly integrated into Chrome. After all, you don't need a DRM module for this - It _is_ DRM.
  - Orphis 6y ago
    The Chrome stack has been highly tuned to make a Stadia use case work, but Firefox hasn't, making highly latency sensitive usage difficult for now.
funkaster 6y ago
I’ve been playing Watchdogs: Legion on geforce now for over a month and I’m extremely happy with it. I play from my ipad with a wireless xbox one controller. Quality is really good and I only see some stutters very rarely. I’ve played other games with the same experience. I would love to see SFV but I imagine the lag might make it a bad experience. all the games I tried were single player first/3rd person view and lag was not noticeable, I’m assuming there’s a lot of input prediction happening, but even in menus things were instantaneous.
abdulmuhaimin 6y ago
I dont know why these cloud gaming service didnt create at least one game tailored to that platform. I mean, single person game is good and all, but that is arguably the worst performing for a cloud gaming because they are create with local hardware in mind. Why isnt online multiplayer game takes more focus on these platform? Like those battle royale games. If they create it with cloud gaming in mind, a match can be just like local coop game, except you have a very long controller and HDMI cable(aka your internet). Online multiplayer is the only category where cloud gaming have the potential to be better than traditional hardware, but they have to built the game with cloud gaming in mind, not just porting it
- cco 6y ago
  Because single players games are more accommodating to network issues, skipped frames, adjustments in resolution etc. You will notice an input latency spike if you're playing a multiplayer game that requires precise and quick input. I've played around with Stadia a bit, even on "good" internet in the US, 20ms ping, 250mbps, Stadia was only really enjoyable for single players games. Even playing a relatively slow multiplayer game like Dota 2 would have been frustrating fairly often.
  - abdulmuhaimin 6y ago
    Maybe youre correct. I dont know much about how multiplayer games works. However, having just 1 server render and basically 10 viewport is really the future of cloud gaming for me, once the infrastructure(stable fast internet) is there
  - gundmc 6y ago
    20 ms ping to the Stadia servers? That's actually pretty high. I usually get 5-8 ms
    - chronogram 6y ago
      It's kind of silly to assume everyone lives next to the data centre.
autotune 6y ago
The best of these is shadow.tech, they literally give you a Windows Desktop to remote into and play any game you want. The rest of these services all have limited game availability.
technick 6y ago
You don't need a long document for me to tell you stadia sucks. I tried it out over the holiday season, games play fine but I couldn't ever get clear 1080p resolution out of it. I'm on symetrical gig fiber in Colorado, which I guess could be my downfall.
offtop5 6y ago
The only one of these services I like, is the Xbox game pass hybrid approach. While you can stream games to your phone, you can also just install them on your PC or your Xbox. I find phone streaming to be a novelty, it breaks so often I'll find myself running to my computer to finish up a gameplay session
nitros 6y ago
You might find https://doi.org/10.1145/3401335.3401366 https://doi.org/10.1145/3401335.3401366 (https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/144135/1/FromOneEdge_MM_MH_MB.pdf https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/144135/1/FromOneEdge_M...) interesting, it looks into the increase in carbon emissions from streaming games instead of downloading the game.
thetanil 6y ago
Why all the graphs and details about bandwidth when latency from the controller to the screen is really the thing that matters. They mention it several times and never show any measurements.
Arubis 6y ago
I’ve been using GeForce Now for a few years now, originally because I wanted a nice way to use Steam on an older Mac, then as a holdover for when I could pick up a latest-gen GPU. Which—the latter—has proved utterly impossible. I’m curious how much momentum these services will pick up by sheer virtue of it being so challenging to find competitive hardware for sale.
jonas_kgomo 6y ago
What is the complexity of building something like Stadia: what technology is required to assemble a competing product, so far the are using open-source tools like Linux and Vulcan?
ID1452319 6y ago
I've been playing Stadia since it launched. Now, I'm a casual gamers, I haven't bought hardware since PS2 and play games on my mobile occasionally, but I have been blown away my Stadia. I simply cannot get my head around how it can stream a game, in 4K, to my TV. I recently purchased Cyberpunk 2077 and was stunned at the amount of complaining about poor graphics, glitches, gameplay etc. as I have experienced none of those. As for latency and lag, my most popular game to play is PUBG, which is any game should suffer from those issues you'd think it would be a multiplayer, battle royale game like PUBG. But no, other than being very bad at it, I've never experienced what feels like input lag or latency issues. Sales pitch over!

123 points by jsnell 6y ago

I did a good amount of gaming via Parsec and AWS this summer. When it works, it's great. I can absolutely see this being the future of gaming as home bandwidth continues to improve, and more datacenters get built near major population centers. It is _very_ sensitive to the connection, though. This summer, I was about 11 milliseconds away from an AWS datacenter with a 500 megabit connection. Buttery smooth perfection. No video compression artifacts. Now, I am about 60 milliseconds away with a 50 megabit connection and it is unplayable. 50 megabits/60 milliseconds is a good connection by US broadband standards these days!

breakfastduck 6y ago
That's the thing with these services. It's not a 'normal' scale of quality like having different levels of PC hardware. It either works perfectly, or is completely unplayable. There's a low cap on the maximum market size based on peoples internet quality.
- deleted 6y ago
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- vvanders 6y ago
  Pretty much. Anyone who's written game netcode(either as a hobby or professionally) knows that you build the game design and game engine from the ground up to tolerate latency. For action games most of the time it's all about building a game design where you're predicting(either via physical location or other player's actions), except in the few rare cases that do time-rewinding(most fighting games, some FPSes that combine both, most notably Counter-Strike). This is usually handled by dead-reckoning[1] For large scale, low bandwidth games(AKA RTSes and the like where gamestate is deterministic) that's handled via lock-step[2]. The gamestate is 100% deterministic and all clients move together with a shared set of inputs in "lock step". Both of these approaches can be tolerant to latencies up to ~600ms(back in the ole 28.8/56k days of '97 SubSpace[3] was doing ~300 players in one zone with a high skill curve and a robust netcode). They usually mask it with client side reactions that are then reconciled with the server in a robust way. If you're just dropping video frames over a network stack none of that is available to you no matter how fancy your FEC or other tricks are. Somehow I've now got the urge to go dust off the Continuum client again and boot up SubSpace. [1] https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131638/dead_reckoning_latency_hiding_for_.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131638/dead_reckoning... [2] https://meseta.medium.com/netcode-concepts-part-3-lockstep-and-rollback-f70e9297271 https://meseta.medium.com/netcode-concepts-part-3-lockstep-a... [3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    Latency is the most important thing. There's a reason high refresh monitors are loved by serious gamers. I can deal with 1080p playing old ps2/3 games through an online service, or modern with the same resolution but high settings with snappy controls. I cannot play a game with noticeable input lag whatsoever, even if it was at 4k HDR 144hz.
    - vvanders 6y ago
      We're not talking about input or rendering latency here, networked games are designed to work such that even when you have 100-300ms of round-trip latency the objective of the game is setup in such a way that your success is based on "predicting" events or the server keeps all disparate time domains in memory and can time-rewind to resolve authoritative game state.
      - breakfastduck 6y ago
        I know that technically it's a different problem. But the prediction is exactly what makes it feel unresponsive. So the human perception is input lag, regardless of what causes that feeling.
        chupasaurus 6y ago
        The input lag causes both unresponsiveness and prediction. The former is obvious, a simple example for the latter: in RTS/MOBA (both rollback or lockstep netcode) the whole region around the opponent where he could be in the next tick becomes your target, the size of it depends on the latency and if RTT is big enough possible reactions become an additional factor.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      by serious gamers You'd think that "serious gamers" would obsess over the merits of games (mechanics, plot, level design, gameplay, etc), not the technical minutiae of framerates and input lag. That term always seemed odd to me.
- stemuk 6y ago
  As a nearly daily user of Google Stadia I have to disagree. I use Stadia in two different households, one with a 50 Mbps connection (where Stadia works perfectly) an one with a connection capped at 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. The 10 Mbps connection only allows for 720p gameplay and I get frequent stuttering every 5 minutes or so but this doesn't really ruin the experience with most story driven games like Red Dead Redemption 2 or AC Odyssey. At first I was surprised by the playability of Stadia at such a slow connection myself but even though I cannot play shooter games I wouldn't go as far to call the experience I get with the 10 Mbps connection 'unplayable'.
- tareqak 6y ago
  I honestly want to have a map of that overlays homes and apartments with Internet connection speed and main Internet nodes/routers/datacenters. If remote work is a big part of the future, then prioritizing optimal Internet connection parameters as a part of a moving decision seems rational.
  - toast0 6y ago
    I suspect such a map doesn't exist, but if you want optimal Internet connection, what you're looking for is: a) in a metro area that has a major internet exchange. Hurricane Electric's list of pops is a decent start: http://he.net/ip_transit.html http://he.net/ip_transit.html Some of those locations are more well connected than others though. In the US, prime exchanges are really LA, SF/SJ, Seattle, Reston, New York, Miami, Dallas, Chicago. If you settle near a lesser exchange like say Denver, you'll probably have good connectivity to many networks, but many services don't have a datacenter in Denver. Also, some companies are trying to put their big datacenters farther north to save on cooling and energy costs, so bias north if possible; however, if you want excellent connectivity to South America, much of that goes through Miami. If you're in Canada, Vancouver or Toronto are your best bets. In South America, Sao Paulo or Bogota (but note, connectivity is sparse between countries, it historically all went through Miami, but that's changed a bit). In Europe, Amsterdam, London or Frankfurt? In Asia, Singapore or Taipei. In Africa, Johanesburg. In AU/NZ, reportedly it kind of all sucks, but Melbourne/Syndey/Auckland are okish. b) not on DSL; usually it's run with settings that guarantee you 20 ms ping to the first hop. Be careful because some of the DSL providers imply fiber to the home, but really mean fiber to the DSLAM (or whatever it's called today). c) fiber is better than cable, but cable is ok as long as the company isn't incompetent. Comcast is much maligned, but their network is actually pretty good; local areas could be mismanaged though. d) you need to actually put potential addresses into the sign up for service pages. Put the one you're looking at, as well as the neighbors; if you get prompts like 'you've already got service, would you like to manage it', that's a good sign that they probably actually service the address. Listed available speeds to addresses that are current customers are more likely to be accurate as well. If there's a public utility fiber, check their fiber map, but don't expect to hear back from them with firm availability or not in time to make a decision on your prospective living arrangement.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  If streaming takes a large chunk of the market that has good internet quality, that's a significant revenue gone for consoles and gaming PC hardware (even if it's not 100% of the market).
vmception 6y ago
That is surprising for me to hear. I did cloud gaming a decade ago with OnLive and some Playstation Now a little later and it was never as bad as the gaming gatekeepers suggested. 60ms latency on a 50mbit connection should be good, sad it isnt. With racing games I learned to compensate and anticipate. And there are pleeeeenty of slower games to play.
- thrownblown 6y ago
  I used OnLive till the bitter end. It was awesome. A little sad the way it ended, also some tears in the rain for the game library I had purchased and the friends I had made in Space Marine multiplayer. I was an early adopter of gforce now and I really enjoyed it while it was in beta. As soon as it was released to the public all the publishers pulled their games.
jjcon 6y ago
> 50 megabits/60 milliseconds is a good connection by US broadband standards these days! Average us internet speed (speed paid for - not just speed available) is >120 megabits so I wouldn’t exactly call that good considering gamers are likely to have faster than average connections
- CraftThatBlock 6y ago
  Estimates I could find put it around 30-170Mbps, but the top end (speedtest.net average) of Canada is >150Mbps, which isn't actually common (living in/near large city). Average likely around 30-60 Mbps from experience.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    Speed test shows average at 170 for USA broadband https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed
pkulak 6y ago
I used Stadia for a while, but after a couple months, the compression started to bum me out. It really worked great, and playing the latest Assassin's Creed on a $200 Chromebook is really something else. But when I would switch to my main TV, I started thinking about how I had given up on the last uncompressed input to my TV; my game console. Dark area blocks, color banding, it all started driving me nuts.
- gruez 6y ago
  Yeah same here. For me it's a bit more obvious. Basically scenes that have heavy foliage + motion turns into a smeary mess.
- martinald 6y ago
  I agree. I actually find watching game trailers on YouTube pretty pointless, as everything turns into mush and it totally loses the "precision" of the graphics. I found these cloud streaming services similar, though not quite as extreme. I think bitrates need to be considerably higher. 4K Blu-ray uses close to 100mbit/sec, but movies have the advantage of not requiring really low latency encoding which means it is far more efficient with bitrate. I think probably looking at well over 100mbit/sec to get good PQ on these services.
martinald 6y ago
50mbit should be enough for streaming games like this. However, it's very latency specific (considering the video encoding and decoding will add a few tens of ms to the latency), so you are probably closer to 100ms overall which definitely feels very laggy. That is considerably more latency than I get on a FTTH connection from London to New York, for example.
colordrops 6y ago
60ms is considered good? Is there some data or graphs on connection speed and latency in the US? Would be interesting to see.

antiterra 6y ago

They wrote a whole paper to say that PSNow doesn’t use WebRTC or RDP and is (currently) capped at 13Mbit/s while the others use up to 45Mbit/s with WebRTC/RDP? Am I missing something?

cyberlurker 6y ago
RTP, and yea. “However, these companies released so far little information about their cloud gaming operation and how they utilize the network. In this work, we study these new cloud gaming services from the network point of view.” They’re early too, so this paper will get a lot of citations in the future.

laurentdc 6y ago

My bet is that the improvement in integrated graphics (think Apple M1 or Vega 11) will solve the "gaming on a low end laptop" problem far before game streaming.

jayd16 6y ago
Games will simply use more power as the average user's rig becomes more powerful. Do you really think we'll solve low power ray tracing before we solve streaming? Streaming also scales better. Rendering double the frames requires double the power but streaming double the frames does not because frames are mostly similar and compression helps a great deal.
- jjcon 6y ago
  > Games will simply use more power as the average user's rig becomes more powerful. But the need for lower latency is increasing as well (a la VR)
  - ThatPlayer 6y ago
    Over on /r/oculusquest, Shadow's streaming PC is somewhat popular for running full PC VR games on the portable Quest (as not all the owners have full gaming desktops). So it's not like it's impossible.
    - jjcon 6y ago
      I’ve actually experimented with this a bit and while it can be done it isnt at all playable for 90% of games (anything requiring even moderate response times). Oculus has been working on home desktop to quest WiFi streaming and say the experience isn’t optimal yet for release and that is all local.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    This is certainly moving the goal posts... is everything in the future going to be VR? I doubt it. There will be a market for streaming 4K@60 for a long time.

fxtentacle 6y ago

I'm working on building a game streaming cloud service at the moment. In the long term, I believe running your own servers is going to be the future, because otherwise there'll always be license issues, e.g. when you want to play your gog.com games on GeForce Now. Or indie games or business apps in general. Also, all those services prevent you from sharing with friends for their business reasons, meaning absolutely no coop or splitscreen. Anyway, the key for making such services work is custom ultra low latency udp protocols. I'm going with nvenc hardware encoding, cuda for data wrangling, and a boost::asio based c++ core for the network layer. That, and controlling packet loss, for example by self-throttling and spacing to avoid overflows at intermediate relays. BTW, I'm surprised by the bandwidth numbers in the article. Even fast explosion heavy games like BroForce work reasonably well with 5mbit/s if you use h265.

the_duke 6y ago
I'm curious how you plan to compete. Microsoft and Sony have a large catalog to offer, Amazon and Google have large data centers, a lot of money to throw at publishers, and a good path to integration with streaming (Youtube and Twitch). Geforce Now has shown the hostility independent efforts will have to face. I also believe the target audience is mostly users who can't or don't want to afford dedicated hardware and will want a good collection of games with a subscription.
- poisonborz 6y ago
  There is a lot of appeal in "play anywhere" alone. Such software gives you the ability to better utilize your hardware by playing from your laptop, friend's house or phone. Also, imagine only needing a weak device as thin client and doing 3D or photo editing through your main computer.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  I don't plan to compete with those huge services and their catalogues. Instead, I'm building a platform as a service. My ideal customers will be the software publishers that want to run their own streaming cloud. There's a lot of demand for enterprise solutions that allow you to demo things online. With a regular unlimited demo version, you have the risk of people trying to crack it. If the demo is a streaming service, then you can use everything, but copy nothing. In essence, a high performance streaming solution is the perfect copy protection for pricey enterprise apps.

birdyrooster 6y ago

I’ll lead with my peak cynical take, apologies in advance, but I think Google just wanted to entice people with cheap centralized streaming games while it was viable to get them married to a platform they will ultimately have to buy a local console to render games with anyways. Can they even get close to DisplayPort 2.0 performance in the next couple years? I don’t see how this is ever going to scale as bit depth, resolution and frame rates continue to increase. This is a losing strategy because a lossy, slow connection between your display and your controller will only get worse (quadratically so) as those three factors (bit depth, resolution and frame rate) increase. They are going to have to beef up the client hardware and do more of the game engine and rendering compute locally, which will undermine the cost savings they offered being centralized.

fxtentacle 6y ago
My guess is that they're testing the waters for enterprise software. Think Google Docs but for CAD. There's a lot of money in that market and people are used to paying $1000+ monthly subscriptions anyway. So if you can move that onto a remote desktop server, you'll have amazing performance and healthy profit margins. And if it works well for games, it'll surely work well enough for regular software.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  I agree that is a good fit for a use case, but I’m speaking about Stadia in particular. They are going to disappoint a lot of consumers.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Why would you get better performance from CAD in the cloud? Doesn't a cloud server have essentially the opposite performance profile from a CAD workstation, with many more cores but much slower clock rates? CAD vendors want your workstation to have a few fast cores and several GPUs.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    Clouds are starting to focus on HPC machine types which can crank out CAD renders

cecida 6y ago

I purchased a Nvidia Shield Pro before Christmas (an unbelievably slick piece of tech btw) and signed up for GeForce Now. I'm based in Ireland, as are the local Geforce Now servers (presume it's running on Azure). A surprisingly decent gaming experience - The Witcher 3 looks amazing, and performance is extremely decent with only slight delays.

tgtweak 6y ago
Yeah the shield can also receive from your gaming PC provided it has an nvidia card. It's a really nice device in general.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  So can any device with Moonlight, I haven’t seen performance differences as far as local streaming goes between my Shield (2018 model) and my A1E (which has a fairly shitty SoC).
- nullify88 6y ago
  Steam Link can also be installed on the Shield and as long as your PC has steam running, you can use its Big Picture mode to stream games.

birdyrooster 6y ago

All of you people that are bullish on Stadia, explain to me why DisplayPort 2.0 provides up to 77Gbps of bandwidth? Google cannot possibly encode/decode that stream with high fidelity using an internet connection available from any residential ISP in the next couple years. Maybe within this decade you could accomplish that. However by that point, local compute will have already exceeded this standard. The fine folks at Google know their computer science well so this isn’t news to them, but it kinda lays bare that eventually they will be selling consoles to execute games locally since it’s clear they do not have the appetite to get 10Gbps+ fiber to the country. Steaming-only Stadia made sense paired with a mature Google Fiber deployment, but alas that is not the universe we reside in.

echelon 6y ago
I still have fun playing N64. How many people play Minecraft? edit: There's a population that cares about graphics, but the population that doesn't is bigger and collectively has more money. Just look at the mobile gaming market.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  I agree that people will settle for less, but I am arguing Google has always been aiming for AAA titles and markets it that way. Also DisplayPort 2.0 bandwidth is mostly for supporting VR where visual artifacts and low fidelity lead to motion sickness for a huge demographic.
  - d0gbread 6y ago
    I have Stadia, love it, and don't care that much about quality. I care that it's console-free and on the two TVs I bounce between, or wherever else.
  - ReactiveJelly 6y ago
    What's VR got to do with it? Sure, Stadia might never work for VR. Sure, VR might one day be a big part of the gaming market. It won't be soon, and it will probably never be the entire market.

justicezyx 6y ago

Cloud gaming is actually far worse than the idea sounds like. From the surface, cloud gaming is absolutely a fantastic idea, I.e., it removes a series of barriers of playing high end games: cost of hardware, convenience, subscription bases consumption to remove upfront cost. However, in close examination, it becomes clear that high end game is costly not because these above mentioned barriers. On the contrary, these barriers are part of the structure to support the high end games. Additionally, the modern high end gaming experience entirely depends on the exclusive ownership of costly computing power. The hidden foundation that supports that comouting power is the low cost local communication networks. And we all know that wide area communication is always more expensive than computing. So for any large scale cloud gaming, the underlying economy is that it's always more cost-effective of having local hardware.

conceptme 6y ago
I don't see it, I got geforce now and that's because it's cheap much cheaper then buying a new game pc or console. If you just want to play sometimes it's a great option.
- woko 6y ago
  For 5.50€/month, it is an extremely cheap way to get to play games with all graphical settings at max with 1080p resolution at 60 fps. However, this price won't last, it is written on the web page that one day, there will be an increase for everybody.

kibwen 6y ago

The tech and infrastructure aren't there yet and the Stadia rollout has been a laughingstock, but cloud gaming is still the future of multiplayer video games (and, since game-as-a-service is (sadly) the future of AAA game models, and because operating a game-as-a-service essentially requires your game to be multiplayer in order to entice people to keep playing (via community-based social reinforcement and the status-seeking that drives the purchase of cosmetics), that's going to be an increasingly large proportion of all AAA games). In terms of latency, having your game in the cloud is worse. In terms of graphics, it's going to be worse compared to having high-end local hardware. Despite all that, the killer app that will tip the scale is cheat prevention. Cloud gaming annihilates nearly every category of cheat. Wallhacks? Impossible. Infinite health? Impossible. Flyhacks and speedhacks? Impossible. The only category that isn't completely eviscerated is aimhacking, and even then it will be dramatically harder and less beneficial to aimhack, since you will need local realtime image analysis to do it properly and you won't even be able to aim at targets you can't currently see. Once multiplayer gamers get a taste of that, there's no going back. Sadly, over enough time I fear this effect will start destroying the market for high-end PC hardware, which will be both sad and a detriment to general computing.

bordercases 6y ago
This is an interesting analysis, I'm wondering where the disagreements are coming from.
- callalex 6y ago
  I don’t disagree with the points made here, and I really appreciate the perspective. However, I do question the magnitude of importance for cheating. It kinda seems like a solved problem, and by solved I mean “good enough to have fun”. Are we really going to reinvent an entire industry to solve a relatively non-existent problem?

ericmay 6y ago

Tried Stadia today and closed my account in less than 15 minutes. Those triple-A games they advertise on the front? Well they aren’t available unless you want to purchase them. You get access to I shit you not like 15 games that are not titles I care to play. It’s a big bait and switch as far as I’m concerned. Those triple-A titles might be available some day, but who knows when that day will be. I left very unsatisfied and didn’t even try streaming anything.

deleted 6y ago
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muststopmyths 6y ago
I don't know why you'd call it bait and switch. Stadia has always been "you have to buy the games separately" for pretty much all titles. That was the big knock against it at launch, and has been an impediment to its growth. FWIW I consider Stadia and the ilk oversold to the mass market akin to VR. There may be a market for people who want to play AAA games, will pay several hundreds per year and yet have never bothered to pay ~$300 for a game console (tail end of last gen). I'm just skeptical it's actually as huge as it's hyped to be.
- ericmay 6y ago
  > I don't know why you'd call it bait and switch. Well, I can't even go back and look at the original marketing now because when I do I get a warning that Stadia must be played on Chrome and to download that. Obviously I could go in private viewing or something but why would I even bother with that? It's so user-hostile. But the marketing that I do remember that enticed me to check it out was that I thought that it was for streaming games. When I checked out the site they had this big list of games that it looked like I could stream. If I could only stream, say, 15 games as it appears to be why not just show those? Hmm. I do think there's a market for those (like myself) who have a few games they'd like to play. Cyberpunk 2077 looks cool - I'll pay $10 or $15 or even $20/month to stream that (among other games) because my alternative is buying it for $50 and not having it run at ultra-max settings on my MacBook Air. Not desirable. To your point that this was a knock against it at launch, well, yea. They have all this marketing copy that makes it look so cool and then I have to pay retail price for a new game. Why wouldn't I just buy a Playstation or use Xbox or Sony's online services? Like what value is $9.99/month for some lame games that I don't care to play? Pass. This service doesn't address any market that I can see.

tgtweak 6y ago

PS Now is the continuation of gaikai (purchased by Sony in 2012) - at the time the lead developer of x264 was working there. They (gaikai) - even earlier than 2012 - had a very smooth gaming experience considering the general state of connectivity and gpu/cpu then compared to today. I'm not surprised to see google pushing out fat streams like that since they have POPs in every city and youtube-battle-tested video bandwidth congestion detection but geforce now... that doesn't sound like a recipe for happy streaming. Also echoing everyone else's praise for parsec, it is a highly underrated (free...) software. A

Thaxll 6y ago

There is a big difference of running a PC on the cloud that runs your game vs what Stadia does, that's why Stadia is so much better than the competition, the game is compiled for that purpose. The other thing that no one is talking about is that it removed 99% of the cheats because the game is not running locally and you just use a "dumb" terminal.

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
It would also make mods impossible. I have a feeling these streaming services will capture a huge portion of the 'casual' market, and there will be some hardcore people who refuse it or consider it a toy. Kinda like cell phones and mobile gaming. Very popular, not going away, but didn't kill off PCs and probably can't.
- meibo 6y ago
  I doubt it. Publishers will be pushing for this heavily since it makes piracy absolutely impossible as well. "Gamers" won't like it, but AAA publishers always get what they want if it impacts profits - this is the future and there's no way around it. I wouldn't be surprised seeing the first "cloud-exclusive" release opping up soon that you can play on Stadia or equivalent only for half a year or so. Valve is working on something like this as well afaik.

didibus 6y ago

> We find that GeForce Now and Stadia use the RTP protocol to stream the multimedia content, with the latter relying on the standard WebRTC APIs. They result in bandwidth-hungry and consume up to 45 Mbit/s, depending on the network and video quality. PS Now instead uses only undocumented protocols and never exceeds 13 Mbit/s. Is this relevant without comparing the picture quality?

dilyevsky 6y ago
No, you can use rtp with like 50Kbps link (audio only). This statement makes no sense
ReactiveJelly 6y ago
I'm surprised Stadia uses standard WebRTC. It doesn't support Firefox, so I assumed maybe it was some specialized version of QUIC that was tightly integrated into Chrome. After all, you don't need a DRM module for this - It _is_ DRM.
- Orphis 6y ago
  The Chrome stack has been highly tuned to make a Stadia use case work, but Firefox hasn't, making highly latency sensitive usage difficult for now.

funkaster 6y ago

I’ve been playing Watchdogs: Legion on geforce now for over a month and I’m extremely happy with it. I play from my ipad with a wireless xbox one controller. Quality is really good and I only see some stutters very rarely. I’ve played other games with the same experience. I would love to see SFV but I imagine the lag might make it a bad experience. all the games I tried were single player first/3rd person view and lag was not noticeable, I’m assuming there’s a lot of input prediction happening, but even in menus things were instantaneous.

abdulmuhaimin 6y ago

I dont know why these cloud gaming service didnt create at least one game tailored to that platform. I mean, single person game is good and all, but that is arguably the worst performing for a cloud gaming because they are create with local hardware in mind. Why isnt online multiplayer game takes more focus on these platform? Like those battle royale games. If they create it with cloud gaming in mind, a match can be just like local coop game, except you have a very long controller and HDMI cable(aka your internet). Online multiplayer is the only category where cloud gaming have the potential to be better than traditional hardware, but they have to built the game with cloud gaming in mind, not just porting it

cco 6y ago
Because single players games are more accommodating to network issues, skipped frames, adjustments in resolution etc. You will notice an input latency spike if you're playing a multiplayer game that requires precise and quick input. I've played around with Stadia a bit, even on "good" internet in the US, 20ms ping, 250mbps, Stadia was only really enjoyable for single players games. Even playing a relatively slow multiplayer game like Dota 2 would have been frustrating fairly often.
- abdulmuhaimin 6y ago
  Maybe youre correct. I dont know much about how multiplayer games works. However, having just 1 server render and basically 10 viewport is really the future of cloud gaming for me, once the infrastructure(stable fast internet) is there
- gundmc 6y ago
  20 ms ping to the Stadia servers? That's actually pretty high. I usually get 5-8 ms
  - chronogram 6y ago
    It's kind of silly to assume everyone lives next to the data centre.

autotune 6y ago

The best of these is shadow.tech, they literally give you a Windows Desktop to remote into and play any game you want. The rest of these services all have limited game availability.

technick 6y ago

You don't need a long document for me to tell you stadia sucks. I tried it out over the holiday season, games play fine but I couldn't ever get clear 1080p resolution out of it. I'm on symetrical gig fiber in Colorado, which I guess could be my downfall.

offtop5 6y ago

The only one of these services I like, is the Xbox game pass hybrid approach. While you can stream games to your phone, you can also just install them on your PC or your Xbox. I find phone streaming to be a novelty, it breaks so often I'll find myself running to my computer to finish up a gameplay session

nitros 6y ago

You might find https://doi.org/10.1145/3401335.3401366 https://doi.org/10.1145/3401335.3401366 (https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/144135/1/FromOneEdge_MM_MH_MB.pdf https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/144135/1/FromOneEdge_M...) interesting, it looks into the increase in carbon emissions from streaming games instead of downloading the game.

thetanil 6y ago

Why all the graphs and details about bandwidth when latency from the controller to the screen is really the thing that matters. They mention it several times and never show any measurements.

Arubis 6y ago

I’ve been using GeForce Now for a few years now, originally because I wanted a nice way to use Steam on an older Mac, then as a holdover for when I could pick up a latest-gen GPU. Which—the latter—has proved utterly impossible. I’m curious how much momentum these services will pick up by sheer virtue of it being so challenging to find competitive hardware for sale.

jonas_kgomo 6y ago

What is the complexity of building something like Stadia: what technology is required to assemble a competing product, so far the are using open-source tools like Linux and Vulcan?

ID1452319 6y ago

I've been playing Stadia since it launched. Now, I'm a casual gamers, I haven't bought hardware since PS2 and play games on my mobile occasionally, but I have been blown away my Stadia. I simply cannot get my head around how it can stream a game, in 4K, to my TV. I recently purchased Cyberpunk 2077 and was stunned at the amount of complaining about poor graphics, glitches, gameplay etc. as I have experienced none of those. As for latency and lag, my most popular game to play is PUBG, which is any game should suffer from those issues you'd think it would be a multiplayer, battle royale game like PUBG. But no, other than being very bad at it, I've never experienced what feels like input lag or latency issues. Sales pitch over!