Info on Google Stadia from today’s Stadia Connect, Baldur’s Gate III announced too

Quoting: OdisejA little bit late to the party so sorry for the late question. Is there a soul among us that can explain the technology behind this to me? I mean I am too old to understand some things especially when I think about lag and response of some games in the past. I still remember Duke Nukem 3D played over a modem with a friend and what happened if the modems had to reconnect or the line was too noisy. Or the pings we got with first lan an internet connections. I mean, so many things had to work just right for it to be playable.

Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.

Apparently, yes. You don't really need an explanation, that's exactly what they're doing. Presumably it requires a pretty fast internet connection. They've been working on making the streaming work well, with I suppose good compression and so forth. And it seems they're leveraging their worldwide network of servers (used for bringing you such things as Google searches, Youtube videos and most of the world's ads) to ensure the game is physically coming from somewhere fairly close by, cutting down lag that way.

Quoting: OdisejA little bit late to the party so sorry for the late question. Is there a soul among us that can explain the technology behind this to me? I mean I am too old to understand some things especially when I think about lag and response of some games in the past. I still remember Duke Nukem 3D played over a modem with a friend and what happened if the modems had to reconnect or the line was too noisy. Or the pings we got with first lan an internet connections. I mean, so many things had to work just right for it to be playable.

Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.

The main change from "back then" is that the latency over Internet (if everything works as it should) are orders of magnitude lower than what you could get over a modem.

Regarding how it works, you are 100% correct in your assumption in the second paragraph. They send a compressed picture to you ala Netflix/Youtube and you send the input to them so the performance of your local machine does not really matter.

Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: OdisejDoes Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.

That's pretty much it! It's like watching a video on YouTube, but it's interactive and let's you send inputs from your controller to Googles server where the game runs. The server encodes a video stream instead of outputting the graphics to a display. The video stream is sent to your client which plays it back just like any video in your browser. For now it's Chrome only. The time it takes between your button press until you see a change on screen is about 150-200ms I think, which is about the same as a console connected to an average TV without "game mode" enabled on the TV, which means it's going to be fine for most people but it will be annoying for latency sensitive people playing fast paced games.

I think that it will be much lower than 150-200ms. I have aprox 80ms round-trip right now over mobile Internet between my home computer in Sweden and one of our servers in the UK. And Google is going to use local servers.

Edit: And it surely can get way lower than that, we run one service where we receive financial press releases from various news agencies over HTTP where I've written a very low latency HTTP server to minimize latency. It calculates the latency from the moment of connect to receivment of the last byte+processing and as you can see it's in the microsecond range (this is a log from a Swedish news agency that sends from the Google Compute Cloud to one of our servers in Stockholm and each received file is between 2-3k in size):

jun 07 15:05:05 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [411us]
jun 07 15:10:47 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [433us]
jun 07 15:13:26 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [379us]
jun 07 15:24:10 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [314us]
jun 07 15:25:37 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [362us]
jun 07 15:30:29 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [414us]
jun 07 15:34:54 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [335us]
jun 07 15:46:19 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [430us]
jun 07 16:00:49 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [403us]
jun 07 16:02:00 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [372us]
jun 07 16:06:46 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [329us]
jun 07 16:06:54 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [335us]
jun 07 16:08:31 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [357us]
jun 07 16:10:05 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [378us]


Last edited by F.Ultra on 7 June 2019 at 6:34 pm UTC

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: OdisejDoes Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.

That's pretty much it! It's like watching a video on YouTube, but it's interactive and let's you send inputs from your controller to Googles server where the game runs. The server encodes a video stream instead of outputting the graphics to a display. The video stream is sent to your client which plays it back just like any video in your browser. For now it's Chrome only. The time it takes between your button press until you see a change on screen is about 150-200ms I think, which is about the same as a console connected to an average TV without "game mode" enabled on the TV, which means it's going to be fine for most people but it will be annoying for latency sensitive people playing fast paced games.

I think that it will be much lower than 150-200ms. I have aprox 80ms round-trip right now over mobile Internet between my home computer in Sweden and one of our servers in the UK. And Google is going to use local servers.

My number is based on DF's test of Project Stream. They are measuring not just network latency but total latency from button press to on screen reaction using a 120fps camera. It's possible it has been improved and will be improved further, but it will never be as fast as playing locally on a decent PC of course. I think Stadia will be fine for a lot of games but I wouldn't use it for stuff like Doom or CS:GO, especially since I like to play those sort of games at higher refresh rates than 60hz.

Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: OdisejDoes Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.

That's pretty much it! It's like watching a video on YouTube, but it's interactive and let's you send inputs from your controller to Googles server where the game runs. The server encodes a video stream instead of outputting the graphics to a display. The video stream is sent to your client which plays it back just like any video in your browser. For now it's Chrome only. The time it takes between your button press until you see a change on screen is about 150-200ms I think, which is about the same as a console connected to an average TV without "game mode" enabled on the TV, which means it's going to be fine for most people but it will be annoying for latency sensitive people playing fast paced games.

I think that it will be much lower than 150-200ms. I have aprox 80ms round-trip right now over mobile Internet between my home computer in Sweden and one of our servers in the UK. And Google is going to use local servers.

My number is based on DF's test of Project Stream. They are measuring not just network latency but total latency from button press to on screen reaction using a 120fps camera. It's possible it has been improved and will be improved further, but it will never be as fast as playing locally on a decent PC of course. I think Stadia will be fine for a lot of games but I wouldn't use it for stuff like Doom or CS:GO, especially since I like to play those sort of games at higher refresh rates than 60hz.

Interesting that the Xbox had 145ms there, Bluetooth in the controller perhaps plays a role there. But the article also shows that we are not talking about an additional 179ms of latency but between 67-100ms since the local PC also showed quite high latency.

This is all strange to me who works with low latency financial data where we constantly keep things well below 1ms, these numbers just look god awful to me :)

Mmmm...

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3401136/destiny-2-is-coming-to-steam-in-september.html

Will it support linux (Stadia build)? Will the Windows version run on Vulkan? Will it be playable with Proton?
Not my kind of game, but it's still a big title... No? I'm not familliar with the game.

Baldur's Gate III on Steam too... It's probably just that, but the coincidence makes me wonder.

Quoting: MohandevirMmmm...

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3401136/destiny-2-is-coming-to-steam-in-september.html

Will it support linux (Stadia build)? Will the Windows version run on Vulkan? Will it be playable with Proton?
Not my kind of game, but it's still a big title... No? I'm not familliar with the game.

Baldur's Gate III on Steam too... It's probably just that, but the coincidence makes me wonder.

its F2P and stadia is also free. i am not sure if it makes any sense to make F2P games for any other platform than stadia... maybe for slow internet connections

but if you have like 50mbit, why would you download it? you have to be online... duuuhhh when you wanna play it, it takes 0 space on your drive (steam says 105 GB), its completely silent, you dont have to pay for higher power consumption

if stadia is really that cheap, SHADOW will have a hard time


Last edited by mylka on 8 June 2019 at 4:13 am UTC

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: MohandevirNot going to say that you are wrong. I totally understand your point of view. But let me be the Devil's advocate, for a minute...

Quoting: liamdaweIt's not free in any form:
Base Stadia - You buy the games.

It depends on the pricing of each games and the conditions, imo. Will they be ours forever, like Steam, even if it's not sold anymore, or are these games exposed to disapearing from the store like the Netflix model? We have no clues about these aspects, yet. Personnally I expected a subscription plan, similar to Netflix, even for the base option. To me it still an interresting option.

Quoting: liamdaweStadia Pro - You pay monthly, you buy games, you get few select free.

It compares to PS Plus and Xbox pass which are popular options. It's not a new formula and it's much better thant I expected it to be. This said, probably not my bag.

Quoting: liamdaweAlso, "unfair" about paying and not having any real access to the files, what's fair about it?
Google has issues? No game.
Your net has issues? No game.

This can be replaced by: "Motherboard failure ($$$), no games, HDD failure ($$), no games, GPU failure($$$$), no games, RAM failure($), no games... Want me to go on? It's all about managing the risks. Both point of view are valid.

Quoting: liamdaweModding? Haha no.

I don't think Stadia is targeted to the 1% techy educated market share that we represent or even the hardcore gamers that mods, which, I suspect, is not the vast majority. It probably has more appeal to the Xbox and Playstation players or the Windows users that have stopped gaming because of an ageing computer and/or are due for an hardware upgrade.

Personnally I see it as a complement to my Linux rig, for games that will never be playable on my Desktop, because there will be. You know "Stadia Games and Entertainment" produced games?

For buying games, it sound very much like you buy them and keep them, not a Netflix model, that seems pretty clear to me. Otherwise, you're not buying you're renting.

Okay, now you're starting to get me to think more on it. I never even thought about components breaking down, leaving you out of playing your games. Now that's a very valid point worth something.

True, but of course you need at least some hardware to use Stadia, which also could break down..

I think I read through the whole thread (not all in one time, so maybe I missed some posts), and I wonder: Where are all those voices that keep criticising Google for its main activities, which are data mining, and learning about human behaviour via AI, to be able to do the obvious, and maybe not so obvious things.
In my opinion Stadia is the ultimate tool to reach their goals even faster. You are beeing closely watched while you play. No privacy setting or alternate software can change this. Even on "shitty" Win10 you can simply go offline and play GOG games. People using Stadia might stop buying gaming PCs and hurt that option deeply and forever.
Yeah, a gaming PC is costly, downloading games needs time, things might break down, but sometimes it's me and my game, modded, played all wrong, maybe even cheated, but mine!
This sense of privacy, and the need of beeing my own PCs master is part of why I chose to start using Linux back in 2003. So how alone am I on GOL with that opinion? :)

Quoting: NeverthelessSo how alone am I on GOL with that opinion? :)

I think most of that discussion has happened in previous threads. But no, you're not alone.