Seems Google are getting a bit more chatty about Stadia recently. Hot on the heels of announcing another round of new indie games with Stadia Makers, we have another round-up for you.
For anyone with Stadia Pro, which is still free for a month when you sign up, you will able to play The Division 2 free from September 24 at 16:00 UTC until September 28 at 16:00 UTC. I actually think The Division 2 is one of the better ports on Stadia, with cross-play with the Windows version and it actually looks quite good.
On top of that, even more new games are here for Stadia:
- Serious Sam 4 - releases September 24 - $39.99 / £30.99
- The Elder Scrolls Online: Markarth - November 2 - the Prologue is free and available to play right now on Stadia
- Hotline Miami - out now - $9.99 / £8.99
- Hotline Miami 2 - out now - $14.99 / £12.99
Additionally, Crayta which is the Stadia exclusive game creation platform has been expanding quite a lot since the initial (and quite dissapointing) release. The next major upgrade goes live today with a bunch of new sci-fi content. It's also bringing new cosmetics, weekly login rewards, a themed hub-world game to unlock special outfits, new sci-fi themed games and so on.
Direct Link
Stadia is also getting more of a presence offline now too, as Google has announced that Best Buy in the USA will be stocking the Stadia Premiere Edition. This is the bundle that gives a Stadia Controller and a Chromecast Ultra for $99.99.
For all that and more head to Stadia.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Mohandevir Sep 23, 2020
Just understood the complaints about the image quality of Stadia... On a phone (5"-6"), tablet (10") or chromebook (11"), the offered 1080p looks great... On an HDTV (50"), it's already beginning to be much less convincing, but still tolerable. But on a 1080p 24" computer monitor it's just plain ugly. It' way too much blury and pixelated.
Didn't do any test on 4K devices, because I have none yet, but that's my observation based on my experience.
Next... 17" 1080p Laptop screen.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 23 September 2020 at 3:00 pm UTC
I have a 27" and image quality is great with 1080p and VP9. I can sometimes briefly see artifacts on darker images, but that's about it.
Consider using StadiaEnhanced instead of Stadia+, to monitor or set the quality. It does pretty much the same things, but it remembers the settings between runs and can force higher resolutions.
As for the topic at hand, there's one thing that Stadia does "wrong" here, they may have their reasons...I dunno, but this free week is still behind the Pro subscription, so not much of a free- week. If they use free-week as a bait to catch future customers, well, they need to go fishing in a bigger pond, as in in make it actually free for all.
I added here an example of 720p+H264 vs 1440p+VP9 (use the slider):
https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/juxtapose/latest/embed/index.html?uid=0439cee4-fe06-11ea-bf88-a15b6c7adf9a
Also one thing to mention, the difference is much more dramatic in motion, that is actual gameplay.
Last edited by dubigrasu on 24 September 2020 at 7:57 am UTC
Mohandevir Sep 24, 2020
Quoting: dubigrasuWhat you're describing sounds more like 720p or/with H264. Stadia drops to that if it considers the connection not good enough (even if you started with 1080p or higher). Doesn't change the codec mid-run though, only the resolution.
I have a 27" and image quality is great with 1080p and VP9. I can sometimes briefly see artifacts on darker images, but that's about it.
Consider using StadiaEnhanced instead of Stadia+, to monitor or set the quality. It does pretty much the same things, but it remembers the settings between runs and can force higher resolutions.
As for the topic at hand, there's one thing that Stadia does "wrong" here, they may have their reasons...I dunno, but this free week is still behind the Pro subscription, so not much of a free- week. If they use free-week as a bait to catch future customers, well, they need to go fishing in a bigger pond, as in in make it actually free for all.
I added here an example of 720p+H264 vs 1440p+VP9 (use the slider):
https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/juxtapose/latest/embed/index.html?uid=0439cee4-fe06-11ea-bf88-a15b6c7adf9a
Also one thing to mention, the difference is much more dramatic in motion, that is actual gameplay.
StadiaEnhanced... ***Taking note***
Thanks!
Edit: I will test in more depth, later today... I know that it's a special case, but Destiny 2 was pretty ugly. It seems a lot better now.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 24 September 2020 at 2:53 pm UTC
Mohandevir Sep 24, 2020
Quoting: MohandevirIs the hardware acceleration in Chromium solved? Read lots of stuff about that? Is it that much of a deal?I haven't checked in the last month or so, but I doubt anything has changed. Last time I saw the bug report it was still labeled "Wontfix". Luckily many distros have a vaapi enabled chromium in their repos, or a ppa for *buntu ones.
Fortunately hardware acceleration doesn't do any kind of magic to image quality (in practice I haven't seen any difference), it just speeds up the process.
Basically you just need the stream decoded as fast as possible, one way (GPU) or another (CPU).
You do need a good CPU for this though.
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