Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: slavezeo

Quoting: thoughtfulhippo

• The controller is proprietary, and not usable with anything else.

After a firmware update I've been using my Stadia controller as a gamepad in steam. It's working great but it has to be wired. Just thought i'd chime in.

It's not really any more proprietary than any other gamepad. SDL 2 already has support for it wired into their next release FYI.

Weirdly I couldn't get it to work on my Linux box or my wife's Mac prior to the firmware update. After it seems to be functioning fine. I may have initially had a wonky connection with the cable or who knows what else. Either way it is now not to bad a game pad for non-Stadia stuff.

Cancelled my Pro, Destiny 2 is nice and all but that plus the few others just isn't enough of a hook right now.

So Stadia Founders: what are your current thoughts and how have they changed about the service?

Well from a technical point of view, I'm still very impressed. My son and I play Borderlands 3 on big screen via Chromecast. We've tried some of the other games, but they are less of a draw. Ironically Steamworld Dig 2 is a lot of fun - but we have already have it on Steam.

And I will probably use Stadia for Cyberpunk 2077, if it ever releases! What is attractive to me is being able to play games on Linux that I would not be able to otherwise.

But I don't think they've got the pricing model right, at least for my use case. I'm not that interested in the "free" games (only with paid Pro subscription, which makes them *not* free)! Most I have on Steam anyway.

Stadia works really good with my net connection. The only game I bought is Read Dead Redemption which I played a few hours already.

I was very fond of Gylt and played through it. Of the other free games I had some like the Tombraider and Serious Sam already, and the Steamworld games, Dirt and Metro are something I am interested in, so that was cool to get those.

So for now with 2 free months I have enough to play on Stadia without buying more. Once those are up I am not sure yet if I keep paying for pro. For now it has been worth it for me even though I got quite some games in my pro collection I am not interested in.

Facing my ever growing backlog I've been trying to complete Red Dead's story and that's been a treat. Truly a remarkable game and world to get lost in for a few hours at a time. After that it's Doom Eternal (bought before proton could play it) on Stadia. I've purposely been avoiding Metro Exodus on Stadia so I can buy it on Steam. Stadia also makes me extremely jealous that desktop Linux doesn't support HDR.

While I'd love to run both of those games locally I've had no issues with Stadia. The more frequent updates Google has shared and the rumours of "Gen 2" instances existing in the wild leave me nothing but excited for the Future of Stadia.


The internet hate for Stadia hasn't really improved if Youtube comments are anything to go by but I was pleasantly surprised to see the post requesting Stadia support on /r/rocketleague filled with positive remarks.



~~~
It is also my hope that owning Stadia Pro will eventually give me access to Rage 2 and Wolfenstein: Youngblood, two games I wouldn't otherwise buy but would play if given for "free."

Stadia Pro Founder Subscriber Interested Linux All The Things Gamer here ;)

Haven't played that much with Stadia since I got it, except trying the included games in the beginning via my Surface Pro 3 tabled pc or the Chromecast ultra.

Just recently I wanted to give it a more in-depth test (more interesting games and staying at home etc). So I realized, I really have issues getting hardware acceleration in Chrome respectively Chromium to work, and issues getting Stadia to deliver 1080p:

I guess hardware acceleration doesn't even work on my Surface Pro 3, as the CPU is lacking modern features:
Decoding needs a Skylake (6th gen) or later CPU, and I got a Haswell (4th gen) CPU. But on my desktop it should work, which is a 6th gen core i7-6700.

So after searching the net about hardware accelerated Chromium, this blogpost from Linux uprising seems the only one to have all the necessary information. The vaapi-enabled snap seems to be outdated.
But whatever I try, on chrome://gpu I even have everything on green or enabled, but still I only get software decoding with either VpxVideoDecoder or FFmpegVideoDecoder. The Chromium Dev build even causes strange behaviour with Stadia, like jumping images, complete white stream or not capturing the mouse once tabbed out.

Well, when I get it up and running with normal Chrome or Chromium (non-dev version, without acceleration) it's at least smooth and enjoyable, though one CPU core is at ~90% all the time.

But the other thing is, I can only get Stadia to stream in FullHD, when I log in via an incognito tab, and only on the first start of a game. Afterwards when not using incognito mode I get only 720p, even with all Chrome-extensions disabled. Also, after playing in 1080p and then closing the game, the next start of any game (the same game or any other game), it's back to 720p. Opening Stadia in a fresh incognito tab gives me 1080p again. In the mobile Stadia app (as you can't do it in the browser *doh*) I tried to manually set quality to 1080p or back to 4K, but that's doesn't help.
My line it totally fine with 100/20 Mbit/s, 9ms to the next speedtest hop and has very little jitter.

So, how are you playing on Stadia? With or without hardware acceleration? Do you get 1080p all the time?

Also it looks like only Chromium can be properly captured with Window capture (XComposite) by OBS. Chrome only works, when I use the Desktop capture (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS atm).

I, admittedly, haven't spent that much time looking into hardware acceleration. I allow my CPU to brute force it and with 32 threads that's not an issue.

(I would love proper hardware acceleration in Chrome/Firefox)

I use the Stadia+ extension to force 4K via the VP9 codec. There is no other way to play Stadia at 4K unless you have a 4K monitor. You of course also need a Pro subscription to be able to stream 4K.


That being said, Chrome really is the worst way to view games on Stadia. The visual quality (especially with HDR) is night and day on the Chromecast Ultra it's just a shame the frame rate for some games is 30Fps at 4K (Red Dead). That and not being able to use KB/M with the Chromecast are some downsides.

Quoting: drlambI, admittedly, haven't spent that much time looking into hardware acceleration. I allow my CPU to brute force it and with 32 threads that's not an issue.

My CPU can handle it as well, it would just have been nice to use the parts of your hardware that are optimized for this.

Quoting: drlambI use the Stadia+ extension to force 4K via the VP9 codec. There is no other way to play Stadia at 4K unless you have a 4K monitor. You of course also need a Pro subscription to be able to stream 4K.

This is perfect! I didn't know about this extension. Being able to select 1080p here is all I wanted. Thank you!

Quoting: The_Aquabatstill no way of running stadia on a normal chromecast? just checking maybe someone has hacked in and found a way.

No and and it likely won't happen as the hardware doesn't have what it needs.

Quoting: Corben

Quoting: drlambI, admittedly, haven't spent that much time looking into hardware acceleration. I allow my CPU to brute force it and with 32 threads that's not an issue.

My CPU can handle it as well, it would just have been nice to use the parts of your hardware that are optimized for this.

Quoting: drlambI use the Stadia+ extension to force 4K via the VP9 codec. There is no other way to play Stadia at 4K unless you have a 4K monitor. You of course also need a Pro subscription to be able to stream 4K.

This is perfect! I didn't know about this extension. Being able to select 1080p here is all I wanted. Thank you!

The problem with hardware acceleration is how Google don't want to enable it on Linux, they repeatedly claim drivers aren't good enough in the past. With how powerful even low-end CPUs are nowadays, it's not too big an issue unless you are trying to play on older hardware. That said, my rubbish laptop can handle it perfectly at 720p over wireless, which is great considering it can barely run anything at 720p native (and Steam Play is out of the picture as no Vulkan support for the GPU).

I do hope eventually Google enable it, or at least stop making it so the force enable is a lie (it doesn't do anything).

Also recently I did notice it kept giving me 720p, so Stadia+ has been my saviour. Google absolutely NEED to officially add a way to pick between them and display it officially. Ridiculous it doesn't.
With Firefox getting hardware accel on Wayland, perhaps things will change eventually on that front...

Last edited by Liam Dawe on 5 May 2020 at 4:35 pm UTC