Matti Robinson
20 Mar 2019 15:45
Google announced a new cloud gaming platform called Stadia earlier this week. Few of the luckier gaming reporters have managed to get some hands-on time with the service, and we've got some news about some of the platforms issues.
If you aren't familiar with the new service, well, read our previous article, but in short terms it is a game streaming platform that allows you to enjoy performance intense games on any screen.
This means that the heavy lifting is done in Google's services and the picture is just transferred to your phone, PC or even TV screen.
However, one problem remains. Latency.
Latency of course being the time it takes for the command to go from your button press to the servers and them come back as an accordingly updated frame to your display.
When you are doing the calculations locally you need to take into account the time it takes to transfer the data back and forth. Eurogamer have done a little bit of a test with the help of Digital Foundry on Stadia's latency, and determined that in very ideal conditions it could provide as good latency as a locally operating Xbox One X.
The tests with Stadia were done with a wireless Google connection, so while not optimal in being a WiFi connection they were probably very close to the data centers.
The latencies recorded with Stadia at around 170ms are on par with the ones recorded by Xbox One X, but PC at 60 fps is still ahead. For the people that like to have on PC with 120hz or above there's probably still no comparison.
Recordinga input lag of 100ms with 60fps PC setup seems also a little on the high end.
Anyways, it seems to be safe to say that Stadia has managed to pull down latency enough to work with slower paced games, and be on par with perhaps console gaming but it isn't replacing PC gaming just yet, especially in the faster paced or competitive end.
The video below also goes other aspects of the platform including picture quality, which still needs some improvements to reach modern console quality. It also nicely illustrates some of the superior aspects of the service compared to local gaming, including storage and updates.