f13.net

Being announced right now.

Apparently it's all about cloud computing, streaming your stuff on all your devices (don't you guys have a phone?), and saving states and sharing them with other people who can pick up your saved games with a single click on a link you share on Youtube or anywhere else. Honestly, I am not even understanding or caring too much about this, but it's news!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7hc4R8JAJY

Edit by Trippy: fixed title

Edit by Trippy: fixed title, again

No.

Just... no.

Has potential for certain types of games.

Ah the Google Glass of consoles.

Not a console but yes there's a high probability that this will die an ignominious death after a few years.

I haven't checked to see if this is accurate, at all, but hey.  It's long.   :awesome_for_real:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Not excited about any sort of platform like this.  Although it's not likely to suffer death, unless Google fails, somehow, to monetize it.

Many of those "killed" things simply morphed into something else though.

Might be worth for some games, but as a PC gamer I still want my precious mods, and also fiddle around with .cfg files, nvidia inspector and whatnot.

So, this is not a physical object? It's a... service?

Time for game-streaming to be relaunched I guess.

1080p, internet latency and probably costs more than buying a PC that will last for years and discount games on steam... It makes sense for google, but it will be interesting to see whether it makes sense for consumers, and pricing will be a large part of that. You need to appeal to casual gamers who have no gaming platform but are still willing to pay for access to the games that run on those platforms.

There are services like Utomik that are already doing this (though I don't know how good the tech is) but having just recently looked at their offerings, I found it wasn't worth it. It doesn't matter much how good the tech is if the games offered are all shit. I suspect that will have a lot more to do with the success of this than whether it can do 1080p at 60 fps, which seems to be what Google is trying to promote.

That's correct. The only physical thing is the optional Google-branded PS4-style controller which has two extra buttons (but no touchpad) and connects over Wi-Fi directly to your closest Google Stadia-enabled datacenter. If you aren't using that you can use a USB controller connected to some sort of supporting PC-style device.

The games themselves play through anything that supports Chrome.

Google is claiming their custom AMD GPU can do 10.7 teraflops per GPU (and promising multi-GPU support) which is about 66% more than the Xbox One X's GPU which can do 6 teraflops and around NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti territory. The Xbox One X can kind of/sort of do native 4K at 30fps with some titles. Google is claiming their GPU can do native 4K at 60 fps which sounds like a bit of a stretch unless you sacrifice some quality. 1080p at 60 fps shouldn't be an issue for most titles on a single GPU especially since these games won't have to deal with the frame rate sapping copy-protection schemes modern AAA PC FPS games have to deal with now.

Edit: the GTX 1080 Ti can do around 11 teraflops, I was comparing Google GPU's to that, not the Xbox One X GPU to the 1080 Ti

Edit: 10.7 teraflops for Google's GPU

Oh come on... you know what I meant.

I have nothing else to hook into the Glass quip.

Edit by Trippy: fixed title

I’m eagerly awaiting the point where Google realizes that this won’t make them nearly as much money as their advertising business and that it’s effort to run a service that targets the end customer and when google abandons it. Like everything else they did that’s not search or ads.

Probably two years from now once they have to compete with Microsoft.

There is a service here in Europe (not sure if elsewhere), the name of which escapes me, and a couple of aquaintances have decided to use it instead of spending money upgrading their PCs.  The way it worked was that, if you owned a game already via Steam, then you would be able to stream that game.  Different plans for different quality, but I think they were doing 1080p at 60 FPS.  One of these guys was a former competitive CS player, and he said it was generally pretty okay.

I proposed my kids giving it a go during a vacation where we only had an older laptop with us but a decent wifi connection.  They laughed at me, basically.  Because, as it turns out, the new generation of gamers is not remotely satisfied with 1080p at 60fps.  I don't personally agree, but I am an old person.  They have 144hz monitors, and if their games are not running at close to that speed, then unhappiness ensues.  Dead in the water.

Anyway, that is something to contend with, because it begs the question of "at whom would such a service be aimed?"  I like ideas like these on the surface, but I find it always crumbles once I tear back a layer or two.  I once thought this could be a great idea at some point in the future for streaming VR content for people who don't want to invest in the equipment, but then I remind myself that A) VR is unforgiving of any kind of speed issues, B) my best games are modded, and C) VR isn't something you do on the go.  You still need other equipment as well.

It's the direction the industry wants to go in, though. There have been rumors about this for years. Google demoed this service last year with an Assassin's creed game. Microsoft allegedly designs the next XBox around game streaming and is rumored to offer a "low end" version of its next XBox that can only stream games with limited disc space and lower tier graphics HW.

If you go with the "vision" of the industry bigwigs, then we'll all be streaming games via subscription services like "Netflix for games" to basically any device that has a web browser from your PC to "smart TVs" and you won't even be able to buy any physical or digital releases anymore.

The main sticking point would obviously be latency. Too bad making Merca great again doesn't include a modernization of our network last mile.

Lots of potential upsides, and I think G has the weight to push similar to MS's decades-long struggle to make the Xbox a thing.

Stuff like drop-in gaming, where you can be watching a streamer and then directly enter that server. The social and interconnection stuff could open up the market the kids care about pretty wide.

Another interesting thing is the potential for scalability. If it's all running at a datacenter, game developer hardware limitations could be relaxed significantly (depending on how much money G is going to dump into the hole).

Lots of techs to line up and a need for some devs to embrace the potential, but there's no doubt this is going to shake things up.

Microsoft also insisted on a multitude of things in their other consoles in the last two generations, and as a result are getting their proverbial lunch eaten.  Unless this shit is ABSOLUTELY SEEMLESS in terms of resolutions, framerates, latency and stability, they are sunk.  I live in one of the top places in the world for internet connectivity, but it isn't good enough for this yet.  If Microsoft builds their near-term future model on this, then we can just re-crown Sony.  It already sounds like I will not be buying the next gen Microsoft machine.  The Bone was the first major console I really skipped, so that would make it two in a row.

I think there is something here, a niche at the very least, and slowly improving.  I could see Steam themselves making it work, they already have a half a foot in the door.

According to Digital Foundry:

Latency is slightly lower than it has been in the 2018 streaming demo. Depending on the device and the internet connection though it's still between 166 ms (best case high speed LAN at Moscone connected to Google Servers in the Bay Area, no jitter) to 196 ms (simulated DSL connection on a chromebook and also XBox One X).

Also visible compression artefacts and lower graphical and audio fidelity compared to the console or PC version. According to Ubisoft the Stadia servers run Linux and use AMD Vega graphics cards. The version of AC: Odyssey they demoed is a port of AC to Linux and they use Vulcan as graphics API instead of DirectX 12.

So you'll probably never see any Microsoft exclusives on Google's platform and probably also no games that use any sort of NVidia api/Nvidia cooperations (like DRX for example). This also means that every Stadia game is a port to Google's server platform which may/may not be commercially viable depening on the contracts Google offers and the amount of work that needs to be done by the dev.

Google basically becomes another game console maker - at least from the point of view of publishers/developers) and so has to compete with all major players as far as platform access fees go (Epic games store, steam, Sony, MS) to get games on the service. End customers may not need to buy a physical console to use the service but given that Google has no first paty studios they need to incentivise devs/publishers to use their service.

This may prove difficult given that all major players plan to roll out their own streaming service or already have (Sony for example) and given that this will directly piss of both Microsoft and NVidia from a strategical standpoint (no DirectX, no XBox live, no NVidia HW)

Google does now have its own game studio run by Jade Raymond.

For full market embrace, this could be an ender. But I'm sticking with my feeling that this is aimed directly at the streaming crowd (streamers and subs). In that scenario, you only need a half-dozen to maybe a dozen titles to have success (Fornite/MC/PUBG/etc).

Yeah, but....upwards of 160 ms lag?  That is an FPS killer.  In fact, that’s pretty bad for most multiplayer stuff these days.  And does that not also include input lag in this case?  As in, I move my thumb stick left, and then it takes 160 ms to replicate on screen?  If so....hahahahahahaha, no way.  Surely that cannot be the case, that would make everything a drag.

I have a feeling that for something like this to have any chance, it has to be aimed at the same kind of gamer who is mostly into mobile games.  Huge potential audience to be sure, but it isn’t me.

this thing is bullshit crap

They haven't unveiled their secret weapon: Glitchless with its patented Negative Ping Code.  :awesome_for_real:

But yeah, this is a non-starter in most parts of the world, I suspect. Hell, Google doesn't even have the Google Store operating here, and they had how many years...?

Yep, that's why I made that caveat before I wrote anything else. I don't see them able to fix that to a degree that is acceptable to the target audience.

Even I have become more intolerant of lag and framerate dips since playing on the PS4 and going back to the PC.

It seems like Google Fiber never really took off and in fact it's being removed in some US cities apparently, and while Google FI the mobile network is pretty good I'd say it was not a huge success for reasons I don't know (I have it and I love it but I couldn't manage to convince anyone else to use it or even look into it). Not sure if a huge advertising push will do the trick or maybe some gaming exclusive. I thpught all yesterday that this was useless and so unnecessary but it kind of sounds as if you can play certain games without having a console or a computer and I have friends in that situation. Does this thing allows John Doe to buy Sekiro on Friday and play it even though he doesn't have a PS4 nor a modern PC? If that's the case, people COULD get addicted to such a service should it prove reliable and lag-free.

I am sure a few of us here tried the PlayStation Now service and I must say I was positively impressed with it even though the specifics were much lower than whatever Google plans on delivering both in terms of lag and picture quality. No way you can play action intensive games on it, but Red Dead Redemption was playable and good looking enough.

So personally I can't really see myself using this service, but I can see some of my less hardcore friends go "Hey I heard GTA 6 came out last week. I don't have the Playstation 5 and my laptop is old, but I am gonna get it on Google Chrome!". Looks like they are hoping for a lot of people eventually getting used to that, yes, in a way similar to phone games.

Most of the most popular titles to stream these days (Fornite, Apex Legends, League of Legends, CS:GO, etc.) wouldn't play well with the extra latency.

There are other less popular to stream games for which this platform would probably work well for and it'll make the logistics of streaming a lot easier for somebody just getting into streaming.

Yeah, the basic concept is: I pay a certain monthly fee, and for those 30 days I can play, without time and/or hardware limits (nor any "downtime" caused by actually d/l the game and such), the complete version of games like Sekiro, Division 2, Stellaris, Football Manager, Doom Eternal and whatnot.

It's not unlike what Origin provides right now with its "premium access" tier (minus the "first you have to actually download the game on your computer" part)

On paper, it sounds good, IMO, at least for "pure" single-player titles.

---

So, I assume there will be many "tiers" for casual, hardcore gamers and other categories. I'm not sure it will simply be a weekly/monthly/annual pass. Considering the scenario I wrote above, what would you consider a reasonable subscription price?

The price has to be sufficiently low to justify using it instead of buying a PC or PS4; anything more than $10-$20/month and you would be better off just saving up a few hundred bucks for at least a console. And that's without the fact that the lag will make the experience worse.

Latency of 150+ ms with an exceptionally good wired internet connection means this thing is a non-starter in the vast majority of the country, even for single player titles. Hell, even turn-based stuff would be a huge pain. Has anyone else tried to play a turn-based console game on an emulator that has trouble handling it, and so you get frame drops and input delay? Menuing feels gross.

And they're saying they expect this to be streamed at high quality to phones over wifi? Yeah, have fun with that outside of the Bay Area, New York, Chicago, and Seattle.

Oh, and reports are that Stadia eats up somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 GB worth of data per hour. Good luck with that, anyone with data caps.

Get out of here with that bullshit, Google.

To that, Dear Koro, Phil Harrison answers "eat shit and evolve, or die!" :

https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/20/18274811/google-stadia-interview-phil-harrison-gdc-2019 (it's quite a straightforward and interesting interview, read it all)

He might be right except for the fact that it isn't an evolution for the consumer.  It is an evolution for companies.  For traditional gamers, this is like saying moving all their shit to phones and tablets is an evolutions, when in most important ways it is a massive de-evolution.

I haven't read the article yet, but I am going to go out on limb and suggest this guy doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about.  Or perhaps, that he is a stooge for one of the biggest corporations in the world and doesn't actually care about what he is saying to any extent beyond getting you to stop looking behind the veil.

Oh and this part is unbelievable bullshit.  The amount of speed and bandwidth those things require are insignificant compared to what he is proposing with Stadia.  And that is before you even get into the latency and input lag conversation.

Since I've seen this mentioned so often with regards to 5G. 5G won't solve the latency issue with wireless networking. It physically can't. I've read that claim so often that 5G will magically reduce latencies to values that are even better than wired networking and that claim is quite frankly utter bullshit.

I'm not even sure that 5G will solve connectivity issues, access isues or bandwidth issues. The technology is vastly more complex and expensive than LTE.

The 5G specification specifies as one goal the "reduction" of latency and this claim has been misunderstood for the most part because it refers to network latency of 3G (UMTS > 300 ms) or 4G (LTE, < 100 ms) networks, which can be in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. The 1 ms value that has been talked about is the "radio network contribution to packet latency" i.e. the additional latency that comes from the wireless connection between mobile device and base station. This is a function of bandwidth, latency introduced by multiplexing/multiple access of the wireless medium, scheduling (TDMA, FDMA, CDMA) connection signalling and handover mechanisms and in general how the connection between cell tower and wireless device is set up, negotiated and managed.

In 3G (UMTS with HSPA data) all of those mechanisms add 300 ms or more to the total latency, in 4G (LTE) those mechanism add less than 100 ms to the total latency and the PERFORMANCE TARGET for 5G is that those mechanisms shall contribute only 1 ms to the total latency. They are currently quite far off that target however.

1 ms however is not the total latency of the entire network connection between mobile device and destination, because that latency still depends on the back end infrastructure that is used to connect the base stations to the telecom backend and how that telecom operator has setup its peering with the rest of the internet. Given that most cell towers connect to the back end via line of sight radio relay links, the end to end latency can still be in the hundreds of milliseconds.

Additionally 5G probably won't solve access, bandwidth or connectivity issues.

5G operates in 2 frequency bands, below 6 GHz (FR1) and above 24 GHz right into the milimeter wave spectrum (FR2). The claimed performance targets listed on the spec page only apply to FR2 at 24 GHz. Quote from the spec: "when using spectrum below 6 GHz performance targets are closer to 4G". 24 GHz and above is basically line of sight only with a very narrow beam and is easily disrupted by athmospheric conditions or obstacles like trees, walls etc. and completely fails when it rains. Even in ideal circumstances the usable range is about 1km/.6 miles.

A large scale 24 GHz setup would require hundreds of base stations to cover even a few city blocks and those base stations would still need to connect to a wired back end. (compared to 1 or 2 LTE base stations). You'd probably need several to even ensure connectivity in your own appartment given the line of sight nature of 24 GHz waves. (doesn't go through walls or most windows) This will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the existing infrastructure. Additionally the performance targets only apply if the devices support what the material calls "massive MIMO" which means that you have multiple antennae and multiple transceivers per device and a large number of them.

The performance targets sound great on paper. 20 GB/s data rate, 1 ms of latency etc. If you read the entire spec then you have a few caveats to consider however.

20 GBit/s is the maximum achiveable data rate over the wireless connection, per base station, at 24 GHz, if the devices support MIMO (edit: this means it is the shared data rate available that is then divided up depending on the number of users per base station)
The "user experienced data rate" "achievable (...) across the coverage area" is 100 MBit/s over the wireless connection, per base station, at 24 GHz, if the devices support MIMO.
The "radio network contribution to packet travel time" is 1 ms and again this applies only over the wireless connection, per base station, at 24 GHz, if the devices support MIMO.

Additionally there's currently not even an agreement over which frequencies in the FR2 range should be used for 5G and there are no international agreements to harmonize them.

Networks that use FR1 below 6 GHz won't perform significantly better than current 4G networks and considering the vastly higher investments necessary and infrastructure required for 24 GHz networking the bulk of the 5G infrastructure will be at 6 GHz and resemble something that is almost indistinguable from 4G LTE.

24 GHz networks will probably be deployed in high density affluent urban areas, like the Bay Area or New York, most of the world will probably only get something that resembles current 4G networks though, as far as coverage, bandwidth and access are concerned.

Even then you'll still probably end up with a system that has comparable or even higher latency than current wired networks, since most of the latency of a network connection comes from routing/switching and connection related issues and not from signal propagation and you'll still experience network congestion and peak usage issues.

Dang Jeff.

Here's some more points.  Or perhaps the some of the same points, minus the difficult words and numbers:

- The speed of light is a thing.  Maybe Google has figured out how to surpass it, in which case we should be wondering why they are wasting time on gamers who like shitty things.  

- Weakest link. 5G sounds nice, but there is more to a network than that alone, and besides which....wtf does 5G that have to do with most home computing?  Just makes me feel more like this is aimed at mobile gaming.

- Caps are a thing.  It is deliberate whitewashing on their part to suggest that ISPs will just adapt.  ISPs will adapt by gouging the fuck out of people.

- The speeds the are touting for 1080p and even 4k at the frames they suggest will require MASSIVE COMPRESSION using technologies that don't exist yet.  Except perhaps in the labs at Google.  Also, moderate compression on video files is one thing.  In an FPS game?  Hahahahahahahahaha.  So many problems.  Even compression on Netflix 4k annoys the shit out of me, and that isn't even close to the kind of compression Google is suggesting.

The TL;DR is:

The touted benefits of 5G will only affect affluent densely populated highly urban areas where the likelihood is high that the investment will pay off
The rest will get somthing that is basically 4G but a little bit faster
The coverage/lack thereof aspect is commercially driven and so nothing significant will change wrt 5G coverage and bandwidth if you live somewhere more rural
Nothing will significantly change wrt "soft" performance indicators like latency

I love the delusions of tech people who live in bubbles.

I didn't have broadband until 2001, and that's only because I moved closer to work. If I still lived up on the Tughill, I'd have dial-up (no cell service).

i'm not QUITE sure what you're saying but

it's not a bubble

it's not giving a shit about people who live like cavemen

Also, he can fuck right off with that 5G bullshit like that's suddenly going to solve everything. That shit is still 2-4 generations of PHONES away from being a viable tech for anyone that isn't an early adopter living in a large metro area.

To add to my own skepticism about 5G doing anything for those outside of cities:

Way back in the early oughts, one of my companies clients that I was helping build a web site for was a company based in Mississippi that wanted to build a cell phone company in Montana. Why Montana? Fuck if I know, other than maybe the market was wide open. I think they burned through investor money for at least 2 years and maybe never even got the web site live before they went tits up. Why? Because trying to build a cell phone network that provided coverage of the whole state somewhere outside of the one or two semi-urban metro areas was a goddamn impossibility. And this was in the days before smartphones or getting email on your phone. This was literally getting a phone call on a phone in your hand without a wire. This isn't even last mile problems, this is getting to the last hundred fucking miles with a population density of "Reb and his fucking cows."

If you live in a city, you are in a very densely populated bubble. And unless you take regular trips into the mountains where no man has tread, you cannot understand the sheer desolation of being in rural fuckhole wherever, especially with regards to the amenities of modern life like electricity, running water, television. High-speed Internet? What the fuck is that? You'll take shitty low upload speed satellite and like it. You may as well be on the moon when it comes to products like fucking Google Stadia.

Is this like that assassin's Creed stream Google did? I remember that being really good from a playable standpoint.

YouTube already does 1080P at 60 FPS. In fact it can do 4K as well. Stadia is doing the exact same thing — i.e. it’s sending a compressed video stream to your browser, *not* the uncompressed pristine video you get playing locally. The same infrastructure they already have to deliver YT video can be used to delivery Stadia streams.

Yes. But Odyseey’s combat is a button mashy affair that almost never requires precise input timing which makes it suitable for Stadia’s extra input lag.

Yep.  Replace AC with God of War, and watch the rage flow through them as they miss literally every single QTE prompt every single time...

Also, while I would agree that general AC combat is definitely straight up button mashy, but there are a few AC games where you get challenges, such as semi dynamic Chase events or "boss" fights (like the War Elephants in AC Origins) that would be straight up nearly impossible with any significant amount of input lag.

Youtube does not reencode/encode on the fly. They encode once during/after upload. Youtube transcodes every uploaded video into the different video profiles they support, starting with the lowest one. That's why you often only get the 240p stream at first when you watch a recently uploaded video. Once this is done the player simply switches between the different 'versions' depending on your current bandwidth.

Encoding quality and efficiency is in this case limited only by available memory and CPU and given that you have the complete video available to you you can do all kinds of nifty predictive encoding and variable bitrate shenanigans using P- and I-frames to give the user the best quality per bitrate. You also don't have to encode in 'real time' because you only need to encode a video once per supported profile. This is the reason why you can stream a 3840x2160 10 bit HDR video @ 60 frames and still get a 'reasonable' bandwidth requirement (still several MBit/s). Even live video streaming services add an encoding delay of several seconds so that their encoders can work more efficiently and use predictive 'look-ahead' encoding options.

Also, since everyone who watches a certain video gets the same data YouTube could theoretically do multicasting to conserve even more bandwidth.

Even with all of those nifty features in place a 1080p YouTube video requires 3 Gigabyte/hour and a 4K 2160p video will use up to 12 GB/h. This is already practically impossible for mobile users given the data caps and overrun fees and would still be a problem for many wired internet connections because of data caps and network congestion issues.

If you have to do low latency real time encoding of video you lose almost all of the features of modern codecs that enable high compression rates while still retaining good image quality, that's because those features need to process upcoming frames in order to compress the current frame more efficiently. If you can't do that - and with low latency real time encoding you can't because buffering and looking ahead is what causes latency in the first place - you'll either end up with a video stream that retains the image quality but has a much lower compression ratio or a stream that retains the compression ratio but has much worse image quality. There's also always the upper limit of 16.6 ms per frame for 60 Hz you need to consider because it sets a bound for the amount of work the encoder can reasonably do before it has to put out a frame and the amount of work that needs to be done per frame depends on the actual contents and is not constant time. Real time codecs are also much more susceptible to noise and the type of video content.

This is the main reason why Twitch usually has an up to 20 second stream delay and also why most digital broadcasting adds 3 - 5 seconds of delay compared to plain old analogue TV. I'd reckon that a significant portion of the 160 ms to 200 ms of latency is actually encoder delay so that they can do at least some video compression.

You can check how this affects your IQ. Just watch Twitch when a streamer plays a game that has lots of red colors (codecs perfom worst on content that contains lots of red) or where a lot of the on screen contents change quickly. The encoder completely shits itself because the encoding time per frame increases with the rate of change per frame but the output still needs to be processed in 'real time' while keeping the selected bitrate. As the actual encoding time per frame reaches the limit (16.6 ms per frame for 60 Hz) the codec can either reduce the compression rate to keep up or reduce the amount of frame processing done on the video feed while retaining the compression ratio  (worse image quality).

Google certainly knows how to run a data center and can handle the bandwidth required for video streaming but they can't magically remove all of the issues that you have if you have 'unpredictable' content with high rates of change on a frame per frame basis that needs to be streamed 'real-time' with low latency.

If they target the same IQ as YouTube video at the same resolution the required bitrate will be significantly higher (50% or more) and if they target the same bitrate as YouTube video they'll end up with a significantly worse image quality. Or latency increases to a point where actually playing a game becomes impossible.

Your post is very informative Jeff. But it doesn't exactly explain to me how PlayStation now works. I mean, I know that PS Now is not 4k and so it kind of proves your point about image quality having to drop, but it's still quite marvelous both in terms of image quality and latency and we are talking about something that has been available for about two years?

My point is, when I read about PS Now I laughed, but when I tried I was somewhat impressed. I don't have any faith in Google Stadia and them being able to maintain their promises, but I don't have a hard time believing they have some aces up their sleeve to vastly improve on a service that already exists, works quite well, and it's two years old.

Not sure if I explained myself: PS Now has big limits but it works well, it's also old and not-Google. Wouldn't be surprised if Google pulled off something not perfect but surprisingly good without bending the laws of physics.

It sort of depends on what you want and what you optimize for.

PS Now limits video output to 720p even for PS4 titles but uses a ridiculously high bitrate of 12 MBit/s. This is basically what YouTube uses for 1440p video and about 4 times as much as you would use for 720p video streaming.
This basically means that PS Now optimizes for latency and uses a very inefficient yet probably very fast encoder that doesn't add a lot of encoding latency. They basically sacrifice low bitrates for latency with the average bitrate being significantly higher compared to Netflix or YouTube video (4 times as high actually). The main problem is that this doesn't scale. If they used 1080p video in the same setup the bitrate would probably double to 25 MBit/s which is significantly higher than even YouTube or Netflix 4K video and at 4K UHD they'd use 50 MBit/s which is higher than most BluRays.

Additionally the PS3 and PS4 both have a low input latency to begin with. The PS 4 Dualshock controller for example adds only 3 ms of input latency even though its wireless.

Eurogamer claims that PS Now only adds 4 frames or 66 ms of additional input lag and that the lag is very consistent and has nearly no spikes or jitter. The total input lag times are slightly lower than Stadia, at least when EG tested the system in 2017. They lie between 110 ms and 180 ms depending on the game and the network connection, with wirelss being worst. EG claims that it "feels" like the latency is actually lower than it is because the times are very consistent on average. Given that video is 720p though and given that the encoder seems to be very fast PS Now clearly focuses on latency over IQ and resolution and even then 100 ms - 150 ms seems to be the achievable limit.

Google markets the service as something that is indistinguishable from a local game, though. They claim that you get 1080p or 4K video at the same IQ as a PC, using the same bitrate as YouTube with comparable latencies over mid range internet connections. Using hardware and video settings that are significantly higher than what a PS4 offers.

Basically PS Now but lower latency, 4 times the resolution at 1/4th of the bandwidth used and with games that have significantly higher HW requirements.

In my opinion this is almost impossible because those performance indicators are interdependent and also because Google can only control those performance indicators in their own network and doesn't lnow what happens from the border of their data center until the stream reaches the user.

I'm not necessary saying that this is impossible for a company like Google who could theoretically throw infinite amounts of money on the problem but Google/Alphabet is not a startup anymore and Stadia needs to be commercially viable or it goes the way of almost all of the other Google services before it.

This necessarily limits the number of servers and the hardware they can use, if they want to be profitable.

One reason OnLive failed was because they were never able to amortize the infrastructure, HW and operational costs necessary to run a decent service at the subscription pricing they offered.

In 50 years, these controllers will be worth thousands as collectors items, similar to Atari ET carts.

They're going to sell infinite of these controllers. It works with every console and PC.

Huh? What? I don't remember them saying the Stadia controller going to be compatible with anything other than Stadia. They did say that USB controllers can be used instead of the Stadia controller.

The controller connects directly to the Google Stadia servers via WIFI. It will only work with Stadia

oh no i read it backwards

how stupid

don't buy this

What? the? Fuck? Why would you... what would you possibly want to do that for? It's like making fucking air buds only work if you sign into Apple Music or some equally stupid shit.

Because it cuts down on input lag. Seriously. And removes the need to install a special device controller on every device you might want to stream to.

it's going to be so bad

Uh, my reply to Cyrrex had nothing to do with the intricacies of real-time video encoding. He was claiming that distributing Stadia streams is somehow far beyond what is available now when in fact it's *exactly* like what's available now on YT.

But you keep doing you :awesome_for_real:

However since I'm here now...

<<that's_not_how_any_of_this_works.gif>>

The multi-second delays in Twitch streams and live broadcast TV (at least here in the US) have absolutely nothing to do with the encoding process.

The two main sources of "chat delay" in Twitch, where what you see in the chat window shows up a few seconds later in the video stream for those streamers that include their chat in a video overlay, are the use of 2 second HLS segments and an intentional delay on the streamers side that some streamers add to prevent "stream sniping". You can verify the HLS segment size for yourself if you watch a streamer in a browser with a "debug" console to view the network segment requests. If you download one of them you can verify that they are two seconds long[1]. And if you watch a streamer that's in the "Just Chatting" category or playing a non-competitive game with a good setup (i.e. with no intentional stream delay) and a chat overlay you can measure for yourself that the delay is in fact about 2 seconds.

There can be a delay caused by Twitch transcoding the source stream into other resolutions if you are not watching the source stream but Twitch does *not* transcode the source stream itself -- it only transmuxs it into HLS format[2] which does add a small delay but not a multi-second one as can be confirmed with the test above.

As for live broadcast TV delays, here in the US, live TV is usually delayed by at least a few seconds (typically 5 to 7 seconds) to prevent another mishap like in the Super 2004 halftime show, though broadcast delays have been around for much longer than that[3]. The delay is often handled through a "dump box"[4] and is not inherent in the video encoding process itself. In fact if you look at the specs for broadcast-ready MPEG2 hardware encoders you'll see that there plenty of options for "low-latency" encoders that add < 0.5 seconds of latency[5].

Getting back to low-latency video encoding, the state-of-the-art these days for ultra-low latency encoding is "intra-frame" encoding (encoding parts of a frame at a time) which can lower latency to <5 ms[6]. I haven't used any myself so I don't know how the quality compares to "full-frame" encoders though Fraunhofer claims their ultra-low latency encoder compares favorably to the reference H.264 encoder with similar settings. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is testing this sort of thing with their Stadia platform.


[1] I captured segments from the OWL stream (https://www.twitch.tv/overwatchleague) and heyZeusHeresToast's stream (https://www.twitch.tv/heyzeusherestoast), both used 2 second segments

[2] I.e. it's doing a codec copy in ffmpeg rather than a transcode/reencode: https://blog.twitch.tv/live-video-transmuxing-transcoding-ffmpeg-vs-twitchtranscoder-part-i-489c1c125f28

[3] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-live-is-live-tv

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_delay

[5] E.g.: https://www.thormodulators.com/files/How_to_Choose_Right_CATV_Modulator.pdf, http://cdn-docs.av-iq.com/dataSheet/Futura%20III%20ASI%2BIP_Datasheet.pdf

[6] Fraunhofer Ultra Low Latency Video Codec (https://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/fileadmin/PDF/VCA/ESG/Flyer_ULLVC-2011-09_web.pdf), CAST Low-Latency AVC/H.264 Baseline Profile Decoder Core (http://www.cast-inc.com/ip-cores/video/h264-d-bp/index.html)

I’ve worked for Fraunhofer for 8 years (until 2011) and I personally know some of the people who worked on MP3/MP4 AAC and h264.

Please keep in mind that ultra low latency encoders are usually targeted for computer vision applications in automotive, medical or industrial applications where you are able to control all of the factors that introduce latency. And where you can basically design the whole application yourself. Including the content aware predictors/algorithms.

Intel, which offers FPGA and IP core based encoder/decoder solutions (Altera based) that actually use the Fraunhofer HHI codec as one of their supported Codecs „only“ achieve 20 ms encoder delay at 1080p in ideal circumstances: encoder and decoder are  both FPGA based, UDP and RTP transmission is done in hardware, boards are directly connected via Ethernet and they eliminated most of the buffers, including the display controller buffers.

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/programmable/us/en/pdfs/literature/wp/wp-cast-low-latency.pdf

That’s a setup that you basically can only use if you design your own application (computer vision for automotive, medical or industrial) that need the low delay and where you can control all off the variables (bit rate adaption systems, decode buffer sizes, network transmission delays etc.)

Even though they use all of the techniques you mentioned including intra frame refresh so that the system doesn’t need to buffer complete frames and content adaptive algorithms.

That’s still a one frame delay for 60 Hz video and you’d need absolute ideal circumstances and you still have the tradeoff between bitrate and picture quality.

Most encoder suppliers would actually consider 100 ms to be low latency compared to the multi second delays that you usually have in digital broadcasting Systems.

Im not talking about US live broadcast delay either i’m talking about the delay that is introduced by DVB broadcasting systems compared to analogue TV which - because of the decoders/encoders, buffers and Bitrate Adaption can introduce an additional delay of several seconds.

Considering all of the different factors 150 ms is actually a pretty great  achievement as far as input latency is concerned. I’ve also never claimed that you cannot optimize one of the parameters down to the absolute optimum.

I‘m still skeptical though that they can do everything at once. Very low latency, very high image quality, average bandwidth, PC gaming at high settings, over average congested network connections for a $20 subscription fee.

If they do great I’ll reserve judgement until then through.

One thing most people are missing is that the 160ms delay is inclusive of the game's own latency.

An enormous amount of the games people play today are at that latency. Rockstar's stuff is slower. Ubi's stuff is around that mark already. In fact, Stadia benchmarks are actually slightly *faster* than the same game on some hardware.

Bottom line though, the vast majority of the audience can't tell. Are there genres that won't work? Sure. There are genres that didn't work on touch screens too.

Other big things:

- instant play from any little bit of video or GIF is a huge huge thing. Think of how much the accessibility of free to play changed market penetration. That's a big deal.

- server side compute power. It'll be years before this really gets used (we don't use the compute we have NOW). But it opens huge doors.

I have plenty of skepticism about aspects of Stadia, which I have gotten to personally express to people on the team. :) But I wouldn't discount it.

As I said before, none of the technical shit on Stadia will matter one good goddamn if the games library isn't absolutely top-notch on day one. If it's just a streamed version of the Google Play store's lineup of mobile trash, it will be utter shit.

Raph, how would you suggest would engines need to be redesigned in order to best make use of the new paradigm?

One fear people have is that games are going to be optimized and designed to fit the current streaming platforms (high latency, average IQ) and that this will kill more genres.

My question is how you could change the engines so that the whole stack is ultra low latency in a way that could make e.g. fighting games still be viable.

Well, first off, not everyone is going to jump to streaming solutions. And barring exclusivity deals, games will likely end up on multiple platforms, so any platform specific features can’t be too extreme.

To really take advantage of Stadia, you want to use the cloud compute. Google has built some tech that basically gives you more GPUs close to transparently, That gives the “easy” upgrade, which is higher-end graphics.

Making real use of the additional CPU, though, requires having something to use it on, and tech to use it. Game engines aren’t going to magically gain better simulation, cooler AI, more player concurrency, and so on. Even if we could just flip a switch and have 10000 people in a battle royale, it doesn’t mean the game will be any good. But that sort of higher CPU sim is actually what Stadia will eventually be good at.

Stuff like AI as a microservice allowing smarter companion AI, world proc gen as you move around, perhaps to add detail as you look closely at things, generating custom animations as you move reacting to the environment, and so on.

Lower latency will come, but only to a degree. Can’t break the laws of physics.

That would also depend on the cost of that high-performance compute power. The CPU in my desktop does not require ongoing rental.

A good sales pitch for people who want to play very complex games on lightweight platforms, but those people are probably also price sensitive.

I could see this work on a mmo especially if it was made exclusively for the platform.

It will be neat if this revives the Xbox Live days of almost all games on the service having demos.   Being able to hop in an play 10 minutes of a game without downloading 20 GB would be nice.

Big announcements coming this Thursday, 6th June, at 9am PDT/6pm CET:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klipg69IyB0

Has Google found a way to eliminate network latency? I assume the 'gives you more GPUs' option is something more sophisticated and quicker than people taking apart your servers and putting additional graphics hardware into them on demand. So I guess additional GPU hardware means additional servers, right?

You still have the overhead of parrallelizing the GPU workload and transferring it to additional servers over the data center network then collecting the rendered data and sending it to the client which incurs a significant amount of additional latency.

If Stadia can do the end turn calculations for my total war games while letting me run the battles then its got legs

It looks like Google has some sort of shared PCIe "backbone" to which instances can attach GPUs as their GPU specs page (https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/) specifically lists the interconnect as PCIe Gen 3 x16 (plus one instance of NVLink). However you can not add or remove GPUs "close to transparently" as you have to shut down the instance (https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/add-gpus) to make those sorts of changes. I.e. Google hasn't solved the rendering pipeline network latency issue cause they aren't using the network to "attach" GPUs to instances -- they are using PCIe instead.

Edit: remove, rendering pipeline

Stadia stuff announced today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-BbW6zAjL0

*Not* a games subscription service -- have to buy individual games (Pro sub gets some free games a la PS+ / Xbox Live)

Have to have Pro subscription to get 4K 60 fps surround sound, (free plebs max at 1080P 60fps stereo)

Pro subscription $10 a month

Need >=35 Mbps for 4K, >=20 Mbps for 1080P, >= 10 Mbps for 720P

$129 preorders to be a beta tester in November open now:

https://store.google.com/product/stadia_founders_edition

Those bandwidth requirements seem to me to be in reach of most broadband connections?

In the US yes in theory. I don't know how good our infrastructure is at sustaining the higher speeds though. E.g. Netflix HD streaming only requires around 5 Mbps*. If everybody started trying to stream at 20 Mbps for hours on end I'm not sure what would happen.

Edit: * and service providers are already pissy about that much bandwidth usage

tempted to buy a founder's edition and do an actual review but

i uh

i don't want the ouya 2 now w/ streaming and a shorter lifecycle

Damn, I'd forgotten about the Ouya. My mind kept going to the Phantom.

If they had a game subscription plan like EA Origin Access I would do this to try it out but I'm really not interested in rebuying a bunch of games on top of the $129 just to see how well it works.

Edit: I guess it's technically $60 dollars extra since you have to cough up $69 for a controller even on the free plan.

This not being a sub type of plan makes me not interested. I don't have time to play $60 games, but I have time to sample a whole bunch of them from time to time.

the plan is offensively bad

Living outside a metro, looks like I don't ever need to think about the subscription because lol infrastructure. I'm solidly in the 720p range from their estimates.

And the lineup of games is so meh that I'm not even gonna comment on having to rebuy anything.

I mean, it seems like the biggest selling point is 1) you can play it on a TV, tablet, or phone instead of your desktop and 2) you can play it in 4k without having to buy the hardware needed for 4k.

I don't see the draw. If I'm not getting free games that I want to play, the convenience of couch play or 4k as opposed to 1080p (since I don't have a 4k TV yet, the 4k isn't even a draw for me) isn't really that much of a draw, especially because I have to play it on a controller. If I want to play games on a controller, well, I have a PS4 for that. At least PSNow gives you a huge library. Why would you pay for this?

I don't have a console or even a good gaming PC anymore and I still have no interest. I'd probably be the target for this service.

I was worried about 4k gaming on my old pc, but at least with the Samsung Qs, they've done a great job with the scaling. Void Bastards has a ton of linear elements from the cel shading and it's nice and sharp.

I mean, they could be banking on people stuck on the idea of 4k but who hate consoles?

I'm pretty sure this is all about people who want to play decent games on their phones. Since nobody seems to be developing decent games for phones and tablets, this might actually be a good way to get that, if you live in a high bandwidth area that can withstand the additional pressure of these streams (if the service became popular).

For me personally, at 720p I guess it would be ok for a couple games now and again but I'm not shelling out $$ so I can play AAA on the shitter.

I forgot about cellphones. 4G's speed is 5-12 down/2-5 up according to Verizon, which is right on the cusp of playable at 720p; I haven't run a Wifi speedtest in a while so I'm not sure if that would be better, although I doubt I'd ever want to play a PC game on my phone while I'm at home.

According to Polygon 60 odd hours of Stadia gaming at 4K is 1 TB of data. Watch data caps across the country crash and burn and more throttling and fast lane surge pricing for Stadia add on packages.

Ain't no one gonna be streaming at 4k outside of extremely major cities with fiber and no datacaps. Our infrastructure isn't made for that shit.

I signed up for the founders edition. I figured its only$189 cdn and if it sucks then its not the end of the world.
My internet plan is 600mbps down and 20 up with no data cap so should be a good test candidate.

The idea of being able to be playing on the pc and then maybe just moving over to the couch, or if the wife wants to watch tv in the living room easily switching to the the bedroom tv seamlessly is pretty compelling to me.

I am also assuming that they will be providing a bunch of free games with the subscription. I know most of those will be shit, but there is usually some gems in these types of packages.

either way, I'm willing to test it out for that price and i get a chromecast ultra. so theres that i guess.

I'd wager to say that the US infrastructure isn't made for the 720p streaming they are talking about doing in anywhere near the capacity they'd need for Stadia to be profitable. And if they are counting on people wanting to play real games on their cellphones with the fakakta piecemeal patchwork of bullshit that is the US cellular system, they are smoking the very best shit imaginable and I want some of it.

You’ll need a second Chromecast Ultra if you want to seemless switch (i.e. without unplugging and replugging in cables) to a second TV. Right now the only confirmed Pro game is Destiny 2, which will already be free-to-play everywhere (a la Warframe) by the time the beta test starts, though Pro players will get the upcoming Shadowkeep expansion for free which the F2P players will not be getting (yeah let’s keep splitting the player base cause we still haven’t learned!).

I bet the weasel words will be "up to" 4k. Yep, 480 is not over 4k, for sure!!

i fixed the title

Just watch a little of the Orion announcement?

Why was anyone cheering this? Why the fuck is this even a thing with a name? Bethesda trying to reinvigorate their "licensing software tech" business since no one uses idTech for FPS'es anymore?

Because the US has bandwidth caps?

Oh, I'm not saying this couldn't be a good tech for games to license, especially esports/streamer focused games. I'm just more gobsmacked that they spent e3 time promoting this to consumers like it was ever something a consumer would ask for. It's like expecting a gamer to say "I won't ever buy a PC without hyperthreading."

Well that whole press conference was shit other than Ghostwire: Tokyo and maybe Deathloop as they didn't show what people wanted to see (Elder Scrolls 6, Starfield) so what's one more turd onto the pile?

bethsoft was an embarassment

i'm glad their employees have hobbies and their fans like dragons though

that was important to know

I'm so glad I didn't watch this, I would just have been pissed. Skyrim 2 and Spacerim and are the only things I would have cared about.

Ghostwire: Tokyo and Deathloop were very interesting (Arkane  :heart:). The rest was truly embarassing. C'mon really, nothing to show about Starfield after a whole year since the teaser? What a joke. There were rumors about development restarting from zero multiple times, this kinda confirms it.

the pc thing was bad

Yep, saved only by Frankie Ward in a shark costume and with her 80s hairstyle

Sooooo, recap after the Ubi conference.

Subscription-based stores or whatthefucktheyare (talking about PC):

- Origin Access
- Xbox Game Pass
- UPlay Plus (which will integrate itself with Stadia or whatever I don't know)

And then, online stores bonanza:

- Xbox Store (PC)
- Uplay
- Steam
- GOG
- Epic
- Bethesda
- Origin

Soon:

- Stadia
- Orion

Yeah, I get that lots of those have redundant stuff but....HELP  :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods:

It's kind of expensive compared to EA's plan ($4.99 vs $14.99) and it's not a good value for me compared to how I currently buy one or two Ubisoft games a year when they are massively discounted (usually 50% off, sometimes 33% off) but it might be worth a try for a month after Stadia becomes available next year to the plebs to see what that service is like rather than paying for full price Stadia games that I may or may not be able to play after Google shuts Stadia down.

I just read this entire thread.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

I assume game streamings are the future because they will help control piracy. In the distant future.

I especially like the thinly veiled intent behind all of the streaming announcements. I also read a recent Twitter thread by one of the business analysts covering gaming (which got retweeted by several people from gaming mags and publishers) which only talked in benchmarks and taget numbers

Firstly everyone was quick to tell us that game streaming won't be the 'netflix of gaming', meaning of course that it won't be flat fee a la carte gaming (see Stadia and how you'll have to pay for individual games on top of the monthly fee)
Secondly they want full publisher (not developer) control
Thirdly they've all been talking about how they want to funnel even more epeople into their free to play style games . The business analyst called it a shift to a more free to play economy and to get more value out of the subscriber base.
Lastly for a lot of publsihers game streaming is not a business model they really want to follow its more a way to put pressure on existing platforms to lower their cuts to preferably below 10% and to get more favorable visibility and coverage with respect to competition and indies.


No one was talking about games only about how to milk their customer base even more while providing even less value and keeping even more of the profits out of the hands of the game developers.

Business analysts only talked in benchmarks and target numbers, stop the presses! Do you think record companies are interested in the quality of the music they produce?

I mean, the software service model has been the thing everyone has been pushing for since they realized they could do it. This is not new, nor surprising.

And we should resist the fuck out of it.  Or actually, as I stated before, I doubt it is necessary yet.  The new generation of gamers would laugh at the performance.  1080p at 60fps (compressed like fuck and full of quality issues, I don’t care what anyone says) only passes muster for us old folks.

In the last few years they at least tried to mask this and gave themselves a thin veneer of 'it's about the games'. That they're blatantly obvious about it is what's surprising not the fact that they do it.

Stadia AMA:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/hi_im_andrey_doronichev_and_im_the_director_of/

Nothing really interesting that I saw on there except for confirmation that games you buy on Stadia stay on Stadia (i.e. like most digital-only services you don't own anything you purchase on them). You will be able to export your saves, though.

For all I've mocked it, I did put in a preorder  :oh_i_see:

u a clown

I'm actually pretty interested in how their tech will work. Or not.

But yeah. Fo sho it's a straight up clownin move.