That's 19,400 players logging in over a 24-hour period, not concurrence.
As far as matchmaking goes, there may be a further effect of more people just starting the game fresh and being at various points of early story, rather than bringing over a high-level character from another platform, where most of the daily players will be pretty advanced.
Doesn’t the Stadia version start you at max level, ready to jump into Shadowkeep, with the old stuff accessed through an NPC?
That’s what happened on PC when Shadowkeep launches.
You're "max level" under the old system. Which is basically Level 1 in Shadowkeep.
I played all the way through "Vanilla" Destiny 2 and imported my dude.
There are like 50 new systems in place that I am still figuring out but so far so good. I can still Titan with the best of them.
I obtained a buddy pass and tried it out. Samurai Shodown and Destiny 2, hoooo. The Google speed test said I had 345 mbps, so I was optimistic.
It really does look like you're watching a twitch stream in terms of visuals. Kind of amusing.
Tried Samurai Shodown first. Seemed fine, but, like MK, is an ideal fighting game for this service. It's a slower game that doesn't really have combos. It felt heavier, but not so much, and it was good enough for normal, casual play. No real complaints on it.
Then I went to Destiny.
60 fps is nice, but again was like watching a Twitch stream. When I last played it on Battlenet, it looked a lot better there. A ton better. Still, it looked good and 60 fps is nicer than my PS4 Pro. Movement wise, It felt....heavier. I tried Crucible only, pretty much, and played with @taco543 in it. Out of like 7 total matches in the Iron Banner, I think we ended up with one or two that was actually 6 vs 6. The rest were 4vs4 or slightly better.
I'm not sure if their matchmaking is separate from console and not account based, but the first few matches were romps against really bad opposition. Later matches had more meta loadouts start showing up.
If I had never played D2 on other platforms, I would've just assumed the motion and controls were normal. As it was, it did not feel right and felt heavy. It was fine, though, and I played it well once I got used to it. It wasn't to the point that I turned my lip up in disgust. It was definitely not a terrible experience and it was admittedly cool just quickly playing the games. Overall, I liked it, but....definitely was more deliberate in the motion.
Bizazedo on
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
So, due to the buddy pass, I am not a founder. When I pick my name, it gives me a number afterwards. I think, cool, Battlenet does that cool, it's just a number I can see or I can use for friend requests. No big deal.
Except....it's not ONLY visible to me. Ingame I am marked by a number. I guess because I'm not a founder? No one else had it and I can't turn it off (s'far as I know). I am forever tarred by my name being Bizazedo...HASHTAG2365.
I hate it and it almost singlehandedly makes me not want to let my subscription kick in.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
So, due to the buddy pass, I am not a founder. When I pick my name, it gives me a number afterwards. I think, cool, Battlenet does that cool, it's just a number I can see or I can use for friend requests. No big deal.
Except....it's not ONLY visible to me. Ingame I am marked by a number. I guess because I'm not a founder? No one else had it and I can't turn it off (s'far as I know). I am forever tarred by my name being Bizazedo...HASHTAG2365.
I hate it and it almost singlehandedly makes me not want to let my subscription kick in.
Yeah, it's weird, there's been a lot of suggestions to not display this everywhere because it's weird and no other service displays names like this. Hopefully they'll switch this!
Regarding Destiny 2's visuals, yeah, it definitely looks much worse on a browser, you definitely get that "Twitch stream" feeling because of this. It's probably the worst of the bunch in a browser, but I won't say the effect isn't there for other games. Less pronounced maybe?I really hope they enable the higher quality streams in browsers soon because playing a game on Chromecast is like night and day vs Chrome so I know it's capable.
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
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0
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
I'd wait for more new releases before doom and gloom. THQ was contacted and didn't comment, so I'm guessing this might be THQ rather than Google pushing up the price. Benefit to being one of a few available games, you can charge more and people might pay it.
Before y'all run away on this train you should probably know that PC is the one that is $10 cheaper than everywhere else. PS4/Xbox/Switch (when it releases there, in February I believe) will also be $40, same as Stadia.
Usually $40 is more the "keep parity with physical editions" tax. Which is not an issue for PC and you think wouldn't be for Stadia either...? But yeah, Nintendo doesn't mandate the Switch tax either (outside of cart prices), that's mostly the market doing its thing, so I don't see much reason to blame Google here.
So is it correct that Stadia is just....capping their hardware right now? Like I know the dream of "better than best PC ever" was a couple of years out even by their own admission, but it sounds like they're using mid-range PC specs and telling developers "Design your game to play on this hardware -- if it's on medium settings then it is what it is, optimize your game better" like with a console.
How do we get from there to 4K game streaming? Aside from the answer of "Just use ultra low settings!" which seems very bad and not the intent.
Is there a roadmap for when we get to at least like, 1080p with "ultra" settings? That's been the most confusing part from me as an outsider looking in since launch. The better than best PC stuff just makes me roll my eyes, but it did seem completely doable for them to have it look like it's running on a high end PC at ultra settings (ignoring the valid conversations about a 1080p stream not looking as good as 1080p rendered locally due to compression and such). That's just a matter of how many resources are you willing to allocate. What changed? Or have they given a breakdown of when it gets better?
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
It's just going to get worse as games get more demanding
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-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
We've known for a while that they were using basically mid tier PC specs. Something that's going to be interesting is how they monetize upgrading their blades. Console makers launch a hardware refresh or a whole new generation. PC part makers sell those parts.
Stadia needs to use their subscription income and game sales income to not only keep their service and data centers going, but also regularly upgrade all of their blades, and starting at mid tier just means it has to be done sooner the first time.
+3
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
We've known for a while that they were using basically mid tier PC specs. Something that's going to be interesting is how they monetize upgrading their blades. Console makers launch a hardware refresh or a whole new generation. PC part makers sell those parts.
Stadia needs to use their subscription income and game sales income to not only keep their service and data centers going, but also regularly upgrade all of their blades, and starting at mid tier just means it has to be done sooner the first time.
And they really fucked themselves because the next gen is about a year away
So the "better looking and more responsive than best PC" thing was even more absurd than it initially appeared? I'll admit I got lost in all of the pre launch discussion -- the discussion in this thread framed it as if "ultra" settings were the assumed baseline, and we're just trying to crunch the numbers on how we get to 4K with minimal latency.
I feel bad for the people who sincerely thought that they were getting a top of the line PC every year, forever, for the cost of a subscription and buying the game. Stadia's marketing really has been a bit of a mess, as I don't remember anyone ever bringing up in this thread pre-launch that the games could potentially be running at low-medium settings.
Fiatil on
+1
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
So the "better looking and more responsive than best PC" thing was even more absurd than it initially appeared? I'll admit I got lost in all of the pre launch discussion -- the discussion in this thread framed it as if "ultra" settings were the assumed baseline, and we're just trying to crunch the numbers on how we get to 4K with minimal latency.
I feel bad for the people who sincerely thought that they were getting a top of the line PC every year, forever, for the cost of a subscription and buying the game. Stadia's marketing really has been a bit of a mess, as I don't remember anyone ever bringing up in this thread pre-launch that the games could potentially be running at low-medium settings.
I should clarify -- at 1080p? I'll admit to not having seen every post, but dang yeah I guess I just missed that part. Whoops!
I know there was a lot of speculation about what they could be using, but it always seemed like official google word was that you'd at least get a pretty version of the game you buy. Shoulda checked their marketing more myself I guess, as much as it hurt to at times.
We've known for a while that they were using basically mid tier PC specs. Something that's going to be interesting is how they monetize upgrading their blades. Console makers launch a hardware refresh or a whole new generation. PC part makers sell those parts.
Stadia needs to use their subscription income and game sales income to not only keep their service and data centers going, but also regularly upgrade all of their blades, and starting at mid tier just means it has to be done sooner the first time.
If it ever finds a large enough support base, I can see them tiering out access to various levels of hardware (similar to how Netflix charges more for 4K streaming).
People would hate it, so I don’t know that it’s a good idea, but it’s a model that would financially allow for incrementally upgrading to match your user base - those willing to pay more for upgraded hardware will be a smaller pool, so you need less of the more expensive hardware, and can expand as the prices go down and the number of users rises (as it always will because stagnation is death and surely every service will simply balloon in numbers infinitely), increasingly getting a cheaper price on the parts as the subscription price remains fixed. As the hardware falls behind the times, you rotate it down to the next tier and upgrade the top tier again.
I think it could be sustainable, but I’m not sure Stadia is going to have enough users to support it for a while, if ever.
OneAngryPossum on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I should clarify -- at 1080p? I'll admit to not having seen every post, but dang yeah I guess I just missed that part. Whoops!
I know there was a lot of speculation about what they could be using, but it always seemed like official google word was that you'd at least get a pretty version of the game you buy. Shoulda checked their marketing more myself I guess, as much as it hurt to at times.
They basically have a sort-of RX Vega 56, which is a decent if unremarkable card. I kept hearing how they'd have some kind of revolutionary technology where they could scale individual GPU's or what have you when it was brought up. Even though Google is a company that will peacock around legit amazing tech every single time, nothing was white-papered or really talked about with Stadia.
Most concerns about the tech were dismissed with "cloud servers" so I just stopped bringing it up.
I should clarify -- at 1080p? I'll admit to not having seen every post, but dang yeah I guess I just missed that part. Whoops!
I know there was a lot of speculation about what they could be using, but it always seemed like official google word was that you'd at least get a pretty version of the game you buy. Shoulda checked their marketing more myself I guess, as much as it hurt to at times.
They basically have a sort-of RX Vega 56, which is a decent if unremarkable card. I kept hearing how they'd have some kind of revolutionary technology where they could scale individual GPU's or what have you when it was brought up.
Most concerns about the tech were dismissed with "cloud servers" so I just stopped bringing it up.
I think there are some interesting possibilities that arise from having a central location for physical hardware that is conceivably on the same network, but I don’t know that we’ll ever see them, and it doesn’t sound like Google wants developers to explore them. It’s kind of a lose-lose proposition. Google doesn’t want to put up more hardware than necessary to keep costs down, and developers don’t want to invest in a weird platform without a strong user base.
+1
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I should clarify -- at 1080p? I'll admit to not having seen every post, but dang yeah I guess I just missed that part. Whoops!
I know there was a lot of speculation about what they could be using, but it always seemed like official google word was that you'd at least get a pretty version of the game you buy. Shoulda checked their marketing more myself I guess, as much as it hurt to at times.
They basically have a sort-of RX Vega 56, which is a decent if unremarkable card. I kept hearing how they'd have some kind of revolutionary technology where they could scale individual GPU's or what have you when it was brought up.
Most concerns about the tech were dismissed with "cloud servers" so I just stopped bringing it up.
I think there are some interesting possibilities that arise from having a central location for physical hardware that is conceivably on the same network, but I don’t know that we’ll ever see them, and it doesn’t sound like Google wants developers to explore them. It’s kind of a lose-lose proposition. Google doesn’t want to put up more hardware than necessary to keep costs down, and developers don’t want to invest in a weird platform without a strong user base.
I think gaming is something that fluctuates too often, especially when we're just now at the cusp of realistic lighting being processed in real-time (ray-tracing, which is the actual future).
Google doesn't have ray-tracing capable hardware in the field, and that's going to bite them in he ass. The next GPU gens (AMD and NVidia) and consoles will have ray tracing.
Once that stuff becomes the norm, companies aren't going to want to make non-raytraced versions of their games.
Raytracing being the norm is an issue but AMD's implementation is sounding pretty half-baked compared to RTX, with only a small portion of dedicated hardware and mostly relying on shaders/compute and even software. It's not going to be the kind of night-and-day comparisons we are currently seeing from RT cores.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Raytracing being the norm is an issue but AMD's implementation is sounding pretty half-baked compared to RTX, with only a small portion of dedicated hardware and mostly relying on shaders/compute and even software. It's not going to be the kind of night-and-day comparisons we are currently seeing from RT cores.
There is no implementation in Stadia at all, tho. Half baked or not. As the tech matures and becomes the norm in major things like Unity and Unreal, it's going to put a huge amount of pressure on Google to upgrade their brand new data centers because they're already behind.
I don't recall seeing this earlier--for those interested for comparison, here's the most complete list I've seen of the current Xbox Game Streaming ("xCloud") lineup in the (free) preview state.
ARK: Survival Evolved
Absolver
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
Battle Chasers: Nightwar
Black Desert Online
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
Borderlands 2
Borderlands: The Handsome Collection
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
Children of Morta
Conan Exiles
Crackdown 3: Campaign
Darksiders III
Dead by Daylight
Dead Island: Definitive Edition
Devil May Cry 5
F1 2019
Fishing Sim World: Pro Tour
Forza Horizon 4
Gears 5
Gears of War: Ultimate Edition
Halo 5: Guardians
Halo Wars 2
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
Hello Neighbor
HITMAN
Just Cause 4
Killer Instinct
Madden NFL 20
Mark of the Ninja: Remastered
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden
Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition
Overcooked
Puyo Puyo Champions
RAD
ReCore: Definitive Edition
SOULCALIBUR VI
Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Sniper Elite 4
Sea of Thieves
State of Decay 2
Subnautica
Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition
Tekken 7
TERA
The Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut
theHunter: Call of the Wild
Vampyr
Warhammer: Vermintide 2
West of Dead (BETA)
World of Final Fantasy Maxima
World of Tanks: Mercenaries
World of Warships: Legends
World War Z
WRC 7 FIA World Rally Championship
Wreckfest
WWE 2K20
Yoku's Island Express
I'm honestly now well-educated on the subject enough to say how this weighs in. Most obviously, I know Staadia has Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, neither of which are on here.
I should clarify -- at 1080p? I'll admit to not having seen every post, but dang yeah I guess I just missed that part. Whoops!
I know there was a lot of speculation about what they could be using, but it always seemed like official google word was that you'd at least get a pretty version of the game you buy. Shoulda checked their marketing more myself I guess, as much as it hurt to at times.
Many games are running at 4k. Some are 4k/60, some are 4k/30. Destiny 2 is 1080p/60 upscaled. RDR2 is 1440p.
The problem is that a bunch of articles came out that said "hey these 2 games we tried weren't delivering 4k" and people ran with it. In all cases, yes a decently high end gaming PC will look considerably better. Many games look at least on par with the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X versions, if not a bit better re: PS4 Pro since it tends to checkerboard a lot whereas you get real 4k with Stadia on these games. Xbox One X is a little bit closer, with some settings being on for one and off for the other (in the case of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example). Most of the time you can expect settings to be in the medium to high range, definitely nothing on ultra.
Obviously Stadia's marketing department fueled some of the fire, but the actual performance is somewhere in the middle. It's honestly more than fine if your point of reference is one of the other consoles, especially one of the base ones. There's a reddit post with some data here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/e3qaiw/stadia_games_performance_summary/
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I should clarify -- at 1080p? I'll admit to not having seen every post, but dang yeah I guess I just missed that part. Whoops!
I know there was a lot of speculation about what they could be using, but it always seemed like official google word was that you'd at least get a pretty version of the game you buy. Shoulda checked their marketing more myself I guess, as much as it hurt to at times.
Many games are running at 4k. Some are 4k/60, some are 4k/30. Destiny 2 is 1080p/60 upscaled. RDR2 is 1440p.
The problem is that a bunch of articles came out that said "hey these 2 games we tried weren't delivering 4k" and people ran with it. In all cases, yes a decently high end gaming PC will look considerably better. Many games look at least on par with the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X versions, if not a bit better re: PS4 Pro since it tends to checkerboard a lot whereas you get real 4k with Stadia on these games. Xbox One X is a little bit closer, with some settings being on for one and off for the other (in the case of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example). Most of the time you can expect settings to be in the medium to high range, definitely nothing on ultra.
Obviously Stadia's marketing department fueled some of the fire, but the actual performance is somewhere in the middle. It's honestly more than fine if your point of reference is one of the other consoles, especially one of the base ones. There's a reddit post with some data here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/e3qaiw/stadia_games_performance_summary/
They put 4K60 HDR in big huge pink and red letters over all their advertisements.
I should clarify -- at 1080p? I'll admit to not having seen every post, but dang yeah I guess I just missed that part. Whoops!
I know there was a lot of speculation about what they could be using, but it always seemed like official google word was that you'd at least get a pretty version of the game you buy. Shoulda checked their marketing more myself I guess, as much as it hurt to at times.
Many games are running at 4k. Some are 4k/60, some are 4k/30. Destiny 2 is 1080p/60 upscaled. RDR2 is 1440p.
The problem is that a bunch of articles came out that said "hey these 2 games we tried weren't delivering 4k" and people ran with it. In all cases, yes a decently high end gaming PC will look considerably better. Many games look at least on par with the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X versions, if not a bit better re: PS4 Pro since it tends to checkerboard a lot whereas you get real 4k with Stadia on these games. Xbox One X is a little bit closer, with some settings being on for one and off for the other (in the case of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example). Most of the time you can expect settings to be in the medium to high range, definitely nothing on ultra.
Obviously Stadia's marketing department fueled some of the fire, but the actual performance is somewhere in the middle. It's honestly more than fine if your point of reference is one of the other consoles, especially one of the base ones. There's a reddit post with some data here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/e3qaiw/stadia_games_performance_summary/
They put 4K60 HDR in big huge pink and red letters over all their advertisements.
So no, the official word was not "you'll get kinda good stuff."
Yeah, and obviously that turned out to be marketing BS. I agree that claiming all games would be 4k/60 was super misleading. Stadia's marketing department doesn't get a pass here, sure.
There's a pretty big difference between 1080p on low-medium and actually quite a bit of stuff being 4k on at least medium. I'd say that's at least "pretty good" even if it's short of some of their messaging. I'm not sure that pretending that everything is on the lower end of that is productive to well, anything, aside from spreading misinformation, either.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
edited December 2019
All the big AAA graphically heavy titles are not on 4K60, at least according to the list you posted.
All the big AAA graphically heavy titles are not on 4K60.
Mortal Kombat 11
GRID
Furthermore, that tweet says some games can be 4k30 for various reasons:
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey
Metro Exodus
All 3 Tomb Raider games
The tweet says "for artistic reasons" which... lol. It's because they cant hit 60.
And GRID and MK11? GRID isn't what I'd call a GPU killer (60 FPS at UHD on a 2080), but about industry average for a racing game. And again, were not going to see it on 4k Ultra. MK11 is not a demanding game at all, with a recommended GTX 1060.
All the big AAA graphically heavy titles are not on 4K60.
Mortal Kombat 11
GRID
Furthermore, that tweet says some games can be 4k30 for various reasons:
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey
Metro Exodus
All 3 Tomb Raider games
The tweet says "for artistic reasons" which... lol. It's because they cant hit 60.
And GRID and MK11? GRID isn't what I'd call a GPU killer (60 FPS at UHD on a 2080), but about industry average for a racing game. And again, were not going to see it on 4k Ultra. MK11 is not a demanding game at all, with a recommended GTX 1060.
While I agree with you in these specific cases, there are some games that tie some stupid things to framerate that have no business being tied to framerate. It's more common among 30fps console games.
I remember that dark souls 2 originally was really buggy at 60fps and beyond and you'd experience things like massively increased weapon degradation rate, dramatically smaller dodge I-frame windows, and stuff like noticeably stronger backstab damage. Also the way that the game rendered some torches didn't work right at higher fps.
I can see some people claiming that such games should be played at 30 fps for "artistic reasons." I'd argue that "artistic" is a lame cop-out excuse and that it would be more accurate to say that the games should be played at 30fps due to poor game design decisions that were made when implementing game mechanics.
Still, for whatever the reason, it's an example of a situation where some games should be played at 30fps to get the intended experience. A reason other than "our hardware can't do it. "
General_Armchair on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Bethsoft games are notorious for the Creation engines physics simulations being tied to the FPS.
Not something I'd call "artistic" but I get where you're coming from.
+1
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Not sure if they’d improved it but MK11 PC performance was terrible. If they’re running the PC version I’m not surprised they’re not offering above 30fps.
Posts
I played all the way through "Vanilla" Destiny 2 and imported my dude.
There are like 50 new systems in place that I am still figuring out but so far so good. I can still Titan with the best of them.
It really does look like you're watching a twitch stream in terms of visuals. Kind of amusing.
Tried Samurai Shodown first. Seemed fine, but, like MK, is an ideal fighting game for this service. It's a slower game that doesn't really have combos. It felt heavier, but not so much, and it was good enough for normal, casual play. No real complaints on it.
Then I went to Destiny.
60 fps is nice, but again was like watching a Twitch stream. When I last played it on Battlenet, it looked a lot better there. A ton better. Still, it looked good and 60 fps is nicer than my PS4 Pro. Movement wise, It felt....heavier. I tried Crucible only, pretty much, and played with @taco543 in it. Out of like 7 total matches in the Iron Banner, I think we ended up with one or two that was actually 6 vs 6. The rest were 4vs4 or slightly better.
I'm not sure if their matchmaking is separate from console and not account based, but the first few matches were romps against really bad opposition. Later matches had more meta loadouts start showing up.
If I had never played D2 on other platforms, I would've just assumed the motion and controls were normal. As it was, it did not feel right and felt heavy. It was fine, though, and I played it well once I got used to it. It wasn't to the point that I turned my lip up in disgust. It was definitely not a terrible experience and it was admittedly cool just quickly playing the games. Overall, I liked it, but....definitely was more deliberate in the motion.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
So, due to the buddy pass, I am not a founder. When I pick my name, it gives me a number afterwards. I think, cool, Battlenet does that cool, it's just a number I can see or I can use for friend requests. No big deal.
Except....it's not ONLY visible to me. Ingame I am marked by a number. I guess because I'm not a founder? No one else had it and I can't turn it off (s'far as I know). I am forever tarred by my name being Bizazedo...HASHTAG2365.
I hate it and it almost singlehandedly makes me not want to let my subscription kick in.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Yeah, it's weird, there's been a lot of suggestions to not display this everywhere because it's weird and no other service displays names like this. Hopefully they'll switch this!
Regarding Destiny 2's visuals, yeah, it definitely looks much worse on a browser, you definitely get that "Twitch stream" feeling because of this. It's probably the worst of the bunch in a browser, but I won't say the effect isn't there for other games. Less pronounced maybe?I really hope they enable the higher quality streams in browsers soon because playing a game on Chromecast is like night and day vs Chrome so I know it's capable.
At least they're rolling out the missing features quickly?
They’re seriously charging more for a Stadia game?
Ahyep.
Granted there was probably some work involved to get it up and running in Stadia. Still, it's not the greatest look.
nope!
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Less Stadia tax, more console tax.
How do we get from there to 4K game streaming? Aside from the answer of "Just use ultra low settings!" which seems very bad and not the intent.
Is there a roadmap for when we get to at least like, 1080p with "ultra" settings? That's been the most confusing part from me as an outsider looking in since launch. The better than best PC stuff just makes me roll my eyes, but it did seem completely doable for them to have it look like it's running on a high end PC at ultra settings (ignoring the valid conversations about a 1080p stream not looking as good as 1080p rendered locally due to compression and such). That's just a matter of how many resources are you willing to allocate. What changed? Or have they given a breakdown of when it gets better?
Stadia needs to use their subscription income and game sales income to not only keep their service and data centers going, but also regularly upgrade all of their blades, and starting at mid tier just means it has to be done sooner the first time.
And they really fucked themselves because the next gen is about a year away
I feel bad for the people who sincerely thought that they were getting a top of the line PC every year, forever, for the cost of a subscription and buying the game. Stadia's marketing really has been a bit of a mess, as I don't remember anyone ever bringing up in this thread pre-launch that the games could potentially be running at low-medium settings.
It was definitely brought up.
I know there was a lot of speculation about what they could be using, but it always seemed like official google word was that you'd at least get a pretty version of the game you buy. Shoulda checked their marketing more myself I guess, as much as it hurt to at times.
If it ever finds a large enough support base, I can see them tiering out access to various levels of hardware (similar to how Netflix charges more for 4K streaming).
People would hate it, so I don’t know that it’s a good idea, but it’s a model that would financially allow for incrementally upgrading to match your user base - those willing to pay more for upgraded hardware will be a smaller pool, so you need less of the more expensive hardware, and can expand as the prices go down and the number of users rises (as it always will because stagnation is death and surely every service will simply balloon in numbers infinitely), increasingly getting a cheaper price on the parts as the subscription price remains fixed. As the hardware falls behind the times, you rotate it down to the next tier and upgrade the top tier again.
I think it could be sustainable, but I’m not sure Stadia is going to have enough users to support it for a while, if ever.
They basically have a sort-of RX Vega 56, which is a decent if unremarkable card. I kept hearing how they'd have some kind of revolutionary technology where they could scale individual GPU's or what have you when it was brought up. Even though Google is a company that will peacock around legit amazing tech every single time, nothing was white-papered or really talked about with Stadia.
Most concerns about the tech were dismissed with "cloud servers" so I just stopped bringing it up.
I think there are some interesting possibilities that arise from having a central location for physical hardware that is conceivably on the same network, but I don’t know that we’ll ever see them, and it doesn’t sound like Google wants developers to explore them. It’s kind of a lose-lose proposition. Google doesn’t want to put up more hardware than necessary to keep costs down, and developers don’t want to invest in a weird platform without a strong user base.
I think gaming is something that fluctuates too often, especially when we're just now at the cusp of realistic lighting being processed in real-time (ray-tracing, which is the actual future).
Google doesn't have ray-tracing capable hardware in the field, and that's going to bite them in he ass. The next GPU gens (AMD and NVidia) and consoles will have ray tracing.
Once that stuff becomes the norm, companies aren't going to want to make non-raytraced versions of their games.
There is no implementation in Stadia at all, tho. Half baked or not. As the tech matures and becomes the norm in major things like Unity and Unreal, it's going to put a huge amount of pressure on Google to upgrade their brand new data centers because they're already behind.
I'm honestly now well-educated on the subject enough to say how this weighs in. Most obviously, I know Staadia has Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, neither of which are on here.
Many games are running at 4k. Some are 4k/60, some are 4k/30. Destiny 2 is 1080p/60 upscaled. RDR2 is 1440p.
The problem is that a bunch of articles came out that said "hey these 2 games we tried weren't delivering 4k" and people ran with it. In all cases, yes a decently high end gaming PC will look considerably better. Many games look at least on par with the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X versions, if not a bit better re: PS4 Pro since it tends to checkerboard a lot whereas you get real 4k with Stadia on these games. Xbox One X is a little bit closer, with some settings being on for one and off for the other (in the case of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example). Most of the time you can expect settings to be in the medium to high range, definitely nothing on ultra.
Obviously Stadia's marketing department fueled some of the fire, but the actual performance is somewhere in the middle. It's honestly more than fine if your point of reference is one of the other consoles, especially one of the base ones. There's a reddit post with some data here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/e3qaiw/stadia_games_performance_summary/
They put 4K60 HDR in big huge pink and red letters over all their advertisements.
And Phil Harrison said this:
So no, the official word was not "you'll get kinda good stuff."
Yeah, and obviously that turned out to be marketing BS. I agree that claiming all games would be 4k/60 was super misleading. Stadia's marketing department doesn't get a pass here, sure.
There's a pretty big difference between 1080p on low-medium and actually quite a bit of stuff being 4k on at least medium. I'd say that's at least "pretty good" even if it's short of some of their messaging. I'm not sure that pretending that everything is on the lower end of that is productive to well, anything, aside from spreading misinformation, either.
Mortal Kombat 11
GRID
Furthermore, that tweet says some games can be 4k30 for various reasons:
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey
Metro Exodus
All 3 Tomb Raider games
The tweet says "for artistic reasons" which... lol. It's because they cant hit 60.
And GRID and MK11? GRID isn't what I'd call a GPU killer (60 FPS at UHD on a 2080), but about industry average for a racing game. And again, were not going to see it on 4k Ultra. MK11 is not a demanding game at all, with a recommended GTX 1060.
While I agree with you in these specific cases, there are some games that tie some stupid things to framerate that have no business being tied to framerate. It's more common among 30fps console games.
I remember that dark souls 2 originally was really buggy at 60fps and beyond and you'd experience things like massively increased weapon degradation rate, dramatically smaller dodge I-frame windows, and stuff like noticeably stronger backstab damage. Also the way that the game rendered some torches didn't work right at higher fps.
I can see some people claiming that such games should be played at 30 fps for "artistic reasons." I'd argue that "artistic" is a lame cop-out excuse and that it would be more accurate to say that the games should be played at 30fps due to poor game design decisions that were made when implementing game mechanics.
Still, for whatever the reason, it's an example of a situation where some games should be played at 30fps to get the intended experience. A reason other than "our hardware can't do it. "
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Not something I'd call "artistic" but I get where you're coming from.