Maybe I’m just an old grump but I couldn’t give two shits if my games are in 4k at 60fps.
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the 4K thing in particular is 
because right now it’s not really possible to get a realtime encode with a good enough bitrate to really care that it’s 4K and not 1080p – every 4K streaming solution currently has been multipass encoded to get it down below 30 or 40mbit/s without artifacting – so if they’re going to compel AMD to ship a fixed-function AV1 encoder in order to support this (which, given what I know about google’s interest in video codecs, is not unlikely), that will be interesting
How about all the ISPs in America that have a data cap? “4K Streaming” to play games would decimate a lot of people here.
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next press conference will introduce Google ISP
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google actually just gave up on competing with those incumbents, you’re thinking in 2013 terms
I think the absolute best case scenario for 4K streaming is about 10GB/hr and given that this is marketed to people who do a lot of gaming (right? that’s the part I still don’t get, like you have to love youtubers but not want to deal with the overhead of a console which to me sounds like a weird audience divide but I can’t speak for the maintstream) I guess that’s not trivial against a monthly cap?
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also, as a happy owner and occasional user of a gamevice, I can say that the majority of AAA titles just don’t scale well in practical terms to a phone
the UIs and the distant details are crushed and you just miss out on too much in many cases
if they think they can have like, Apple-sized influence in compelling game developers to make changes to accommodate this, that’d be one thing, but I think that makes the “it just scales anywhere” prospect nontrivial
and without that they have fairly serious install base / motivation issues
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Yeah, some UIs don’t even scale well to the Switch in handheld mode.
To maybe answer @tt_zop’s question, the Stadia falls back to 720p streaming for connections as low as 15 mbps.
streaming to a thin client is the correct answer for high graphics gaming
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oh cool so their answer to realtime encodes not being good enough for 4K displays is 50mbit streams
fair enough lol
how do I use gsync with it
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It’s really hard to evaluate this because in a lot of ways we’re not the target audience; we’re used to buying consoles or PCs and purchasing games on them, and Google will struggle to surpass the advantages of local content.
Google has talked about reaching markets where phone is the primary computer and that makes a certain sense, except bandwidth is a huge concern in those markets.
And then what they show is core console games (because the pitch is, stream high-quality graphics), and I think, what is the overlap of, pays for high-quality internet, interested in core demographic games, but will settle for a lower-initial-investment solution?
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By the time Nintendo retires the Switch, if my son is into gaming and has a device that I’m uninterested in/unable to access, and if I’m still interested in gaming, maybe then old-man probablyfine will consider Stadia.
As in, if you see yourself as a marginal consumer interested in dipping into things but with a background of games playing? Yeah, I could see that being attractive to a lot of lapsed game purchasers.
Exactly. I think that in a world with no Breath of the Wild, I would still be (re)playing DS and 3DS games, and I’d be very interested in Stadia right now. However, the streaming requirements would be hard to swallow/prohibitive.
this gets a bit soupy but my other thought about this thing is…
why do we have to have games everywhere? why does every screen we own have to give us drip-feed access to our paper-thin paradise of distractions? thank god my brain will never have another idle moment to think about real things and i can smash more fortnite into my sensory organs like delicious cocaine cola
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So that’s about 8 hours a month I can play, assuming I do nothing else with my internet, unless I play during my unlimited bandwidth hours of 2am to 8am.
Thanks, I hate it.
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if it’s any consolation I don’t think they have the slightest intention of launching in canada
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Except that they do.
oh no!!
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