HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ ablation

Eurogamer also did a tech review, and actually did find it laggy: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-stadi...

Also, they found that to get the best performance from it, it sucked down in the region of 20gb per hour of data. Which is a lot for countries with capped internet allowances.

⬐ dharma1

It's streaming video, so depending on your settings, about the same as Netflix I would think?

⬐ ealexhudson

Pre-prepared streaming video will compress much better: amongst other things, modern codecs will send frames out-of-sequence in order to better compress, have motion prediction, stuff like that. Even if this system is willing to spend the compute to do high-level compression, they don't have the data from future frames yet that will allow them to get down as low as you can go.

Equally, because you know so much about the scene, there are many more opportunities to do smart video compression - however, those would be extremely difficult to take advantage of.

⬐ IronBacon

> they don't have the data from future frames yet that will allow them to get down as low as you can go.

They could potentially implement something similar to Retroarch's runahead feature, but I suppose it would requires support from the game itself and more infrastructure so probably not feasible...

⬐ taneq

> Equally, because you know so much about the scene, there are many more opportunities to do smart video compression

Ultimately they could cache textures, models etc. on the client system and only transmit data about the players' locations and inputs. Then the codec would render the game on the client... hey wait.

⬐ grenoire

What surprised me with their measurements is that the baseline Xbox One X lag is also quite high, but I suppose it doesn't matter if both are measured the same way.

⬐ pcroh

I played GTA 5 on the PS4 and the input lag is simply pathetic. If that's the baseline, surely Stadia can win.

⬐ ablation

Yes, but people will be injecting more frames of lag into their already laggy inputs with Stadia. I'm not sure this passes muster.

⬐ govg

Is this due to the game being poorly optimized for the PS4, or because the TV adds some lag? I have heard that TV lag can be reduced by turning on "Game mode" or equivalents.

⬐ pcroh

No, other games perform fine. TV correctly set up (I know what you mean, some TVs have frame interpolation to fake 60 fps which adds lag) and gamepad connected via cable.

⬐ m0xte

Yeah considering people complain about game updates running 50Gb of traffic once every few months this is going to be a big issue for a lot of people.

Also I suspect this is not something that will sit on any CDNs due to the specialist nature so this is going to transit much further than the ISP's edge.

⬐ systemtest

The problem I have with Stadia is that you need a monthly subscription and also need to pay full price for all games. Games that can't be sold on the second hand market, unlike the current console games. And at $129 it's not far off from the €200 I paid for my PS4 during Black Friday 2017. The TCO of the Stadia seems much higher than traditional consoles.

The upside is using it on a mobile device but to me this doesn't add value, as the network connection outside my house is either a high-latency 3G connection or someone else's unreliable WiFi. And with Remote Play on the PS4 I have similar capabilities.

⬐ macspoofing

>The problem I have with Stadia is that you need a monthly subscription and also need to pay full price for all games.

Yes. The problem with Stadia is Google. Google hates hardware and they pretty much half-ass everything that is even an inch outside of their core competency.

There is something exciting about cloud-gaming, even in the present state ... but to make it a success it would have required Google to make better deals with content providers (maybe turn it into a true Netflix-for-games), and potentially pour some significant resources to subsidize it. For example, they could make the controller/hardware really cheap, subsidize content-provider licenses (so games are available via an Xbox-pass type service, or are half the price of their PS4/Xbox counterparts), or, god-forbid, invest in first-party studios to create original games. But that's not the Google way.

⬐ skinkestek

> The problem with Stadia is Google. Google hates hardware and they pretty much half-ass everything that is even an inch outside of their core competency.

You make it sound like their core products are good.

Search is worse than in 2009.

Ads has been useless for me for years, even when I tried to help..!

Anyone here who buys Google ads, expect to be fleeced for nothing:

There exist ads I want (events, local) , but I never see them.

On the contrary: for years I've seen irrelevant but probably very expensive ads that aren't even remotely interesting but rather insulting.

⬐ dariusj18

> Search is worse than in 2009

To be fair, the internet is worse as a whole. Google is at war with SEO and bad actors.

This is not to reduce how bad/evil their ad model has become.

⬐ MrMember

>The problem I have with Stadia is that you need a monthly subscription and also need to pay full price for all games.

And I don't have any confidence in Stadia being around for the long term. If I buy a game on Steam I'm fairly confident I'll still be able to play it in a decade. If I bought a game on Stadia I wouldn't be confident in the service still existing two years from now.

⬐ gnuarch

Dan Luu recently measured latency of computers of the past, keyboards, terminals. See posts listed on https://danluu.com/

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

https://danluu.com/term-latency/

https://danluu.com/latency-mitigation/

⬐ cyborgx7

The stream I saw said there was barely any noticeable lag. Not discounting this experience, but I suspect the specific corporate network might play a significant role here.

⬐ delfinom

Corporate networks don't magically add latency. You would need a corporate network that idiotically sent things over the wire to a corporate office on another continent.

⬐ wdroz

Maybe they have a "smart" corporate firewall that inspect packets.

⬐ cyborgx7

>Corporate networks don't magically add latency.

That's why I specified "this specific" corporate network.

>You would need a corporate network that idiotically sent things over the wire to a corporate office on another continent.

There are much more plausible scenarios than that, like packet inspections and side-effects of attempting to MITM any SSL packets.

⬐ loriverkutya

You are seriously underestimating the things (routers, packet inspection firewalls, proxys, cross office VPNs) in corporate networks, also the completely crazy rules corporates comes up: all traffic is routed to the us no matter where you sit in the world, etc.

⬐ jcfrei

They are also not magically low latency. Maybe there are some QoS rules in place that deprioritize Stadia's video stream. According to the video the mobile connection was fine and the router just treats traffic over wifi differently.

⬐ mikkom

Or it might be that mobile connection is better because the bandwidth needs are much lower for the mobile-size video feed.

⬐ cyborgx7

How about some kind of MITM that decrypts and reencrypts all SSL traffic? This probably doesn't do that to the Stadia traffic, but who knows what it does to traffic it can't do it to.

⬐ dijit

Corporate networks don’t add latency because they’re corporate.

Corporate networks vary.

It’s such a generalisation that it’s easy to argue both for and against.

I can say that the majority of corporate networks will have a higher latency to internet resources than an equivalent home network.

Why?

Well, NAT adds latency, the more there is in the lookup table the longer it will take, even with a beefy cpu on the firewall/NAT device. More complex firewall rules too, will impede. If there is any IPS (intrusion prevention service) on the line then that may add some latency. Then there’s simply the hops that your network traffic would have to take to even hit the border.

Not counting things like QoS rules that need to be evaluated to de-prioritise things like VOIP (which stadia, if it’s streaming using UDP, might even look like to a dumb router).

Most corps also do not just let traffic outbound, if there’s any R&D or risk of leaking then there’s a lot of filtration rules on the line and often that is centralised. I work for a global company and our internet traffic exits the corp network more than 200km from where I’m sitting.

⬐ m0xte

I can't see how this lag couldn't exist with the network, processing and encoding overhead. How did they get that far through product development and still assume it was viable?

⬐ delfinom

They have a whole thing on using machine learning to predict your inputs to reduce input lag....essentially making it pointless for a human to play at all but that's another philosophical topic.

⬐ m0xte

Oh wow that just sounds horrible. So it is entirely the illusion that it's doing what you want. It'd be as pointful as riding in one of those cheap amusement rides outside a shop. It's all shiny. I want to sit in it. But the novelty wears of immediately when you realise you're not totally in control of things.

⬐ flatiron

It looked to me he was playing from inside a corporate network. There could be a lot more in play that stadia can not control. At the end it says mobile is fine. My guess is that phone is on their guest network without all their security software poking and prodding the packets.

⬐ thatguyagain

Been using Nvidia's GeForce Now for a couple of months, playing games like Apex Legends on a macbook air 2013. Works like a charm! The only issue have been the waiting time between game updates (I guess they have to update all their servers, which takes time).

⬐ whazor

Stadia and other streaming services will be a next unique selling point for internet providers. It could cost consumers more money to have a 'stadia'-ready connection, where the ISP invests in more stable infrastructure. Routers and wifi access points could be 'stadia'-ready. Do not forget Stadia will be a free service next year and consumers are going try out free-to-play games and blame ISPs for lag.

⬐ xenog

I have been using Shadow for a couple of months from my fast and stable gigabit FTTH connection. My ping to their servers is about 20 ms, and I have to make a conscious effort to notice any input lag. Some of you may argue my brain is slow. I can assure you it is not.

On the other hand, I got Stadia a couple of days ago, and although graphics work very well, input lag is unbearable. Some streaming users will experience input lag because their Internet connections cannot handle it, but that is not my case.

It's sad because I live in Dublin. Google has servers here. Shadow's servers are in the Netherlands. I'm very disappointed at the level of incompetence that Google displayed on this release. They have enough data centres, money and quality network connections to pull this off properly, yet they didn't. Shadow, a small French company streaming remote Windows PCs, did a much better job running standard Windows games that are not purposefully made to be streamed.

⬐ Const-me

What might have worked for them, develop a new game engine from the ground up, designed for their unique environment.

Games do non-trivial amount of processing with relaxed latency requirements: physics, cloth, many particle systems, fluid dynamics, some other VFX like weather / time of day, many parts of gameplay logic. Even some parts of rendering pipeline don’t require low latency, e.g. camera frustum culling doesn’t. Many of these things even run on CPUs as opposed to GPUs, and cloud providers have a lot of idle CPU and RAM resources.

Such a hybrid engine might be OK offloading half of the code to the cloud, while still using local GPU for rendering and dynamic lighting, using assets streamed from server and cached locally. This still requires a reasonably fast local machine, but hopefully less so compared to current game engines.

Very expensive to develop and run, though. Also it may consume even more download bandwidth compared to the streaming video they have now.

⬐ tiborsaas

Here's a positive demo from CNET without lag issues:

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

⬐ hartator

He doesn’t seem to test for lag though. You can also see there is a delay between him pressing the button and the character moving.

⬐ tiborsaas

Compared to the one in the post it looks negligible he even says that it's fine. I don't claim it's zero lag, lol.

⬐ touchpadder

Over 200ms "negligible". Ok Google.

⬐ rasz

CNET video has 8 frames (260ms) of input lag on TV ~6 (200ms) on phone, and it looks about 720p after compression https://mobile.twitter.com/Nitomatta/status/1196485009315520...

⬐ mrguyorama

Holy cow, 200ms of input lag? At that rate even my pleb gamer self would notice it.

⬐ tiborsaas

Where do you have the data from? Did you analyze the video frame-by-frame? Actually that's not bad considering what are we talking about here. Wish I could try it.

⬐ rasz

You can pause YT clip and skip one frame at a time using ,.(<>) keys.

⬐ amq

I remember trying out Gaikai in some 2009, and I was completely blown away both by the quality and by the latency. It felt like magic, I couldn't understand why they didn't succeed commercially, and I still can't understand why there is still no better service out there.

⬐ bootloop

When World of Warcraft got released, 2004, they optimized bandwidth usage for 56k modems in order to ensure that they can cover a big percentage of the market.

And at many places, if it's not a city, you still (in 2019) have to deal with ISPs which offer not much more.

⬐ maest

THer's also GeForceNow, from nvidia - it's been around for a few years now.

I've used it for Prey 2 (finished) and The Witcher 3 (in progress) and I'm really happy with it. It's still in closed beta (although I think it's available commercially somewhere in Asia(?)), but it's a no frills product that does exactly what it says.

There's no platform play, though (like the Stadia integration with youtube and special Stadia dev framework etc), but that's an advantage to some.

⬐ amq

I also have a GeForce Now account, but somehow, it doesn't feel as smooth as Gaikai back then. An FPS like CS GO is unplayable for me - because of input lag.

⬐ m00dy

The solution is to build mini data-centers frequently placed around neighbourhoods in an ecological way.

⬐ Luuseens

Micro data-center in each home. Then we can just attach the input and output devices to said data-centers, and skip the whole video encode/decode step as well.

⬐ m00dy

I mean we use Uber and book rooms on AirBnb. Why not to share gpu cycles ?

⬐ asadlionpk

ikr? data center sharing economy with price surges and all.

⬐ loriverkutya

I cannot tell of this is sarcasm.

⬐ maxaf

Are you suggesting that there be a home-installed computing device dedicated to the needs of one person? I suppose this could be called a "Personal Computer".

You, my friend, just made a trillion VC megadollars.

⬐ highcapacity

From what I gathered, it should be laggy. I mean, you have to have a killer Internet speed to pull this off and even then - the inconsistency and fluctuation of speed are just natural. Waiting a bit to see how this will be solved

⬐ clktmr

There will always be a lag. The best they can do is hide the lag by doing some stuff on the client (e.g. mouse cursor or shifting viewport pixel-wise). That ways I suppose they could get this on a level where most people don't notice.

⬐ touchpadder

Promised 60fps 4k and no lag. Delivered 720p/1080p, compression artifacts and 200ms lag in best cases. That's like onLive 10 years ago.

⬐ grenoire

I seriously did not understand how there could be no input lag, and even though I was asking people who both tried and watched it they all said that it was not noticeable. I had a hard time believing it, and still can't...

Stadia should, theoretically, be like playing an online multiplayer game with no lag compensation. Your inputs are received and processed, and the output is sent back at the network delay; this is going to be at best three to four frames late (60 ms on a good day, with 16 ms per frame at 60 FPS). Unless you run multiple instances of the game at the background and do input prediction at different modes (much like CPU branch prediction, I suppose), you will encounter this significant lag. Even with prediction, the experience just cannot be smooth.

⬐ nvarsj

If google can get latency under a frame (16.67ms) or two then the latency should be almost unnoticeable. You can also time shift to hide the delay in one direction, assuming that Stadia modifies the game engine (you can send the expected game state at delay time in the future). FPS also have a lot of leniency to compensate. Other types of games are far less forgiving (platformers and fighting games) but they all tend to have fairly large internal buffers that can be modified to hide lag.

⬐ grenoire

First of all, it's not always under Google's control what the user latency is. There are a myriad factors they do not control when it comes to the network connection. Second, Stadia does not send a game state like a multiplayer game server does. What you send is input, and what you get back are video frames. Had the game engine touched your own computer, you would be using the same tricks as any other online multiplayer game. Yet, we can see the input lag being a major deterrent in the play quality.

Presently, the only defense for Stadia right now is that your average gamer probably won't give a crap if the game feels a bit laggy. We only recently had the stupid ongoing debate with console developers and publishers trying to convince people that 24-30FPS is the maximum that humans can perceive. Luckily that ended with eSports players going for 144Hz monitors and showing that there is an obvious (i.e. noticeable) improvement in reaction times and responsiveness. Hopefully people are convinced that cloud gaming latency does affect the way you play your game, and how much better it feels when you're playing on your own hardware; weaker or stronger it might be than the Stadia server farms.

⬐ rco8786

I’ve played on these sorts of systems a good bit. There was a post on here a long time ago about using AWS GPU instances and Steam streaming to do exactly this.

It’s really not noticeable (unless of course you hit a latency spike, which was pretty rare.). It of course requires a fast, stable internet connection. But the reality is that we don’t really perceive a 60ms lag as anything. Or at e very least it’s fast enough that our brain compensates for kt

⬐ macspoofing

>I seriously did not understand how there could be no input lag

Of course, there is.

>and even though I was asking people who both tried and watched it they all said that it was not noticeable. I had a hard time believing it, and still can't...

Network latency is highly context-dependent. In the right environment, it could be minuscule. Online multiplayer has been with us for decades now, and in general works very well (even with FPS, RTS, and fighting games, all of which require a high rate of actions) so it is something that can be mitigated. In an online multiplayer game, your local state is updated quickly and the server state catches up (or uses some prediction heuristic) or rolls back client state. I'm sure there are some strategies to mitigate with pure cloud games...

Having said that, a purely server-side streaming solution wastes the processing power of the client, with even a typical phone being a pretty powerful device. Maybe there is a hybrid approach lurking in here somewhere, where some processing is done on the client, and heavy rendering is still done on the server. This lightens the server load and improves latency.

⬐ gameswithgo

i played an action game on a streaming service like 5 years ago and input lag wasn’t bad. it isn’t magic people just make too much of this. many many people play on tvs that have as much input lag as stadia has and are happy. the competitive fps gamer wont like it, or that kind of tv, but many people are fine with it.

⬐ taneq

I don't think the people saying their game is affected by 20-30ms of extra latency are playing on bigscreen TVs. They're playing on G-Sync monitors with triple digit frame rates.

⬐ hyperpallium

They could be close to the server, with few hops, on a good connection. i.e. the same circumstances where fps don't need lag compensation because there isn't lag.

IDK the techniques Stadia is actually using but MS has a prediction and local warping method. Consider that when moving or turning in a fps, in most frames you're making the same input as the previous one. A statistical model, noticing walls and enemies etc can do better. So if lag is n frames, they predict what your input would be pver those n, and send the result.

Misprediction is still common, so they do local warping: locally transform the last received frame in accordance with the local input. Zoom for forward, pan left/right for turn etc. I think this would look a little like a stablized video, but it's only for a max of a few frames, so not as bad.

⬐ grenoire

> I think this would look a little like a stablized video, but it's only for a max of a few frames, so not as bad.

The issue is that the stabilisation is not just for a maximum of a few frames, because you're always behind by the amount of frames stabilised/processed/corrected. This would lead to the stabilised video feeling as long as you're moving... which happens rather often when playing games.

⬐ hyperpallium

The warping/stablization only happens on a misprediction, which would be much less than half the time.

Ignoring that, I see what you mean that it's ongoing. But it resets every time a new frame is received, whereas a stablized video never resets from the start.

To illustrate, consider a video with the camera spinning on an axis into the image (like a barrel roll; so the image rotates in 2D). To prevent the subject of the video from rotating, each image must be rotated in the opposite direction. You'd see the frame of the image rotating.

Whereas, with warping, the orientation of the image would reset to level with each actual frame recieved. So the amount of rotation would be limited to a few frames worth - not spinning around 2pi like the stablized video.

⬐ Stevvo

I remember playing borderlands on the first streaming game service back in 2010, I forget the name of it; there wasn't any noticeable input lag back then. I was lucky enough to have 10ms ping to the server, so inputs would only have been getting to the servers one or two frames late.

⬐ sitzkrieg

nvidia grid beta?

⬐ krige

seems to be rather inconsistent, one moment no input lag, but next: https://twitter.com/GenePark/status/1196488999524802562

⬐ taneq

The best they could do is enforce a constant latency equal to your worst-case actual latency, so at least it was consistent and you'd be able to compensate for it. (This was a thing that RTS games used to do, consistent mid-level latency feels way better than variable latency.)

⬐ collsni

Exactly, I can't imagine making it work any other way.

⬐ me_me_me

Yes this is a key, consistency of lag for some is crucial for experience.

I can see a lot of games to be playable with Stadia.

However anything competitive PvP is a no-no. Playing TF2 I could tell whats is server ping with accuracy of around 30ms by using projectile weapons. Adding best case scenario 60ms is a big deal.

Stadia simply can't ever compete with local setups. Currently multiplayer game will play with your local input and then resolve any inconsistencies on server side (this is the reason you were 'killed' when clearly behind a wall). While the resolution of the local input might differ to server the responsiveness feeling of local input is part of good play experience.

There are corner cases for some games (RDR2 - all actions have long unskippable animation) or game play style racing games (input lag is hidden by the 'responsiveness of a car').

All that said, its still very impressive how low they got. I was expecting no less then 100ms.

⬐ Paradigma11

But what if the TF2 server runs on the same Google machine?

⬐ grenoire

Then there's two ways to work with that:

1) It's only Stadia users against each other;

2) People who are directly connected to the Google machine still have an advantage over the Stadia players.

The first is... OK. You'll be fine, the playerbase will be tiny and you won't be able to play with your non-Stadia friends.

The drawback for the second one is a little less obvious, but the result is that the Stadia users will not benefit from the client-side lag compensation measures that Source (TF2's engine) implements. Most people in this thread miss the fact that in multiplayer games you're always ahead of where the server thinks you are, because you're playing on your timeline, and the server perceives you at RTT/2 behind. When you think you perform an action, the server travels back in time to determine whether how it played out (as opposed to actually executing your actions in what is relatively RTT/2 later).

⬐ Paradigma11

@2.) I disagree that this would necessarily lead to a disadvantage for Stadia users. When the prediction turns out to be wrong, your client has to correct which can be disconcerting. This is not the case for Stadia users. Prediction is certainly more comfortable, but i am not sure it is an advantage. What you are describing is just moving the prediction from the client to the server. If the server receives input from t-10 and recalculates the state(t) and sends it to the client then obviously (t-9) - (t-1) inputs are missing for the final state calculation at t.

⬐ me_me_me

That's what I described in my comment. And while it is ture that you might feel cheated because something else happened on the screen (your character was hit while already in cover). This is 'rare' event in terms of perception. Client makes a lot of predictions but most of those misses are invisible to user.

What is visible and perceivable is the lag effect and it is constant and unavoidable.

The client - server differences are handled differently depending on the game. AFAIK there is a trend of 'attacker' advantage ie client input is more favored when resolving delta, incentivizing active play vs camping. In that case Stadia fares worse then local.

⬐ Red_Leaves_Flyy

Rare? Depends on what you play. Overwatch, cod, and destiny are terrible for this. Happens to me several times, per 10 minute game. Csgo is the best in my experience.

Trading kills can theoretically happen, but it's like lightning. If it's happening a lot there's something wrong. My guess is the fuzzy calculations in the earlier mentioned games err on the side of killing everyone.

⬐ me_me_me

Overwatch is just badly made game, half of those are engine issues rather then buggy netcode.

⬐ voldacar

You are totally right about competitive shooters - in TF2 I can tell the difference between 10ms and 30ms ping, even with hitscan weapons.

Nevertheless something like Stadia could probably catch on easily for things like mobas and mmos that don't rely as much on every single frame getting to the screen asap. Assuming the economics work out, that is