Next month, Google will officially launch its cloud gaming enterprise, Stadia. Using the power of the cloud and their own processing farms, Google will allow players to play the latest and greatest games, without having to own expensive hardware. Instead, with a Chromecast Ultra and a connected controller, they’ll be able to buy games and play them on their TVs, beamed in real-time over the internet, with their inputs streamed back to Google servers – with this going back and forth as people play games.
And it works. At least, it does if you have proximity to the servers, because no matter how advanced data transfer becomes, there will always be an element of latency to it. It takes time – even if it’s tiny little slivers of a second – to transfer data, and it’ll take as long for that data to come back. Google, however, says they’re using software wizardry to mitigate this, and in the future, it won’t matter because streamed games from Stadia will be faster and have lower latency than playing in your own home from your own machine, even if you’re using the top of the range gaming hardware.
“Ultimately, we think in a year or two we’ll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally,” Says Google Stadia VP Madj Bakar, speaking to Edge (via PCGamesN), “regardless of how powerful the local machine is.”
According to Bakar, this is done through “negative latency” which is a completely nonsensical marketing term for software algorithms that’ll offer a “buffer of predicted latency,” helping to mitigate input and server lag. It can include things like dynamically increasing the fps to lower latency, and in more extreme cases, predicting what a player will do, queuing those predictions up and using that data as soon as it happens.
In truth, it’s not too removed from what many multiplayer games already do, provided they have robust, functional netcode. Games already predict the actions players will make, and then run those eventualities as they happen. Perhaps, with Stadia being powered by AI and massive datacentres, the algorithms could be flexible enough to actually negate latency – but I remain incredibly sceptical.
Stadia launches in November, but South Africa is not one of the launch countries.
Last Updated: October 10, 2019
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 08:44
It’s like that one joke:
Two good friends are fishing on the side of the river. The weather is fantastic, they are having a wonderful time. Suddenly, a drol (turd) drifts past in the river, and speaks to them! “Come swim with me! The water is excellent!”
The one dude looks to the other dude in disbelief “KAN JY DIE KAK GLO?”
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 08:44
So it will predict how you play, and just how is that fun?
Geoffrey Tim
October 10, 2019 at 09:05
Almost all netcode for multiplayer games already does that – and then just “runs” what you actually do.
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 09:05
So if you act unpredictable, that causes lag?
I AM SO VERY UNPREDICTABLE!
Pariah
October 10, 2019 at 11:17
No. No you’re just bad. 😛
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 11:17
Jokes on you, I don’t do mp
Pariah
October 10, 2019 at 11:17
That’s why you’re bad. Noob.
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 11:26
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c8f395bce81cf2038bf8bfb2ed9888cac106eb62d863ed559eb8c7b03f153335.jpg
LegionZA
October 10, 2019 at 09:13
Would like to see Deadpool with this then. He’s so unpredicatble Taskmaster had issues
Llama In The Rift
October 10, 2019 at 08:56
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d121f75eacbb64a25a6571026456e230ba86b51ddba6d560292ffcaf24afc107.jpg
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 09:05
HAH
Alien Emperor Trevor
October 10, 2019 at 08:56
https://media.giphy.com/media/ohBeIPJ4MEuas/giphy.gif
HairyEwok
October 10, 2019 at 09:05
The real problem here isn’t as much hardware, but more internet, for most 1st world countries this will be amazing, the rest….. ehhhhh hardware is cheaper.
Pariah
October 10, 2019 at 09:05
To be fair here, there are MANY people in the US with terrible internet. Comcast has a reputation.
HairyEwok
October 10, 2019 at 09:14
Even terrible by their standards is good internet for us, and the prices are amazing. I get that we’re paying what were paying now for future development and infrastructure building (the big lie we tell ourselves) but heck, when are we getting it.
Pariah
October 10, 2019 at 09:22
No. Their terrible is Telkom levels of bad. If you have 50mb fibre, you have better internet than a good portion of America. 100mb and you’re well above average compared to the US.
With fibre, SA has comparable internet to a lot of the world – the main difference is now the cost of fibre and the access to local servers. That last bit is the main issue.
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 09:22
Indeed. Since the government in USA is using about 80% of the bandwidth for spying O_O
Pariah
October 10, 2019 at 09:30
https://media.giphy.com/media/J20Z2SH5WmCnzSrbqA/giphy.gif
Geoffrey Tim
October 10, 2019 at 09:30
This is correct. US internet is only great in big tech centres. Have even had completely shit internet in the middle of LA – where’s I’ve missed my fibre and 4g here at home. Gavin lives in the UK now, and he can’t even get fibre – let alone comparable speeds to what we get with fibre.
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 09:39
Look at me, mister fancy-travel-pants!
😛
Hammersteyn
October 10, 2019 at 09:13
It will also launch with Star Citizen
https://media.giphy.com/media/A97DsLbVCEBBS/giphy.gif
Original Heretic
October 10, 2019 at 09:22
On another matter…
I read this morning that Blizzard has lost so many accounts, they’re now blocking all cancellations…
Pariah
October 10, 2019 at 09:30
O_o how do you cancel a Blizzard account? I’ve just looked, that’s not even an option.
Original Heretic
October 10, 2019 at 09:38
No idea. I don’t have one.
But from posts I saw this morning, there are apparently 4 different ways.
And all of them currently do not work.
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 09:39
Yoh
Pariah
October 10, 2019 at 09:46
Well in all my years I’ve never seen an option to cancel your Blizzard account. So eh.
Admiral Chief
October 10, 2019 at 09:39
All your things are belong to them
Kromas
October 10, 2019 at 09:39
This is the type of soon that Valve uses for HL3.
Pofadder
October 10, 2019 at 09:55
I don’t care if you have the worlds most powerful super computer. There is still a bottle neck going through my internet line. There is no way you will ever get better response from a server 5000km away or 50 km away than from a console sitting on my desk. Imagine how bad Ghost recon breakpoint will be through stadia. On console it feels like you’re playing through a 56k dial up, the response is so bad.
G8crasha
October 10, 2019 at 10:04
I love the idea, but unfortunately, with our IC in SA, I can’t see there being much a market for this now! Maybe in the future when we get our sh!t together in this country!
Juan
October 10, 2019 at 11:44
i would honestly love to see the adoption rate of this after about a year, even in the US, there is very few places covered by stable internet, and with those, not many have fast lines
Son of Banana Jim
October 11, 2019 at 15:01
lol, there must be some strange narcotics in the drinking water of San Francisco and Silicon Valley.