Question 2: How Realistic is HQ Streaming for the Masses?
During its conference, Google showed off how seamless it was to switch between devices and continue playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey right from the point they left off at via Stadia.
In the space of about a minute, a demonstration showed Odyssey running on a Pixelbook, smartphone, tablet and a TV via a Chromecast dongle.
Each time they switched tech, it was a matter of seconds before the game was running all slick with, apparently, little to no latency.
The question, of course, arises, just how many people’s internet can realistically stream that kind of quality content in such a seamless manner?
Well, that was another question that Google did its best to avoid during the presentation, but has since commented on in an interview with Kotaku.
According to Google Stadia boss Phil Harrison, when testing Project Stream towards the end of last year “to get 1080p, 60 frames per second, required approximately 25 megabits per second. In fact, we use less than that, but that’s where we put our recommended limit at.”
Discussing 4K requirements, Harrison went on to state, “But with innovations that we’ve made on the streamer side and on the compression side since then, when we launch, we will be able to get to 4K but only raise that bandwidth to about 30 megabits per second.”
All of this will apparently scale judging by the quality and speed of your internet connection. The question remains whether or not latency will become significantly more noticeable when playing on connections with less bandwidth, on top of the reductions to image quality and framerate.
On the surface, this actually sounds pretty great, but I’m more interested to see just how Stadia performs out in the real world. In real peoples’ homes and via their routers, not through a fairly controlled environment at a press event.
If the reality of the matter is that only those with superfast fiber connections can get a gaming experience similar to what they’d get on the Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, or via traditional PC gaming, Stadia may struggle to find its feet.
Again, though, if there’s any company that has the technical know-how and clout to make something like this work, it’s probably Google.
