Stadia, Stream Connect, Latency ➶

Thomas Morgan, writing about Google’s Stadia game streaming service that lets you play games run by powerful hardware streamed to the Chrome web browser, at Eurogamer:

The idea is simple: you join up with up to three friends online and as you play, you see their point of view in a smaller window at the top-right. It’s a picture-in-picture display of their side of the action - requiring no extra processing power from your Stadia hardware. Instead, the video stream of the other player is transmitted over and composited into your screen.

This is a nice feature which reminds me of 2 or 4-player split-screen Mario Kart with friends on consoles when I was a kid. No latency worries back then, but you did need to be in the same room — and in Mario Kart’s case — risk the ire of friends who “too angry to continue playing, threw or smashed their controller in response to their rage.”

Although I have been hesitant to recommend Stadia given how often Google discontinue their products, with many friends asking me about playing cooperative video games together during this time I am considering telling them to try it making sure to select the 1080p 60fps mode, especially if they have a fast internet connection (please hurry up, Elon).

May give it a go myself to see if it solves action-freezing-for-a-few-seconds-at-times lag issues I have in The Division 2 and Ghost Recon Breakpoint that happen whether I am playing alone or with friends with my internetworks-connected videogaming machine (a small Zotac with an i5-6400T with GFX-1060 mini, connected via LAN cable to a router on a 200+ mbps network, running games installed on a SSD, in case this information is useful to someone who may have an idea of what is happening that causes the intermittent freezes in the action, which only happens with these games).

✶ Thursday, 23 April 2020


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