as satisfying as it is to piece together a shiny new gaming pc or unwrap a lovely
new console on christmas morning there's no denying how convenient it would be to
be able to just load up and play your games from
anywhere even if you're using a system that isn't all that powerful
and although simple browser games have been around for a long time remember
addictinggames.com and miniclip running anything more immersive or
powerful has typically required some kind of dedicated hardware but now there
are a number of services that are trying to alleviate the load that your computer
has to handle by streaming games directly to you that is to say that most
of the computationally intensive work is done on a server
somewhere far away and then the completed rendered frames are delivered
to your pc via the internet and with rising internet speeds and
games taking up more and more space on your computer's local storage
game streaming is becoming an increasingly crowded marketplace
especially with google announcing their new streaming service called stadia
which will work with nothing more than a browser or a smart tv an internet
connection and then optionally google's own game controller
but as much buzz as there's been around it there are a few things that we'd like
to see from stadia to help propel game streaming more to the forefront
first off is of course the elephant in the room latency for obvious reasons
when you're playing a game you expect something to happen on the screen as
soon as you press a button or click your mouse and while this is basically never an
issue if you're gaming on a local machine it's a real concern if you're
expecting a server hundreds of miles away to respond instantly to you moving
a targeting reticle now google is hoping
to mitigate the latency issues that have plagued other streaming services
part of the solution will probably come from the fact that they just have more
cloud infrastructure i mean think about it it's freaking google
so the fact that they have more servers in more places should help to reduce
both ping time and inherently the latency of your connection so like a
stadia gamer might be connecting to a server 50 miles away instead of one that
is 500 miles away hopefully this will keep games from
lagging out but another major hurdle is going to be
image quality and i don't mean to say that google is you know going to be
using weak graphics cards to render stadia games in fact they're apparently
using arrays of custom AMD Radeon chips
that sound pretty freaking powerful the issue though is that like the vast
majority of digital video online the rendered frames will almost certainly
need to be compressed before they're sent across the internet so that a
standard connection actually has any hope of handling them so that means
there could be some degradation in quality by the time they hit your screen
now google is expecting a 25 megabit home internet connection to be good
enough to stream games at 4k resolution
60 frames per second and that's a speed that's certainly within reach of many
users but in order to keep the game from lagging well 25 megabit 4k 60
the image quality may not be as good as some gamers would like so we're gonna
have to see if google has a solution to this issue in the works that said all
the tech in the world isn't going to matter unless it's actually easy to
access the games that people want to play and it's still a bit of an open
question as to how libraries are going to be handled on stadia now playstation
now sony streaming offering only offers
a rotating list of games so it's never clear if you can rely on a certain title
being on the platform for too long GeForce now from NVIDIA only supports
certain games from steam uplay and battlenet and has been in an invite-only
beta for a very long time and blade
while fairly slick has a fairly expensive monthly fee with the amount of
storage and connectivity in google's arsenal however the hope is that stadia
will not only have a large library of games to pick from at a reasonable price
be it a la carte or by subscription but that it will also give people the
ability to bring their own games in and run them off of google servers or at
least grant access to those same titles so that gamers won't have to pay again
for a game that they already own one thing standing in the way though is the
fact that unlike playstation now or GeForce now where games will run just
natively as is on the servers stadia is an entirely new platform built on Linux
meaning that many titles will have to be ported over in order to work and game
ports take both time and resources to do properly you can actually learn more
about that up here what that means in a nutshell though is that it's possible
that this issue will affect what kinds of games will be available as well as
which previously owned games users will be able to bring to the service and of
course we'd also like to see streaming platforms other than youtube get
supported it's an open question at this time as to whether stadia will allow
gamers to stream to twitch since it's in direct competition with youtube which is
of course owned by google but to be fair there are some cool
youtube centric features in the works including the ability for a stadia user
to start playing the game being streamed with the click of a button or even join
the streamer's game even with all these questions yet to be answered though it's
certainly exciting for an absolute titan of cloud computing like google to
finally throw its hat into the streaming ring my only hope is that it's not so
good that people will just stop building gaming rigs altogether otherwise we're
going to run out of video ideas pretty quickly
speaking of streaming things over the internet check out private internet
access vpn pia hides your true ip
address and allows you to bypass geo restrictions and censorship by making
you appear as though you're connecting from somewhere else and what's cool is
you can use it on up to five devices at once with a single account pia helps
prevent attacks by blocking unwanted connections and keeps your data out of
the hands of advertisers and other activity tracking snoops and it's got
all kinds of great features including preventing dns leaks and even mace pia's
built-in malware blocker it supports multiple vpn protocols so you can dial
in exactly the level of protection you need and they've got apps for Windows
mac iOS Android and even a chrome
extension finally pia does not log your activity
and they have over 3 000 servers in 33
countries so what are you waiting for check them out today at the link in the
video description so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other
videos leave a comment with video suggestions and don't forget to
subscribe and follow so that you can
spend more of your time admiring this fantastic new sweater i'm actually
trying out we don't have it available on our store yet but i think it's pretty cool
oops shilling the LTT merch on Techquickie oh now
john's gonna beat me