Is Google Stadia the FUTURE of Gaming?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
1,325 words · ~6 min read
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as satisfying as it is to piece together a shiny new gaming pc or unwrap a lovely
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new console on christmas morning there's no denying how convenient it would be to
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be able to just load up and play your games from
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anywhere even if you're using a system that isn't all that powerful
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and although simple browser games have been around for a long time remember
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addictinggames.com and miniclip running anything more immersive or
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powerful has typically required some kind of dedicated hardware but now there
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are a number of services that are trying to alleviate the load that your computer
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has to handle by streaming games directly to you that is to say that most
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of the computationally intensive work is done on a server
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somewhere far away and then the completed rendered frames are delivered
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to your pc via the internet and with rising internet speeds and
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games taking up more and more space on your computer's local storage
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game streaming is becoming an increasingly crowded marketplace
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especially with google announcing their new streaming service called stadia
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which will work with nothing more than a browser or a smart tv an internet
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connection and then optionally google's own game controller
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but as much buzz as there's been around it there are a few things that we'd like
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to see from stadia to help propel game streaming more to the forefront
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first off is of course the elephant in the room latency for obvious reasons
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when you're playing a game you expect something to happen on the screen as
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soon as you press a button or click your mouse and while this is basically never an
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issue if you're gaming on a local machine it's a real concern if you're
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expecting a server hundreds of miles away to respond instantly to you moving
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a targeting reticle now google is hoping
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to mitigate the latency issues that have plagued other streaming services
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part of the solution will probably come from the fact that they just have more
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cloud infrastructure i mean think about it it's freaking google
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so the fact that they have more servers in more places should help to reduce
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both ping time and inherently the latency of your connection so like a
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stadia gamer might be connecting to a server 50 miles away instead of one that
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is 500 miles away hopefully this will keep games from
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lagging out but another major hurdle is going to be
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image quality and i don't mean to say that google is you know going to be
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using weak graphics cards to render stadia games in fact they're apparently
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using arrays of custom AMD Radeon chips
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that sound pretty freaking powerful the issue though is that like the vast
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majority of digital video online the rendered frames will almost certainly
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need to be compressed before they're sent across the internet so that a
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standard connection actually has any hope of handling them so that means
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there could be some degradation in quality by the time they hit your screen
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now google is expecting a 25 megabit home internet connection to be good
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enough to stream games at 4k resolution
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60 frames per second and that's a speed that's certainly within reach of many
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users but in order to keep the game from lagging well 25 megabit 4k 60
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the image quality may not be as good as some gamers would like so we're gonna
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have to see if google has a solution to this issue in the works that said all
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the tech in the world isn't going to matter unless it's actually easy to
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access the games that people want to play and it's still a bit of an open
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question as to how libraries are going to be handled on stadia now playstation
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now sony streaming offering only offers
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a rotating list of games so it's never clear if you can rely on a certain title
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being on the platform for too long GeForce now from NVIDIA only supports
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certain games from steam uplay and battlenet and has been in an invite-only
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beta for a very long time and blade
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while fairly slick has a fairly expensive monthly fee with the amount of
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storage and connectivity in google's arsenal however the hope is that stadia
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will not only have a large library of games to pick from at a reasonable price
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be it a la carte or by subscription but that it will also give people the
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ability to bring their own games in and run them off of google servers or at
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least grant access to those same titles so that gamers won't have to pay again
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for a game that they already own one thing standing in the way though is the
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fact that unlike playstation now or GeForce now where games will run just
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natively as is on the servers stadia is an entirely new platform built on Linux
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meaning that many titles will have to be ported over in order to work and game
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ports take both time and resources to do properly you can actually learn more
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about that up here what that means in a nutshell though is that it's possible
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that this issue will affect what kinds of games will be available as well as
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which previously owned games users will be able to bring to the service and of
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course we'd also like to see streaming platforms other than youtube get
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supported it's an open question at this time as to whether stadia will allow
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gamers to stream to twitch since it's in direct competition with youtube which is
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of course owned by google but to be fair there are some cool
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youtube centric features in the works including the ability for a stadia user
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to start playing the game being streamed with the click of a button or even join
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the streamer's game even with all these questions yet to be answered though it's
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certainly exciting for an absolute titan of cloud computing like google to
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finally throw its hat into the streaming ring my only hope is that it's not so
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good that people will just stop building gaming rigs altogether otherwise we're
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going to run out of video ideas pretty quickly
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video description so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other
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