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by snarfy 2650 days ago
Lag will always be an issue. I used to play a lot of competitive games like street fighter, tekken, starcraft.

There is zero chance of a fighting game like Tekken ever being popular on Stadia due to lag.

Distance from LA to New York: ~4500km.

Time of light speed to travel 4500km: ~30ms

Time of 1 frame at 60fps: 16.7ms

There are moves in Tekken ('just frame') that require 1 frame precision to pull off. For a while it was popular to hook up old CRTs to playstations to reduce lag as much as possible.

People might think the network will get better eventually, but the speed of light isn't getting any faster. The network is no match for the local bus, and it never will be due to physics.

3 comments

Render the next 60 possible frames (and recursively the next 60 of each 60 to that frame), send them to the client, then based on controller input, it knows which frame to choose next.

Use AI to determine the "most likely futures" and process those branch further.

It could dynamically increase and decrease the "possible futures" sent depending on how fast a person is going and how many input choices they have at any given moment. Compression (combining like elements of different future frames) can happen strongly on frames further into the future that have more time to be decoded.

That would either require games to support this branching feature or have 60 instances of the same game open. Forget about this if you have any RNG or MP elements. The complexity of such task is enormous. And that's not even talking about the performance cost. Pretty much whatever is G charging now times 60 times 1.2x for added complexity.

"lol" is the best reply.

I don’t follow. Why are you assuming LA to NY?

If you’re in LA and want to play against someone in NY, your example makes sense, but it would be technically infeasible even without Stadia, so...

However, if you’re talking about local split-screen through Stadia, what does the RTT to NY have to do with anything?

Google/Stadia would definitely have a dedicated West coast datacenter, if not one in LA itself.

Let’s say the nearest local DC is in SF. 600 km from SF to LA converts to ~10 ms RTT.

Assuming you have a good local connection, you should be able to get ~15 ms max response time playing splitscreen against your friend at home. That sounds very reasonable to me.

This isn't a solution for every game nor is it meant to replace all forms of gaming.