[iLoveOncall]

> IMO streaming games still has a lot of potential.

Not with the current internet speed.

The vast majority of people is below anything that would play "okay", and almost everyone is below a speed that would play well (1 GBPS).

Until 1 GBPS is the default EVERYWHERE, streaming games has 0 potential.

[drusepth]

Stadia ran (runs) well at 50mbps, and their competitors don't require much more (~100mbps for comparable results afaict), and 2x that minimum often results in a flawless experience if you have the bandwidth/latency to back it up (e.g. if you're on a home/work connection, rather than a busy coffee shop).

I put almost 1,000 hours into Stadia across all my games travelling across ~20 states and 3 countries the past ~3 years. It's very rare to find places where it isn't "okay" to play (with some notable exceptions near launch where you'd regularly get ~1 second input delay at times or frozen, pixellated graphics), and in many places now it feels indistinguisable from native/local games.

I don't know which platform I'll move to from Stadia, but it will definitely be a cloud one.

[iLoveOncall]

It does not run well at 50mbps, you have artifacts all over the screen, it's unbearable. And as people are moving more towards 1440p or 4k monitors, it's even more untolerable.

[SXX]

Streaming problem is not about bandwidth, but about latency. With current technology and physics there nothing you can do about latency.

[rieTohgh6]

It is both. I tried GeForce NOW and it required only about 60Mbps - it was just a fraction of Gbit connection. Still, I sometimes struggled to keep it at that minimum. Variable bandwidth doesn't matter for file downloads or video streaming(where there is few seconds of buffer) but it makes game streaming almost unplayable.

[ancientworldnow]

Nah, if you can stream Netflix in 1080p or better and have low latency then game streaming works fine. I know people who do it off LTE without issue even for non competitive games.

[iLoveOncall]

I encourage you to watch a Netflix movie and a live video game side by side and you will see how nonsensical the comparison is.

[drusepth]

Doing this now... what are you expecting to be obvious from this experiment? Obviously the video game has some upstream requirements (just user input), but neither are stuttering or having any issues.

[iLoveOncall]

The quality is simply incomparable. A 4K movie streamed wouldn't even compared to a 1080p game being ran.

You're putting side by side compressed and raw visuals, it just doesn't compare at all.

[drusepth]

The GP comment you were referring to recommended streaming Netflix in 1080p to, assumedly, compare to streaming games in 1080p, too; not to compare 1080p versus 4K. If you can stream Netflix in 1080p, there's not much additional strain on the network to stream games in 1080p.

Side note: Stadia also supports streaming games in 4K, which will have a relatively equal quality to streaming a 4K movie, for the same reasons. That is the result I see while streaming a movie and a game side-by-side.

[mijamo]

Netflix in 1080p is nowhere near the quality required to play games in 1080p. It is heavily compressed, whereas games need crisp precision because it contains a lot of text that should be rendered precisely, as well as having pixel perfection for a lot of in game elements. To convince yourself look at Twitch, which has higher bitrate than Netflix for a similar resolution, and realize than even that is far from good enough to be playable.

[p1necone]

You can get high quality streaming video with much less than 1GBPS, low latency and consistent speed + latency are the important parts.

(Needed bandwidth will still be higher than regular video streaming though, as you have to compress in real time)

[staticman2]

I Stream locally from my gaming PC to Nvidia Shield in 4k with around 80 mbps and it looks as good as an HDMI hookup.(and less than that would look fine)

[iLoveOncall]

Yeah streaming locally you don't even need internet buddy, the speed of your connection is totally irrelevant if you are on the same local network.