Comment by FridgeSeal
5 years ago
> What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add 20-30ms
I can’t ping my router and get consistent latency that low.
Latency on speed tests varies between 15 (off peak no load) and 100ms (normal).
There is no way that by the time that all adds up, stadia is going to be a better experience than local.
My internet is also shared with other people, in a country with notoriously subpar internet (yay Australia), the closer we get to reality, the less appealing stadia becomes. The kind of game streaming I could get behind is the rainway/local streaming approach where I run the game on local hardware (pc/PS5) and stream to convenient device.
> I can’t ping my router and get consistent latency that low.
OT, but I'm curious, what kind of router do you have? That seems really bad. I tested this on my laptop (over WiFi, in a very heavy traffic apartment building) and see the following:
I don't say that to brag, I really think that's definitely expected for any LAN device.
I’m on my phone at the moments, so I’ll paste proper numbers when I’m back, but when I tried it last week it was like 18/370/60/1478/etc ms. Bear in mind, this was In the same room as the router.
Finally got a chance to test:
That's really dreadful, I'm sorry you even have to deal with that. Can you replace the router? Even the cheapest bottom of the barrel router from your local big box store should be able to get a response to you in under 5 ms pretty reliably. (I'm assuming your WiFi / access point is built in to your router.)
What model of router is it? This really feels like a situation where something has to be broken, I can't imagine any router, no matter how cheap, has an expected ping rtt maxing out at around 2 seconds. Notably, your minimum rtt is under 2 ms, so it's definitely capable of getting a response to you faster than that, maybe it's just overloaded or something?
I never said Stadia would be better than local when it comes to latency, though I wouldn't blame you for assuming that's what I meant. Latency will be increased.
An argument I was trying to make is that for other reasons, and for a lot of games, Stadia is better than local when you take the entire experience into account. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example of where the overall experience is subjectively better. My RTX 3070 based system renders the game and its bugs beautifully, far better than Stadia does. But is that $4500-worth of eye candy worth it compared to the $0.00-worth of totally acceptable Stadia? Lag-wise, I don't notice a difference.
I prefer playing the game on Stadia now because it's just so simple. I can use a controller or mouse and keyboard with my iPad and play from anywhere in my house. And not just my house - I've played it over a LTE connections several times without issue.
As far as latency goes - people tend to get hung up network latency when it's only a small part of the latency story. Granted, at 100ms, it becomes a bigger part of the story, but people either don't know about, or forget, that there's more:
There's peripheral latency, "system" latency (which includes CPU, render queue, and GPU), then display latency for single player games.
Stadia, or any streaming service, adds network latency. For me, with a pretty normal American internet connection provided by a craptastic provider (because it's the only choice I have), it works great.
For what it's worth, I've also played with some of the "local" streaming tech. No joke, Stadia performs better than streaming using Steam's local streaming app, by a long shot. There's the iPad app (the name escapes me at the moment) that lets me stream my XBox to the iPad, and it's better, but still way worst than Stadia.