Stadia: Questions about latency

Last week Google broke the news about it’s online gaming platform, Stadia. An on-demand cross platform, fully online cloud based system. However, the quality of your game play depends on your internet connection. You could have 60 FPS or not depending on if you have a potato for a router.

This brings up the question, what about the lag?

Excerpts on store.google.com mention that you need high speed internet connection in order to experience the Stadia platform. So should we assume that buffering, stuttering, crashing, and getting kicked from games will be an issue with a subpar connection?

Consider the connection issues that gamers have  even when they are hooked up to a Ethernet cord while playing games such as Destiny 2, Division 2, Anthem, Fortnite, Apex Legends and others. Plus, users on  YouTube or Twitch are known to have buffering, freezing and audio out of sync issues based on their WiFi connection as well.

Being that Stadia is 100 percent in the cloud, will that play a part in fighting the latency issue? Or will it cause more of a problem?

Right now when you visit YouTube.com and click on your desired video, you are automatically place on ‘auto’. Whatever that means from your connection. On average, that means 720p HD. Will Google place you on auto based on your connection for gaming as well?

The promotional site also mentions being able to watch a video about a game and instantly being able to jump into that game. Can you imagine the amounts of people backed up in the queue waiting to play with their favorite YouTuber?

This is bound to be a new experience for all involved. We’ll be tracking information. View any of the facts discussed in this article by clicking this link.