First Reviews are coming out and they aren't pretty:
Google Stadia launch review: Gaming’s “future” looks rough in the present
The Verge disagrees on 4K quality. Indicating that both 1080p and 4K are much worse than native. You will pretty much have to pay 4K service to get 1080p native Quality:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18...aming-cloud-price-specs-features-chrome-pixel
Google Stadia launch review: Gaming’s “future” looks rough in the present
The Good
The Bad
- Over a wired Ethernet connection, streaming feels a lot like local play.
- Stadia controller is solid and well-built.
- 4K streams on Chromecast look very sharp under ideal Internet conditions.
- Starting games without the need for a download is pretty neat.
The Ugly
- Wi-Fi performance can be extremely inconsistent
- Chrome browser streams are limited to 1080p (for now) and look worse than similar resolution running locally.
- A vast array of missing and "coming soon" features.
- Up front/monthly costs don't provide much savings over a console (which can do in-home streaming).
Verdict: Early adopters feel like they're getting a beta product here. Wait until next year to see if Google can work out the kinks and prove the service's longevity.
- The prospect of paying full price for games that only last as long as Google supports the service.
The Verge disagrees on 4K quality. Indicating that both 1080p and 4K are much worse than native. You will pretty much have to pay 4K service to get 1080p native Quality:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18...aming-cloud-price-specs-features-chrome-pixel
Did you notice that I wrote “4K” and “1080p” in scare quotes earlier? For days, I’ve been trying and failing to get Google to admit that its servers aren’t actually rendering intensive games at what I would consider 4K.
With Destiny 2, it’s even more obvious that the game isn’t running at the highest settings. On a Chromecast Ultra, a “4K” stream looked closer to 1080p, and my colleague Tom Warren and I swore that the 1080p streams we were getting in the Chrome web browser looked more like 720p.
Initially, Google told us that it was using the highest-resolution, highest-fidelity build of Destiny 2 available. But Bungie later confirmed that our eyes weren’t deceiving us. “When streaming at 4K, we render at a native 1080p and then upsample and apply a variety of techniques to increase the overall quality of effect,” a Bungie rep said, adding that D2 runs at the PC equivalent of medium settings. That explains why the Xbox One X build, which runs at a native 4K and with higher-res assets, looks so much better than Stadia.
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