ArsTechnica: Google Stadia launch review: Gaming’s “future” looks rough in the present

Well, I stand corrected. I assume it's "supposed" to work via Chrome. Probably launch glitchiness. Either way, I don't really care. I don't think Stadia is going anywhere, especially when you can only activate your account via Pixel. :-O
 
A phone shouldn't be 3840 x 2160 while horizontal. But Stadia Pro would adapt well to the 19:9 ratio of a Pixel 4 XL or they don't care?

And I'd rather use ethernet than WiFi.
 
Well, I stand corrected. I assume it's "supposed" to work via Chrome. Probably launch glitchiness. Either way, I don't really care. I don't think Stadia is going anywhere, especially when you can only activate your account via Pixel. :-O

Tech Jesus said you must use a phone--Chrome and a Chromecast are out.

Just for the heck of it I checked the Google Play Store on my Galaxy S9 and it doesn't say the Stadia app won't work on my phone, so maybe it's not 100% just Pixels.
 
Well, I stand corrected. I assume it's "supposed" to work via Chrome. Probably launch glitchiness. Either way, I don't really care. I don't think Stadia is going anywhere, especially when you can only activate your account via Pixel. :-O

Support for other devices will come next year. I presume the option to use Chrome to activate, buy, etc will come around the same time as the “free” version of Stadia. Launching the “free” version without that would be a monumental disaster.

Tech Jesus said you must use a phone--Chrome and a Chromecast are out.

Just for the heck of it I checked the Google Play Store on my Galaxy S9 and it doesn't say the Stadia app won't work on my phone, so maybe it's not 100% just Pixels.

Yeah. Someone posted in the Stadia thread in the PC Gaming section that the app worked on their Razer Phone 2. So either device support is incredibly random or they’ve updated it recently.
 
BTW if people hasn't seen this : the chromecast ultras that are needed for this seem to overheat kinda easy if you use them for a bit over 2h.

You can check out reddit for user reports about how "fun" it was to get their destiny 2 raid interrupted due to it shutting down and being too hot to handle.

This one is an unacceptable thing honestly, did they really not test the thermals of the design for their glorified streaming stick?

Edit : btw I have actually found reports of them overheating since this years start, so it is a known issue prior to stadia and it wasn't fix... What a shit show.
 
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Really hoping this entire streaming thing ends up near DOA.
Once they get they latency issues sorted it will end up being the industry standard. With Steam getting onboard, streaming games will eventually be the norm. If you have data caps then it sucks for you.
 
Once they get they latency issues sorted it will end up being the industry standard. With Steam getting onboard, streaming games will eventually be the norm. If you have data caps then it sucks for you.

People said the same about 3D, VR, and several other things over the years. There is no "solving" latency issues. You can't break the speed of light so there is always going to be a floor to latency that is higher than playing locally. You can't guarantee that every hop along the pipeline is working perfectly. You can't force ISPs to serve 100+ Mbps connections to every single customer. You can't ensure nodes aren't overloaded. You can't force people to wire every single device in their home to Ethernet. You can't ensure wifi is set up properly for every person. You can't force only one person to be on a network at a time in a family to make sure only one person is using bandwidth. You can't do shit if ISPs decide to throttle game streaming. Also, the moment Stadia shuts down and people the bought into it lose access to every single game they purchased the shit is going to hit the fan.
 
Hmm.. that is pretty rough.

I already pre-ordered, so I'll get mine and test, but I'm not expecting all that much at this point.
 
Also, the moment Stadia shuts down and people the bought into it lose access to every single game they purchased the shit is going to hit the fan.

Would it though? Companies of this size can eat that. The worst case scenario is a class action forcing them to pay a percentage of the depreciated value of the games to people (unless some snippet in the TOS says you own nothing but temporary licenses). People in general i suspect wouldn't boycott google enough, they won't ditch chome and their android phones in protest. Would have to switch and start using Bing from now on too lol.

Not arguing with you so much as I am saying that company this large pretty much can afford to try shit out like this and screw up the industry just to see if it works.
 
Whats with all the chromecast being required? I thought this was some stand-alone hardware for $130?
 
Whats with all the chromecast being required? I thought this was some stand-alone hardware for $130?
The Chromecast Ultra is not required, but it is part of the Premiere Edition you pay $130 for. Right now it's required for Pro "4K" streaming, but supposedly that is changing next year when the standard option is rolled out.
 
It's also currently required for 5.1 audio.

And it's a general company shitshow that it was known since at least March that they had overheat related shutdowns and they didn't bother to fix the thermal design in time for the Stadia release.

Heck even w/o stadia how can anyone accept a streaming device that overheats in around 2h of use.
 
It's also currently required for 5.1 audio.

And it's a general company shitshow that it was known since at least March that they had overheat related shutdowns and they didn't bother to fix the thermal design in time for the Stadia release.

Heck even w/o stadia how can anyone accept a streaming device that overheats in around 2h of use.

It's a feature, preventing you from binging too much TV. ;)
 
Strange about the overheating.

I have a Fire Stick 4K that I modded to stay on 24/7 as a screen saver. It got hot but I had it running straight for several months without problem.
 
Told you this would not work out. A 1.5mb connection to the "cloud" is 0 compute power.
 
BTW if people hasn't seen this : the chromecast ultras that are needed for this seem to overheat kinda easy if you use them for a bit over 2h.

You can check out reddit for user reports about how "fun" it was to get their destiny 2 raid interrupted due to it shutting down and being too hot to handle.

This one is an unacceptable thing honestly, did they really not test the thermals of the design for their glorified streaming stick?

Edit : btw I have actually found reports of them overheating since this years start, so it is a known issue prior to stadia and it wasn't fix... What a shit show.



this statement is all wrong.Google states they tested the hell out of it and it isn't so. google would NEVER lie.
 
My body is ready.

stadia_shipped.jpg
 
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thanks for taking one for the team, cybereality... let us know what game you plan on trying, what kinda internet you gots, and how it all goes in general...
 
Right, I'm holding out hope that it will work. I've seen some positive reviews from users, so maybe it is not as bad as some sites make it out to be.

I got the phone app installed and my code, so everything is good to go. Bought a few games already: Tomb Raider, GRID, Metro and this exclusive Gylt (which looks interesting).

So there is a first person, third person, and a racing game. Should give me a sense of what the platform is capable of.

Also, I'm probably not the target demographic. I have several PCs and consoles, so I don't need streaming. But I like the idea.

I saw some people got it working in Linux (not completely, but sort of) so that would be an awesome option if/when Google supports that natively.
 
I saw some people got it working in Linux (not completely, but sort of) so that would be an awesome option if/when Google supports that natively.

I'm curious how the back end works - if the games are containerized Windows, or Proton based, or actually native Linux/Vulkan compiled. Not that Google would likely ever bother with letting native Linux gaming benefit somehow from the work and expense they may have gone through to get these games on Linux backend.

In a more ideal world, Google would be a Steam-like on Linux and offer the games both for local install and streaming. But that wouldn't fit their cloud-cloud-cloud business model.
 
I wonder too. Google did share that Stadia was based on Vulkan and Linux servers.

If developers were doing the work for a real Linux port, I think that would be great for the future of both Vulkan and Linux gaming in general.

Most companies will reuse their engine for several years and several games at a time. So if they already had a working Vulkan/Linux engine then maybe there is a possibility of native Linux release.

Or if Google decided that supporting Linux for streaming was a good idea, then that would be a great option for people who are tied to Windows only for gaming and want to try Linux.
 
this statement is all wrong.Google states they tested the hell out of it and it isn't so. google would NEVER lie.

I guess that we all missed a /s at the end there. Truth be told one of the YouTubers I follow that tries to look objectively at things opened it up, put a probe on the chip and did some testing.

Streaming stadia is hotter than streaming movies, sticking heatsinks to the glossy surface can help lower up to 6c the temperature of the chip.

They (Google) are using a thick amount of thermal paste/pad as interface between the chip and a heat spreader and then a thermal pad between the spreader and the back plastic plate, this is in general a bad thermal design in total.

1) plastic isn't an effective thermal conductor VS metals.
2) glossy surfaces are worse for heat dissipation than rough surfaces inherently because the surface area in contact with the air is smaller, this is why heatsinks use fins as a way to increase the total surface area.
3)proper thermal paste use should be a small amount since it may be a better conductor than air but still isn't as well as metal to metal, so the actual use is to fill the small gaps in the metal to metal contact with a malleable material with much higher conductivity than air.

So it makes no surprise that opening it up and putting a raspberry heatsink directly on the chip or any other more extreme modification gets rid of the problem, this I see as a massive design fail.
 
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