Imagine a world in which you do not need to have powerful and expensive hardware to enjoy the latest AAA releases. A world in which t...
Imagine a world in which you do not need to have powerful and expensive hardware to enjoy the latest AAA releases. A world in which to start the game it’s enough to open the browser, without the tedious long downloads. All this can become a reality in the next six months or a year if the Stadia cloud gaming service turns out as we were promised.
This project was announced in March at the GDC 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Then, after 3 months of silence, Google made a 15-minute presentation during the June E3 exhibition, where Google Vice President Phil Harrison, who leads the Stadia development team, told us about the cost of subscribing to the new service and the requirements for connection speed. Google promised that at the start, Stadia will be supported by desktop computers, TVs with Android TV, laptops, tablets and smartphones - the truth is, in the latter case we are only talking about devices of the Pixel line. On all compatible platforms, there will be no need to purchase any equipment, since data processing will be performed on remote servers, and a rendered image will come to you.
By the way, a few words about data centers: according to the company, each user will have 10.7 TFlops at their disposal, which is more than the performance of the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X combined.
Blitz
What is it? Google’s big step towards the gaming industry, a kind of 'Netflix for games', able to compete on equal terms with the next generation consoles.
When? In some regions, Stadia will launch in November 2019, including Western and Northern Europe, the USA, Australia, South America and some Asian countries, and among the available languages you can choose English, German, French and Japanese.
Question price? $ 9.99 / £ 8.99 per month
How fast will you need a connection? 35 Mbps for full 4K with HDR at 60 frames per second.
How Google Stadia Works
Perhaps the best thing about this service is that to work with it you only need fast Internet and Google Chrome latest version. To start playing you just need to open a new tab and go to the Stadia.com homepage or find a video on YouTube about the game you are interested in. First of all, Google will check the connection speed, delay and loss of data transfer between your computer and servers. For normal operation of the service in 720p, a minimum of 10 Mbit / s is required.
An unofficial beta test of the service called Project Stream was launched last October (of course, no one mentioned Stadia then, apparently, marketers decided to choose a more harmonious name for this project). With Project Stream, you could play Assassin's Creed: Odyssey directly in the browser tab, and in full screen mode the gameplay was indistinguishable from that on the console or PC, except for the lack of graphics quality settings. In Stadia, everything will be exactly the same - you press the buttons, and information about these clicks is sent to the server.
Speaking of buttons: Stadia will be compatible with both your old input devices and the official controller for $ 89, which connects directly to the cloud, thereby reducing latency with low bandwidth; in addition, this accessory will be equipped with a special Google Assistant button, which allows you to quickly call a virtual assistant who is ready to tell this or that information about the game in which you are located.
Stadia will be compatible with the Google Chromecast Ultra USB dongle, ready to turn any TV into a powerful gaming solution.
What games will be available on Stadia
The final list of titles for the long-awaited streaming service has not yet been formed, but according to preliminary information, Stadia's assortment will be quite impressive. Apparently, Google had to work hard to lure as many publishers as possible, since the starting line can be called one of the richest in the history of the gaming industry. At the moment, Google has confirmed the presence of:
- Assassin's creed odyssey
- Borderlands 3
- Baldur's gate 3
- The crew 2
- Darksiders genesis
- Destiny 2
- Doom
- Doom eternal
- Dragon ball xenoverse
- The elder scrolls online
- Farming simulator 19
- Final fantasy 15
- Football manager
- Get packed
- GRID
- Gylt
- Just dance
- Metro exodus
- Mortal kombat 11
- NBA 2K
- Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid
- Rage 2
- Rise of the tomb raider
- Samurai showdown
- Shadow of the tomb raider
- Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint
- Tom Clancy's The Division 2
- Tomb Raider Definitive Edition
- Thumper
- Trials rising
- Wolfenstein: Youngblood
When in a conversation with Eurogamer, Phil Harrison was asked about the availability of paid games on the service, he replied that even having to pay for a high-speed Internet tariff and subscribing to Stadia “cannot outweigh the value of being able to play on any device and anywhere.”
Google Vice President also added: “Theoretically, the version of the game for Stadia will be the most advanced in terms of the capabilities of the game engine.”
It turns out that Stadia does not work on all computers. Or not?
It would seem that due to the fact that all calculations take place in the cloud, nothing is needed from the client machine except the Chrome browser and a stable connection to the Network. However, during last year’s beta test, Google released a list of minimum specifications. For 1080p resolution and 60 fps, it looks like this:
Operating system: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (only 64-bit versions)
Processor: AMD FX-8350 4.0 GHz, Ryzen 5 - 1400, Intel Core i7-3770 3.5 GHz
Video: AMD Radeon R9 290 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
Memory: 8GB RAM
Built-in memory: 46 GB of free hard disk space
DirectX: DirectX June 2010 Redistributable
Audio: sound card supporting DirectX 9.0c
Those who want to play in super-detailed 4K at 30 fps will have to prepare from 16 GB of RAM and a more powerful AMD Ryzen 1700x / intel Core i7 7700 processor and an AMD Vega 64 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. Yes, at first glance it all looks very sadly, but these were requirements for Project Stream testers - according to third-party developers, Stadia will have much more modest appetites. For example, Marty Stratton from the id Software studio responsible for the upcoming Doom Eternal said that it took their team just a few weeks to port the new Doom to the Google platform, but even for such a short time, they managed to get the game to work in 3840 x 2160 resolution with HDR and 60 fps.
At the same time, the majority of users who managed to test Project Stream note that despite the hardware requirements described above, the service worked perfectly on both budget PCs and a Chromebook five years ago - so we can safely say that Google compiled this set of specifications with a significant margin for the future, or at that time, Dobra Corporation was not completely sure of the number and performance of servers for Stadia.
Will nextgen games run on mobile devices?
Yes! Of course, if your smartphone does not belong to the Pixel line, you will have to wait a bit. Of course, on the one hand, this is not entirely true for owners of non-Pixel devices, but on the other, everything is quite obvious: Google is easier and cheaper to optimize software only for its devices than immediately for the entire fragmented Android market with hundreds of different models. In addition, this may spur sales of Pixel smartphones, the fourth generation of which will go on sale right before the launch of Stadia.
What happens when the connection is disconnected?
According to Google representatives, Stadia, in the event of an unexpected loss of connection, the image of the game will remain active on the server for several minutes, so if you immediately reconnect and restart the game, you will return to the place you left off. If you hesitate and do not have time to open the game, Google will close your game and next time you will continue from the last checkpoint. It is also said that when the signal degrades, Stadia will automatically reduce the resolution and quality of the graphics to prevent disconnection.
How and when will Stadia work?
Nobody knows that. The only thing that is known about the expansion of the geography of the service is that it will happen in 2020. At the start in November, residents of Canada, the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Austria, Belgium can take advantage of Stadia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Great Britain, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. The final Stadia distribution map should look something like this:
Among other things, the question of the reaction of providers to a sharp jump in traffic after the launch of Stadia is not clear, because the game in FullHD-resolution “eats” 1 TB of data in 113 hours, and in 4K - in just 65 hours. For example, in our country, with Internet tariffs, everything is fine, but in many of the above countries, 1 TB is one third, or even half, of the monthly limit. It’s possible that operators will make concessions and increase restrictions on the amount of transmitted/received data (as was, for example, during the mass popularization of online video), but you should not really hope for this - at least in the next 1-2 years, while Do not upgrade the current Network Infrastructure.
