Stadia's E3 Doom Eternal demo has made me a fan of cloud computing



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LOS ANGELES – Since the beta test of Google's Project Stream in October and the announcement of the complete Stadia platform by the company in March, a question weighs on the service: will the system work fairly well? for fast and intensive reflex games? After playing a demo of Eternal Doom On Wednesday, for about half an hour, I'm prepared to say that the answer to that question seems to be yes – at least under Google's controlled test conditions.

Google has invited me into the space of the creator of YouTube Gaming downtown, away from the Internet-cluttered E3 showroom, to try out the latest version of Stadia. My demo ran locally on a Pixelbook with the Chrome browser, connected to a TV via HDMI, and remotely to remote data centers more than 300km away in San Francisco. The Pixelbook had a wired internet connection which was told that it was running at about 25 Mbps (Google did not let me run a speed test to confirm the quality of the connection). I controlled the demo with a Stadia controller connected to the Pixelbook via USB, but the keyboard and trackpad controls also worked.

More than thirty minutes of Eternal Doom To play, I would have had a hard time reporting any difference between the Stadia version and a version running on a local PC. The 60-fps animation did not seem to be moving throughout the demo, and the apparent resolution was also no lower than 1080p (although a Google representative said that Stadia would sometimes reduce this resolution briefly to maintain a uniform frame rate if and when the bandwidth drops). . There was no sign of video compression artifacts or color gradients that you might see in a low-resolution YouTube video.

I could not swear that control latency was identical to a game running locally, I will say aim, shoot, jump and dodge the various demons of the game felt identical to playing the 2016 version of Condemn. Perhaps a professional-level player could feel the difference in the perfectly synchronized muscle memory needed for precision maneuvers, but Stadia certainly felt up to the heavy design of the game from my point of view. On this score, Eternal Doom been a much better example than the previous Stadia tests Assassin's Creed Odyssey, a game that has extremely loose and latency-laden controls, even in local game conditions.

I was not able to run slow video tests on Stadia to estimate total control latency, as I did earlier in the week with the Microsoft Project Xcloud demo. The actual playing conditions, with Wi-Fi routers and local network congestion, may also not be as good as Google's idealized demo setup. And I would need a double-blind comparison with a local version of the game to determine if the Stadia version was compatible. really indistinguishable from a local version.

That being said, this long demo has convinced me that Stadia had at least the potential to provide the solid, responsive and local gaming experience that Google promises, even for an extremely reflexive game. I could easily see myself playing through all of Eternal Doom on this version of Stadia without complaining, and without the need for a high-end console or game console, nor.

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