How are they overcoming the jarring effects of input latency? Even 20-30ms in input lag would turn a lot of people off, or is this primarily for casual games where this won't matter too much?
I played the AC Odyssey Stadia/Stream beta -- at least for that kind of single-player experience it felt comparable to console input lag with no jarring effects. I'd be interested in how it would be in twitch shooters though.
I doubt twitch shooters would be playable. I've used steam's in home streaming, and platformers that require precise jumping accuracy are basically unplayable because even a fraction of a second hiccup in latency can get you killed. Even simple platformers like Crash Bandicoot can get frustratingly difficult to play over a stream. If the service gets popular enough, we might see developers making changes to help out players using Stadia, the same way that they add auto-aim for most console shooters, but disable it in the PC version.
I usually notice input lag in first person shooters when I have V-sync / fast sync on. V-sync introduces about 1 frame of input lag (0.5 frames for fast sync), so 8~16ms is just enough to throw myself off. I would guess platformers and fighting games would have similar kinds of input lag problems.
I played the beta too, but never a local copy of AC: O. I couldn't tell whether it was the game or Stadia or my connection (Google Fiber, no wi-fi), but it felt like walking through mud.
If that's was just the nature of the game, that's not a very honest choice of game. Every game I've bought for myself is in recent memory was more responsive.
I know that 20-30ms is jarring because I've experimented in doing everything possible to reduce input latency while playing competitive shooters over the years, as has any serious FPS competitor. 20-30ms is highly jarring to many. Even playing SSB Ultimate over wifi on my Switch is super annoying for me to deal with.
You can simulate ~instantaneous input with this kind of approach, but not if the input has to travel to the server and back before it's registered locally.
Most people won't care about this, but it will certainly put a ceiling on serious people (e.g. streamers) trying to play popular, competitive games on Stadia.
If if there was, would it matter? 144Hz monitors draw a frame every 7ms. What does it mean to have sub-frame latency? Human reaction time is about 250ms. So from the time you see something and ate able to react, over 30 frames have rendered.
As someone who used to play fighting games competitively I know that it makes a huge difference if it's sub 1 frame input lag or not. It's the difference of being able to execute certain combos with 1 frame links (basically the time between inputs) 100% of times instead of <50% of the time.
