Stadia is now free! Or rather, any Google user can now sign up to the service and access the games library without having to subscribe to the Pro tier or purchase the firm's bespoke controller and Chromecast Ultra 4K HDR receiver. It's a good jumping on point for users interested in the service and as we shall discover, accessing Stadia via Chrome browsers, smartphones or tablets can actually offer a key advantage over the Pro-level 4K Chromecast Ultra experience. In returning to Google's cloud service, we also wanted to take the opportunity to go back to Doom Eternal and revisit our latency metrics - a key point of criticism in prior coverage. Was Stadia just having a bad day when we tested it? Was there something wrong with our network? Could we bring latency back down to the impressive level we saw in our Stadia review?
The good news is that we have managed to reduce latency in our Stadia test set-up, improving the Doom Eternal experience significantly. id Software's port succeeds in pushing an 1800p resolution, excellent visuals and a highly consistent 60fps. However, fast response is a must for a fast-paced first-person shooter and our initial results just weren't good enough. We logged a range of latency results between 79-100ms extra compared to the Xbox One X version of the game - a surprise given the 300Mbps fibre connection behind it. Google itself asked for permission to access our telemetry (which we granted) but our end goal is to give the system and the software the fairest assessment we can, so we spent a lot more time investigating the metrics ourselves and looking to optimise the experience.
And so, for a second test we reduced all variables to the absolute minimum. We plugged the Chromecast Ultra directly into the Virgin Media router via ethernet and as before, Stadia shows the connection status as 'excellent' with 4K streaming confirmed. This time, to ensure no possibility of contention issues, we cut everything off from the router besides the Chromecast itself. All network devices were removed from the pipeline, every device was bumped off the WiFi - with the exception of the Stadia controller of course - to make sure there was zero interference with lag testing. And the result? Instead of the 79-100ms of additional lag on Stadia from the initial test, results at first came in at 54ms in the best case and 75ms in the worst. Note that this is indeed additional lag on top of the game's inherent latency as established with the Xbox measurement - cloud lag, if you like.
from Eurogamer.net
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