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Taras
Founder
Founder

Improving Bluetooth Controller Quality on iOS?

So I posted this on /r/Stadia, but it cought no attention. Perhaps more lukc here? 

Obviously, a lot has been said that third party Bluetooth Controllers work worse than the native Stadia one. And to the extent possible, I prefer to use it, but that’s not always practicable.

So I also noticed that the perofrmance of bluetooth controllers (I have PS4 and XBOX One) can vary a lot and tend to cause overall lag/peformance in the Stadia games. So here are my observations:

  • same controllers work better via bluetooth on MacOS than on iOS (virtually no significant lag on macOS).

  • PS4 controller seems to be working better overall for me.

  • XBOX is a hit or miss - sometimes no issues whatsover, sometimes, it makes a game unplayable. It is a pretty old controller, so I wonder if that has anything to do with the bad performance. But then, it works fine in other iOS games that support such controllers...

  • button mashing may sometime increase the lag.

  • [not sure about this one, but...] it seems that performance of the controllers may vary depending on the game played. I am playing a lot RDR2 and Cyberpunk2077. RDR2 is usually mostly fine/playble - a bit of delay/lack of the controllers responsiveness, but in Cyberpunk it just impedes the overall performance of the game, it becomes very laggy.

  • curiously, stadia sometime interprets this a ‘bad connection’ and starts popping up those misleading messages, even those the internet connection is actually fine.

So these are just very subjective observations, I have no technical expertise in this, but wonder if anything can be done to improve/prevent those issues?

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JohnZoidberg
Gold Stadia Guide
Gold Stadia Guide

Hello @Taras 

With the caveat that I don't use Bluetooth controllers, my first question here is: are you playing via WiFi, and if so, are you on 5GHz? If your devices are connecting via 2.4GHz, then it's possible you're running into interference between Bluetooth and WiFi in the same band (they use different technology – Bluetooth is frequency hopped across the entire band, while WiFi is likely sticking to a single 20MHz wide channel, and will get "stepped on" by Bluetooth when its hopping sequence sends it through that area). Hard-wiring controllers is going to be better for gaming in general, but trying to share the 2.4GHz band is pretty much worst-case.

Why not Zoidberg?
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Taras
Founder
Founder

Ah, thanks @JohnZoidberg 

. This does make a lot of sense. I actually completed forgot about the wifi settings. I have my macbook and chromecast wired for Stadia, so have not thought about wifi settings for a while. When iOS was introduced I just jumped to try it out there on wifi without giving it much throught or tuning the network setings. My wifi setup is actually ranning a mixed setttings where it can jump between 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz. Unfortunately some parts of the home are rather secluded for 5Ghz, so such mix usually is the most practical sollution overall... So I guess when I was getting bad stadia quality it was indeed on a 2.4.Ghz with bluetooth interference....

I can run a wired connection for the device itself or PS4 Dualshock controller... Though, unfortuantely wired connections are not supported for xbox controllers... But still, this was very helpful indeed! Thank you!

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