is there anyway to get at least 1080 with minimal encoding artifacts? i mean if google toyed around with the RTMP stream encoding configuration for Stadia, they could make it look A LOT BETTER, just with that?
i'm close to asking for a refund on Cyberpunk because this is just too easy to get wrong.
Hello @cxor
Stadia doesn't use RTMP – it uses QUIC, which is the protocol that HTTP version 3 is based on. Each frame is compressed using a custom encoder that generates only P-type frames (unless there's a significant packet loss event or a need to adjust the encoding resolution, either of which would require a new I-type frame). Not using B-type frames allows for the minimum amount of latency between when the game renderer generates a new frame and when it can be encoded and transmitted (B-frames would require buffering one or more frames before encoding). All of this allows the encoder to get each frame encoded in under 1 millisecond. Compare this to something like YouTube TV, where even the "live" channels are delayed substantially in order to allow greater compression and deal with much wider ranges of available throughput. Then there's the question of which codec you're using. If your system can't decode VP9, you may be seeing H.264 instead, which isn't necessarily worse, but it may look different. The point is, there's a lot going on under the hood here. The system has to balance a whole lot of goals to produce the best total experience possible. Could they improve the encoding quality? Sure – but only by compromising something else like latency and bandwidth (which would risk congestion, which would trigger a "gear shift", which would be rather unpleasant).
So, all of that said, I would try to make sure your system can decode VP9 for the highest quality experience. If you provide your GPU model, we may be able to tell whether it can decode VP9 or not.
Lastly, Cyberpunk has some graphics quality choices you may want to experiment with (e.g., quality vs framerate, but also some post-processing affects I didn't personally care for).