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TheDarthTux's Posts

I really didn't want to pre-order because there was nothing it offered over PC but now thinking I may just pre-order and also get a PC version. Hopefully progress saves are cross-platform
O so you're talking about upscaling the way, TVs and AV recievers upscale 1080p to 4K and how TVs like the Smasung KS8000 use things like auto motion plus to smoothen and eleminate judder, ghosting a... See more...
O so you're talking about upscaling the way, TVs and AV recievers upscale 1080p to 4K and how TVs like the Smasung KS8000 use things like auto motion plus to smoothen and eleminate judder, ghosting and blurring, but using AI compute? My bad Guess that would make sense, but they could easily do that in the chromecast ultra. ARM chips are already capable of doing tensor compute (https://developer.arm.com/solutions/machine-learning-on-arm/developer-material/how-to-guides/deploying-a-tensorflow-mnist-model-on-arm-nn). So depending on what chips are in the chromecast ultra, it may be able to do that already. The question of compression/decompression/decoding is still an important one because this may also be a cheaper and better quality solution in the short-run than the local hardware; remember DLSS 1 was no where near as good as DLSS 2 which has come almost 2years later. The AV1 reference encoder can get 27%, 34%, 46.2% and 50.3% higher data compression than H.265/HVEC, vp9, x264 high, and x264 main profiles respectively. If you can compress the data being sent from the server by up to 50% you use less data and this may be cheaper than having more tensor compute cores on the local device. Even 25% reduction in data transfer is huge. That takes you from the 20GB/hr currently at 4K on Stadia to 15GB/hr which is closer to the current 12.6GB/hr of 1080p. Since AV1 is an open standard, if they can go in and improve the compression rate, it may very well be possible to get 4K streaming at the current data requirements for 1080p. I am not sure what the comparison is using DLSS vs native on average on Nvidia GPUs but I think on Death Stranding it resulted in a 25% frame rate improvement, 47% in Control. So this is on par with the AV1 vs other compression codecs in terms of amount of data being used. Stadia is also meant to be accessible across devices and the objective, would probably be to have near identical experiences regardless of where you play. So, the data compression route may end up being a business model decision than a cost one as well.  AMD's Navi2X GPUs are meant to support hardware level AV1 encoding so this is where the guys at Stadia could actually talk to us about upgrade paths and other things they are doing. Either solution is perfectly fine, but Stadia should at least talk about these things.
I think you may be confusing the function of the dongle and the hardware actually running the games because you like all of us are used to having local hardware such as a PC, laptop, tablet, or conso... See more...
I think you may be confusing the function of the dongle and the hardware actually running the games because you like all of us are used to having local hardware such as a PC, laptop, tablet, or consoles. Cloud is not the same thing. Cloud is a computer you connect to remotely from another device you have running locally. The local device sends instructions to the cloud computer and displays images from the cloud computer, but the cloud computer is the one doing all the heavy lifting and compute. Basically, the server rendered the graphics of the game and transmits it to the dongle. So the GPU on the server side can send (1) Native 4K (2) checkerbox upscaled or (3) AI upscaled 4K/8K images to the dongle. The dongle then decodes/decompresses the images and sends them to your TV.  So with that being said, AI upscaling will be done at GPU at the cloud server level not locally at the dongle level. What the dongle does is decompress and output the images it recieves to a local screen. Where you could get improvements at the dongle is imaged decoding/decomprssion (H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1, etc). Aside from that AI up scaling would be interesting assuming Google can do it. There is AI-based upscaling currently available in Vulkan, but few games use it, just like few games use Nvidia's DLSS. That may change with next gen consoles and whatever AMD are going to announce on Wednesday. However, seeing that the guys at Stadia are not talking about features or future vision for the platform, we can assume that Stadia still using AMD's Vega 10 GPU architecture which is limited to FP16 compute, will not be capable of doing that upsampling or upscaling in anywhere near an efficient way.  Remember the Vega 10 is from 2016/2-17. AMD have released Vega 20 (Radeon VII), Navi 10/RDNA 1 (RX 5000-series) and on Wednesday will be announcing Navi2X/Big Navi/RDNA2 (RX 6000-series and what is in the PS5 and XBox Series X and S). At this stage we can only say that Stadia is previous gen. I know Google have custom tensor compute (i.e. AI/ML compute) processors, but there is no mention of those being used on Stadia from what I remember. This is why I keep saying the guys at Stadia need to get beyond just releasing games, we trust them that the games are coming, what they need to do instead is tall us about upgrade paths and features. Since the roll out of Stadia is in countries where PC and consoles purchases are typically high, Stadia needs to give us a good reason to buy games on Stadia rather than PC or consoles. With SSDs dropping in price and internet speeds improving, not having to wait for downloads really is not a good reason to buy on Stadia. Added to this, there are other cloud services like Shadow.tech that give you access to your PC library that also do 4K and since they use Nvidia GPUs already have or will eventually get ray tracing and DLSS. I may be an exception, but I actually don't care about the games on Stadia, I believe the games will come and with so far 113 games either already live on Stadia or coming in the next month, Stadia has more than a lot of games for its first year. Right now, what I want to see from Stadia which covers the AI upscaling is, I want Stadia talking more about the server side hardware and the potential behind the tech they have at their disposal.
I completely agree with you. I found these three days of Good Stuff to be meh! Not because the games weren't good, but because, they are just games, all gaming platforms have and release games and be... See more...
I completely agree with you. I found these three days of Good Stuff to be meh! Not because the games weren't good, but because, they are just games, all gaming platforms have and release games and being someone who keeps watch of what is in the library, with the Ubisoft anouncement last week, it was clear Stadia would hit the 120 games by year end 2020 target that was set. So games, while great, are meh because I already trust Stadia to deliver the games! What would have been somewhat better was perhaps having a deep dive with CDPR on Cyberpunk on Stadia just like happened with Immortals Fenyx Rising, talking about next gen. Tell me what is so special about this game on Stadia vs PC or console. I am a founder still with my pro account, but I have a high end desktop capable of 4K@40fps+ at ultra settings, I am thinking of picking up a PS5 for the VR. Tell me why I should buy games on Stadia. Yes, I can game on any device but, I could also subscribe to Shadow and get that for my PC games. Even tell me that once lockdown is over and I can travel again, I will be able to play in say Brazil at sompoint because Stadia hardware/network engineers are working to expand the reach and get better optimisations on the compression technology, etc.  Sell me a vision of what to expect with Stadia that just is not possible anytime soon on other platforms.
Since resident evil, rocket league and witcher have already been mentioned, will go with a toss up between  Dead or Alive 6 (for being a more light hearted tongue and check fighter unlike Mortal Kom... See more...
Since resident evil, rocket league and witcher have already been mentioned, will go with a toss up between  Dead or Alive 6 (for being a more light hearted tongue and check fighter unlike Mortal Kombat) or Project Cars 2 (for being a deep detailed multi-dicipline racing simulator) Ok... Dead or Alive 6 I'm sure I will have buyer's remorse but DoA6 is a more recent game than Project Cars  2. So definitely Dead or Alive 6
@fransuarez100  It is good to know I am not alone in seeing just how important gen 2 is for Stadia. I spent months debating whether to get Red Dead Redemption 2 on Stadia or on Steam and ended up go... See more...
@fransuarez100  It is good to know I am not alone in seeing just how important gen 2 is for Stadia. I spent months debating whether to get Red Dead Redemption 2 on Stadia or on Steam and ended up going with Steam. I have a Radeon VII and I can get an average of 45fps at high setting at 4K. I will be getting a Big Navi GPU for Star Citizen which is an exclusively PC game and the one game I spend hours upon hours playing,  For everything else, Stadia would be perfect if the high visual quality was there. Not really concerned about the games because I believe they will come, it just takes time to convert games written for Windows and DX11 or the consoles over to Linux and Vulkan and with other projects game studios are working on, those ports aren't high level priorities.  I suspect for games like  battlefield, COD, and GTA it will be the next releases that come first if they are near. Though even the current COD should be doable. Project Cars 3 would be amazing if it came to Stadia and hopefully Google finds a way to get racing wheels to work with the chromecast or an improved chromecast. The games I would love to see on Stadia though would be Pro Evolution Soccer, DOA and Resident Evil 2 and 3. I own them on Steam but would gladly pay for them again on Stadia especially if there is crossplatform progression.
@Shadowdarck  Thanks for this. I can now play on my Galaxy Tab screen. You can't imaginge how happy this makes me 
I am sure these are questions that have been asked many times over, but is there any word on when the stadia app will get support on Android tablets as playable screens like on mobile phones? Would... See more...
I am sure these are questions that have been asked many times over, but is there any word on when the stadia app will get support on Android tablets as playable screens like on mobile phones? Would rather play games like Shadow of the tomb raider, metro exodus, red dead redemption and cyberpunk when it comes out on the larger screens of tablets than a mobile phone With next generation consoles and PC graphics cards coming out in a few months, will there be any talk/presentations/event on how Stadia plans to keep up with these other platforms? As someone who's subscribed to stadia pro primarily for 4K, visuals are important especially in the triple A titles. While it is up to developers to use the available hardware, it is clear game settings are dialed back a bit relative to PC, suggesting the current hardware setup in not really "high settings" 4K rendering capable. Would ideally like stadia to become an alternative to my PC for 4K gaming and with next generation consoles looking like being viable replacements to mid-tier PCs, my decisions about continuing with stadia pro beyond December really hinges on these 2 questions; especially being able to get comparable visual quality as my PC. The convenience of stadia is great, but games to me are an extension of going to the movies so the cinematic immersion is very important. Therefore the larger mobile form factor support in tablets and the higher graphics fidelity at the highest available resolution on stadia. 
@mcnichoj  I personally think that the situation with GFN, was Nvidia not doing their legal due diligence before going live. And I know people online getting salty about developers and publishers pu... See more...
@mcnichoj  I personally think that the situation with GFN, was Nvidia not doing their legal due diligence before going live. And I know people online getting salty about developers and publishers pulling their games from GFN don't want to hear this, but GFN is not a PC in the cloud as some people claim. The fact it has its own user interface (UI) that is not or does not take you into a Windows 10/Linux/Mac desktop, means it is legally possible to argue it is not a PC even if it is using PC hardware and Windows 10 in the backend. It is rather a platform. For example if I remember correctly, the PlayStation 4 uses a highly customised version of BSD/freeBSD but it is not a BSD desktop and the UI has been written for a specific purpose. So, while it is possible to go through the pain of setting up steam on freeBSD and playing games that way, it is a whole different thing legally if Sony just pulled Steam games into their UI. It is the same thing with Stadia. Stadia's application UI is a highly customised for single purpose version of Debian Linux. Legally, however, for Stadia to backdoor into Steam to access games that are already native on Linux, there would have to be legal agreements in place between Google, Valve, and the various developers and publishers around not just technology, license fees, but also distribution of fees for games on Steam but played on Stadia or sold on Stadia but played through a Steam account on PC. If these types of conversations were to  came up, negotiations would get complicated quickly. Where Nvidia made their mistake for marketing and setting GFN up exclusively as a gaming platform and choosing not to give subscribers access to a full Windows virtual machine (VM) in the cloud. This is the big difference between GFN and Shadow and why people get things mixed up. With Shadow you get a full Windows 10 VM in the cloud. You can use it for what ever you want including gaming. They give you a Windows 10 VM in the cloud and you install on it whatever you want. So when you install a steam game in Shadow, you are installing Steam on a Windows 10 VM and installing your games on that VM using Steam as you would on your local desktop/laptop PC. So legally, Nvidia's decision on the UI and marketing is ultimately what is likely causing them the trouble. Shadow unlike GFN is not directly piggybacking off someone else's IP whereas GFN appears to be. If Valve launched their own Steam cloud gaming service they wouldn't have the problems GFN is because the games were already on the Steam platform/market place.
Will agree with @BinaryJay regarding PhsyX, that's an Nvidia feature that is probably proprietary so little to no chance seeing it on Stadia. However, I am certain AMD have their alternative which is... See more...
Will agree with @BinaryJay regarding PhsyX, that's an Nvidia feature that is probably proprietary so little to no chance seeing it on Stadia. However, I am certain AMD have their alternative which is opensource. whether developers actually use it is a different thing. Typically on PC, at least, games using Nvidia specific features have had some type of development partnership with Nvidia. As for ray tracing, I would say, that is more likely. I know on PC, the tech press and hardware reviewers have tended to confuse the lighting effects, the APIs, NVidia Turing architecture design, Nvidia's RTX API software stack they've written into their drivers, DX12 and Vulkan, and what "hardware ray tracing" actually is. I have only come across two people who have really covered what ray tracing actually is. AdoredTV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrF4k6wJ-do)  and  Naoki Watanabe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BOUAkJxJac&t=348s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdS-baX7hwE&t=133s) Basically ray tracing is essentially an umbrella term used to cover a series of algorithms  for simulating photons in a scene or in physics waves in bouncing off surfaces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(physics) ). There are multiple approaches to doing this and each one is algorithmic in nature. That is to say, there are step-by-step calculations that various researchers have developed over the years to run on ray tracing devices to determine the path of the rays.  So ultimately there is nothing remotely special or unique about ray tracing that would mean AMD or even Google, could not find a set of algorithms that will do the same thing in a way that works optimally for the hardware Stadia is running on. The CryTek's CryEngine introduced ray tracing without needing DX12/DXR or RTX API or Vulkan or Nvidia's Turing (RTX) GPUs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0kICYkaKo0) and World of Tanks does ray tracing that will even work on Intel iGPUs. This video show the difference with enCore ray tracing on and off better than the demos others have done (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suur7CNYQBk) Pause at 3 seconds in to see the difference on the tanks' tracks. And let's face it, a Commodore Amiga 500 was doing ray tracing back in the 1990s (seehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBkUzab5TEo andhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KcwMZUnIAg andhttps://blog.codinghorror.com/real-time-raytracing/) So since Stadia uses Debian Linux as its base OS and Vulkan as its graphics rendering API and ray tracing is just a suite of photon simulation algorithms, there is every chance that Stadia will get ray tracing using Vulkan Raytracing, even on the current Vega 10 GPUs that Stadia is currently using. Though as a pro-subscriber, I really which Stadia moves to the RDAN2.0 or CDNA based GPUs AMD will be releasing later this year.
So, two Talos Principle and Portal. Personally not excited but GREAT to see more games being announced. Means more content for wider range of people
But NO THIS CAN'T BE TRUE!! There are no games on Stadia!! LOL!!
@Danielo, honestly, the only reason for having a pro subscription is 4K HDR 5.1. It has been that way since the pricing was released at E3 in 2019. Besides, not sure if you are aware of this but the o... See more...
@Danielo, honestly, the only reason for having a pro subscription is 4K HDR 5.1. It has been that way since the pricing was released at E3 in 2019. Besides, not sure if you are aware of this but the overwhelming majority of gamers especially on PC (despite the PC master race none sense) game at 1080p NO HDR NO 5.1. Even when you look closer at what those PC gamers who talk about 1440p being the best resolution for gaming, are using, it is a pixel count of 2560*1440 or 3,686,400 pixels. 1080p has a pixel count of 2,073,600 vs the 4K pixel count of 8,294,400. So 1440p is not much different from 1080p. For this reason, it makes perfect sense that Stadia Base, even though you will be buying all your games on there, is at 1080p not 4K. I would also argue that for what you are getting for the $10 or so per month subscribing to Pro (i.e. 1 may be 2 games to claim each month), it makes more sense to be a pro subscriber than be on Base and buy the games. Especially since you will recover all you previously claimed games if you re-subscribe to Pro after leaving for a period of time. Pro actually works out to be identical you PS Now or XBox Game Pass only you are accumulating the games over time with the subscription. Probably because there are a very limited number of games on Stadia currently.
"Q: What will happen to the progress I’ve made on the Stadia Pro games if I cancel my subscription? A: If you decide to re-subscribe to Stadia Pro, you will regain access to your previously claimed ga... See more...
"Q: What will happen to the progress I’ve made on the Stadia Pro games if I cancel my subscription? A: If you decide to re-subscribe to Stadia Pro, you will regain access to your previously claimed games, as well as retain your progress for those games. Additionally, if you decide to buy one of your previously claimed Stadia Pro games a la carte in the Stadia store, you will regain access to all of your saved data and progress. Your saved progress is safe!" This I like very much! The only reason the Pro subscription has any value to me is 4K and of late since I can't stream Stadia due to the HDCP on Chromecast Ultra and browser support for 4K is not here, been really questioning the subscription. 1080p gameplay on 4K monitors or TVs is a horrific nightmare of a visual experience. But it is good to know that even if I was to temporarily stop the subscription, all the claimed games and progress would still be recovered. Makes it worth being a Founder and maintaining that collection of games.