Dubigrasu's Posts

Waiting with bated breath for the next major Stadia platform feature, feature only possible thanks to the awesome power of the cloud computing and Google's technical prowess: 60 FPS on Elder Scrolls Online and other various games! This extraordinary feat of engineering will make us the most envied group of gamers, I can hardly wait. Just imagine those extraordinary days to come, when we will play at 60 FPS like no one else!

You gotta do better than that. Few game scraps thrown here and there won't get you out of this mess you're in. Fix your games, get bigger ones, hire a new leader, communicate better, whatever, do something. Stadia is currently going downhill with no signs of slowing down.

I noticed that if you have crossplay enabled, the Steam settings can negatively affect the performance on Stadia. One solution would be: a) to tweak the Steam settings until they no longer affect Stadia (mainly vsync+ fps limit) or: b) reset the video settings on Stadia (set the video ones to default). However, for the b) solution you'll have to do this every time you start the game.

Stadia uses two codecs for video streaming, VP9 or H264. Your phone must have the ability to decode (in hardware) at least one of them.  Look at the phone specs, see if they to have video hardware decoding. capabilities. 

Check first your browser for latency. See this: https://basro.github.io/input-lag-measuring-tool/ Your mouse should closely follow the inner dot/point. You can improve the response time by starting Chrome with the --disable-frame-rate-limit flag. Be aware that this will likely raise the CPU usage to the roof, check if you have decent cooling.   Make sure you have the hardware video decoding working, at 4K in software mode your CPU might not be enough. Go to:  chrome://webrtc-internals/ and while the game is on, select the latest stream, and then the RTCInboundRTPVideoStream_*** section. At the decoderImplementation line it should say ExternalDecoder. If is something else(like ffmpeg), then is in software mode (not good). Other line to check is [totalDecodeTime/framesDecoded_in_ms], the lower, the better. Other good sources of info are the RTCIceCandidate* sections. Check also the Stats graphs to monitor in real time (ideally on a second monitor) most of the above values over time.     

Try also the Stadia Enhanced extension. Don't know the current status of Stadia+, but I stopped using it exactly from this reason (problems with forcing H264). https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stadia-enhanced/ldeakaihfnkjmelifgmbmjlphdfncbfg

I really think you should have free demos available for public to try out, and I mean not free weeks or whatever, but permanently, the way you can find on Steam for example. This free week is great, but it will pass and some people will miss out for various reasons. Even if you repeat this type of event, is not enough. Just have a set (the bigger, the better) of demos readily available for everyone to try at the time of their choosing. Many people are not interested in Pro or buying games on Stadia, but they might get interested in free try-outs, and who knows, eventually become actual customers because of that.

Your system might not be able to decode the video stream fast enough. This can add a very high latency on your system itself (not related to network latency). Ideally, hardware (GPU) acceleration will give the best results, but if your GPU is not able (or not enabled to do that) the the system will resort to software (CPU) acceleration, and that's pretty intensive, and yes, is possible that a 2014 CPU might not be able to do it properly, especially at high resolutions. Start small, go to your Stadia settings > Performance and set it to 720p, see if it works better. Additionally, add (for example) the StadiaEnhanced extension and force the stream to H264.  At 720p + H264 the stream will  look rather bad, but is the least intensive setting for your system, and it can give an indication as what your system is capable. If you want to check the actual video decoding latency, you can open chrome://webrtc-internals/ (while the game is running) in another tab or window, > select the latest entry, and from the Stats Tables select RTCInboundRTPVideoStream_****. You can find there useful information that can help you understand your issues, info such as:  codec: H264 or VP9 decoderImplementation: ffmpeg/libvpx or ExternalDecoder (GPU) totalDecodeTime/framesDecoded_in_ms: on my system this takes for example 2.5 ms. You want this value to be as low as possible. There is a lot more there, but these should be sufficient. Alternatively, to have a better view of the decoding times you can open (from the same Stats Tables) Stats graphs for RTCInboundRTPVideoStream_*** and check again  totalDecodeTime/framesDecoded_in_ms, but this time in graph form, very useful too see how fast and stable is the video decoding process.  

To address your question: Yes, while the issues was still ongoing I was able to connect to the website through a VPN. It was sufficient to connect through a VPN (with an UK address) to the website and then disconnect the VPN once the website was on. After that I could connect normally to my games. The one issues was that I needed to repeat the procedure few times until it actually worked and avoid anything that could reload the page. But as mentioned, no need for that now.

To answer your question, the Stadia app on the phone seemed to work normally at the time, but no games were able to actually start. They were just hanging at the loading screen. But as I posted earlier, the issues is now fixed.

So I contacted Google support and they basically told me that they don't know what the issues might be and to just wait for Stadia to be available in Romania. It was a helpful guy, but honestly I'm a bit disappointed. It was clear that they don't do anything on purpose to block the access from unsupported countries, but at the same they don't seem to care about that. He told me that there were some changes to website server that could've caused it, but they don't seem preoccupied to remedy that. What I don't like is that supported country or not, they took the money all the same, so basically I'm still a paying customer nevertheless. From the looks of it, google support stops right there, at that guy at the desk support. If he doesn't know how to help, that's the end of the support. I wonder if they do the same if you call from a supported country.

Unfortunately I still can't access it, and I have no idea where to begin to investigate the problem. I mean, an hour before I was playing without problems, I took a pause to eat something and when I tried to reconnect to finish my quests...bang, this happened.

Yes, seems something different here, I thought that maybe is the ISP restricting my access to that page, but other friends using various others ISP reported the same in Romania since this morning. Tried other computers as well. On my phone I can start the app, but games are not starting while Stadia is giving all sorts of messages: "Sorry, Stadia has stopped, or Sorry, Stadia has encountered a glitch, etc."  And again, it was working fine until this morning, I haven't done anything to my systems or internet connection. I'm stumped. And I can't contact official support since they require for you to be in a supported country. Hoping that is something temporary, all the best.

Hey, Raptu39, is me again Can you tell me if Stadia still works for you without a VPN? Like I mentioned before, I was able to play for months, but since this morning Stadia seems restricted to me, and now I'm also forced to use a VPN. I made another post more detailed about this, but also I thought about asking you, since we're both from unsupported and neighboring countries.