Google Stadia
Would you consider using a streaming gaming platform, asks Joanna Nelius? She takes Google’s offering on a test drive.
It might be Linux-powered, but would you consider using a streaming gaming platform, asks Joanna Nelius? She takes Google’s offering on a test drive.
Stadia is like other cloud gaming platforms: great for single-player games, terrible for multiplayer and if your internet isn’t great. It’s a cool innovation, free from the hardware that a PC needs. But when things go wrong, figuring out why can take even more technical savvy than building the best gaming PC. Added to that, Stadia just after launch is simply missing many of the features it needs to make it a robust gaming platform.
Setting up Stadia is simple on TV: connect the Chromecast Ultra to the Google Home app on a smartphone; configure the user’s Stadia account; sync a controller; start playing games.
On a desktop, meanwhile, you just need to log into the Stadia site in Chrome (ensuring hardware acceleration is on).
Compared to the hardware that’s needed to run PC games at 4K, Stadia’s launch price of £119 is a minimal, as is the £9 per month Pro subscription. The 4K option is only available with Stadia Pro, but this isn’t available on PC.
Stadia recommends a minimum connection of 35Mb/s to play games in 4K, but not all of its games ran perfectly, even with a higher bandwidth. Nearly every game tested performed either slightly under or on par with a local machine at 4K and 1080p, but something just felt ‘off’ visually when playing Shadow Of The Tomb Raider and Destiny 2 via Stadia on PC, rather than on a local machine. That off feeling was a result of Stadia running with double the input latency on PC compared to native PC gaming.
Google’s claim that games will run flawlessly at 4K at 60fps with an internet speed of 35Mb/s has some truth to it. Some single-player games can perform nearflawlessly at 4K at as low as 25Mb/s, but Destiny 2 proved unplayable at that download speed. On 35Mb/s at 4K, there was massive lag, input latency, pixelation and frame-rate drops. These persisted until the bandwidth was raised to 100Mb/s.
For anyone with a data cap, meanwhile, Stadia’s data usage is as taxing as feared: 2.5 hours of game time at 4K consumed around 40GB of data. Playing Stadia at 4K for 2.5 hours every day for 30 days will use about 1.2TB of data, so those with data caps can forget about daily 4K gaming.
The Stadia controller is solid, with weighty-enough buttons and two sturdy thumbsticks that move smoothly. If you have small hands, you may experience finger fatigue after a while, but the controller is comfortable enough.
Taking screenshots and clips via the controller saves them directly to the Stadia app, but you can only see them on your phone. There isn’t even a way to share or download screenshots from your phone, only delete them. The Stadia controller also doesn’t work wirelessly with a PC.
With the right combination of fast, reliable internet service, a good modem and router, and an ISP that doesn’t cap your bandwidth, Stadia is an alternative to PCS and consoles. However, Stadia is missing a bunch of extras, has a tiny catalogue of games, and there’s still a huge performance divide between single-player and multiplayer games. Google’s proven that Stadia’s tech works – but it’s also proven that without its many missing features, it’s rarely going to be the best way to play any of the games on its service.