One of the main concerns from gamers regarding Google’s Stadia platform is that it might suffer from latency issues, which most game streaming services have struggled with.
In a recent interview, Google’s Madj Bakar said that Stadia will employ several technologies to help combat latency issues experienced by other streaming platforms. He went as far as to comment that games would feel more responsive and run faster on Stadia than on local hardware. “Ultimately, we think in a year or two we’ll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally.”
This is quite the statement, especially since this is a universal problem with streaming services. In fact, Bakar even went as far as to say that the technology Google will be implementing will include what they refer to as Negative Latency.
Another feature that will help reduce latency is an algorithm that will be able to predict which buttons players will press, allowing Stadia to pre-empt the processing of the frames required for the specific action.
Now, it is important to note that this does not mean that Stadia will be without latency issues right out of the box but rather that it will most probably become better over time as Google sorts out all the kinks and niggling issues.
What do you think? Will you be giving Google’s steaming service a go when it launches in November?