So the compression is only for data cap purposes? Would they allow a full inmage for thouse who can handle it? Maybe reviewers could take another crack at it. I mean its still pointless cuz if this is already toping data caps on first World nations. But then they can say "see we are good. It's you lowlife peasants and crappy internets."

4K60 10 bit color is 14,238 mbps or 13.9 Gb/s, nobody can handle that!
You need 35 mbps for 4K 60 with compression. That kind of sustained speed (no buffering option) is pretty difficult already.

4K blu-ray goes up to 100 mbps, digital cinema up to 250 mbps, however those have the advantage of time to optimize the encoding for quality and use variable bit rate, more bits for fast scenes. So even going up to 100 mbps for stadia won't make it look near as good as 4K blu-ray. It will get better as encoding hardware gets smarter and faster.

what 99% of the people in this thread don't realise or dont wanna see is that this product can improve whereas a normal console cant

edit : if its economically viable the chance that it can improve after being dead in the water, is a different question

onLive launched in 2011 when there were no pro consoles and console games ran in sub 720p. Stadia does look better than the base PS4. Diminishing returns also play a factor, which is actually helping streaming services. As long as it doesn't look much worse, most people won't care. Switch will soon be the most played console, xbox one x and ps4 pro users are a niche.

Anyway onLive was not financially viable, it's dead. I have no clue if PS Now is even profitable with the benefit of using their own hardware and games to save costs. Game pass certainly can't be profitable for publishers but it has put price expectations low.

It seems more like Stadia is here since Google has all these data centers with processing time left over :/
MS has Azure so they are good for hardware.
Sony has the most first party titles, they can save on that.

It will be interesting.

Stadia needs to make money too.... so NO.

So the compression isnt just for peoples benefits (with compression 4k, can use more than 20GB+ pr hour).
1 TB data cap / month cant even play a game for 50 hours at 4k.

Those mobile phone plans.... yeah this doesnt make sense for streaming to phones.

Without data caps, and with insane bandwidth.... google still wouldnt do it I suspect, its a matter of the costs.
They need to take a cut of that 60$, and still be able to pay off the price of the PC power consumption + maintaince + bandwidth costs.

Spending even more on un-compressed data sent, would eat away at their profits.

If Google is splitting the GPU performance in half (2 users per gpu) we should see games running at 1080p/60fps, 1440p/30fps or 4k/30fps with checkerboard rendering. This is PS4 games running at 1080p/30fps. The gpu in Stadia should be more capable than I listed but should be close enough.

The cpu is 2-3x stronger than the PS4 CPU depending how well games are optimized for multicores, this if it's a Intel Xeon 4core, 8thread cpu. We don't have a good way finding this out as the GPU will probably be the bottleneck in almost all scenarios. We should see it in Red dead redemption 2 though, performance should land around 52 average fps in more demanding cpu scenes in that game.

Soon eurogamer will probably have analysis of several games.

Stadia has launched a few years into premium consoles and they boasted specs well above them. Even if there is a poor optimization thing happening, I suspect the reality is users arent getting the advertized specs.

PS4 and X1 basically share the same market, given their library is very similar and they have similar games as top sellers. So I generally  lump them together as an audience. Therefore I dont see premium consoles them as a niche separate things per se. Frankly, Stadia is aiming for the exact same type of gamers that enjoy Playstation and Xbox.

Switch in comparison has a more unique audience. When you look at the games that really thrive on it, it has no direct competitor.

PS Now is probably profitable, but I doubt its making a big profit. I cant recall the exact amount but I think they said it had like 700k subscribers in a report before the price change and some major PS4 games were also added. Its also limited to 720p/60 fps so they arent sending out data like Stadia.

Gamepass cant be profitable for publishers? What is that based on?

Sony has a strong 1st party, but they come to PS Now late. I believe I read xCloud is going to have the enitre X1 library. Hence, xCloud is more like a real console being streamed versus a more curated experience of the competitors. If xCloud is ultimately curated, it will atleast have 1st party games at launch.

Virtualization doesn't work like that. The way instructions need to be assigned and executed in the complex GPU pipelines, each with different burst times, data fetches etc. would mean that each "half" would have far less computing power than it is theoretically available. And it would probably be readily noticed from frame time spikes and latency, a bit like what happens with dual GPUs but worse.

Not to mention that comercially speaking, two GPUs half the size of a larger one would have been a cheaper alternative considering how the costs for larger dies scale. Of course, I'm not saying is impossible that it could have happened, maybe Google did invest a lot on GPU resource scheduling and sharing (to little results), but it would seem super sloppy and amateurish even for the standards of the Stadia launch.

PSNow have passed 1M subs, but it still is under 2M.

That's a very good point. For the experience to not feel too laggy, there needs to be less than 200 ms between the time you press a button on your controller and the time the input makes it's way to the Stadia box, processes the data, grabs the next frame, compresses it, sends it back, gets de-compressed on the user's end, and finally displayed on the screen. Only fast compression algorithms can be applied, and they are lossy.

I was optimistic about Stadia when it was first announced, back before we knew anything about pricing or their launch line-up. As someone else mentioned, until exclusives arrive, there is no good reason for me to bother playing on Stadia, as I already have the means to play every one of their games on other platforms, in an environment that isn't going to cut into my data cap and won't be inconsistent.

It could have been so much better.