5 votes

Stadia version of Doom Eternal's lag re-tested, plus tests of The Division 2, Borderlands 3, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and more

2 comments

  1. [2]
    Bullmaestro
    Link
    I signed up for Stadia when I was gifted a 3 month pro pass and even bought Doom Eternal on the platform recently. My thoughts have been... mixed. On the plus side, latency isn't that bad. Unlike...

    I signed up for Stadia when I was gifted a 3 month pro pass and even bought Doom Eternal on the platform recently. My thoughts have been... mixed.

    On the plus side, latency isn't that bad. Unlike with PSNow I haven't noticed input lag that much and Google have done a decent job at minimising its effects.

    What I can't excuse is the abysmal stream quality and how half of the settings (stream quality, display settings, etc) are locked behind a fucking mobile app which defeats Stadia's platform agnostic purpose entirely.

    I'm on a 160mbps download connection that's pretty reliable. While I don't have a 4K display, I definitely have the internet connection to stream 4K should I want to.

    Stadia looks like complete ass at times. Like... so bad that the stream quality frequently dips. When I played Serious Sam HD, the game looked like watching a youtube vid of it in 360p. When I went out of my way to actually buy Doom Eternal to see if the problem was the fact that I was playing a game that was free with Stadia Pro, the issue was even worse. The choppy quality of the video stream, the sheer amount of missed frames and the abysmal video quality was beyond bad and made Doom damn near unplayable.

    I checked Stadia+ and its network diagnostic settings and it told me I was locked into the H264 codec and in 720p, despite me trying to force VD9 and 4K.

    But the worst part is that despite this constant choppiness, inferior codec and forced 720 quality,.... Stadia still decided that my video feed needed more JPEG and bumped me down to a 180p equivalent where everything looked pixellated and filled with artifacts.

    Apparently it's a common problem on Chrome. I've tried everything from port forwarding, disabling all extensions, changing my router to 5GHz (despite me using a wired ethernet connection), Incognito Mode, different devices, using Chrome Canary and many other "fixes" and my experience is still bad. The only friend I know who has a good experience bought the Founders Edition with a Chromecast Ultra and Stadia Gamepad.

    7 votes
    1. jcrabapple
      Link Parent
      I use Stadia frequently, and I only rarely experience issues with low resolution or lag. I have a gigabit connection. I play in Chrome on a hardwired desktop in both Windows and Linux, and on a...

      I use Stadia frequently, and I only rarely experience issues with low resolution or lag. I have a gigabit connection. I play in Chrome on a hardwired desktop in both Windows and Linux, and on a Chromebook on wifi. I have my performance set to Balanced in the app and I get solid 1080p streams, as well as 60fps in the games that support it.

      2 votes