What about a GTX 1070? I actually also moved on from a 660 myself and had luck to get a 1070 for sub 300 on ebay before the mining craze hit. I barely game myself on it, but maybe it's an option depending on your region. It would be used though.
I'm a bit surprised by the low reply count on this thread.
While watching the coverage I had more deja-vu to tablets than to anything more groundbreaking or "disruptive" which seems to be the current buzzword regarding this. I remember back then being super worried that tablets would take over desktop computing, but for me it's not happened and I don't think Stadia will change much.
Some technical thoughts I had during the press conference:
Isn't the US riddled with data caps? Sure there's google fiber, but not everyone has access to that.
The way they are talking about assigning GPUs per streaming instance to basically one person sounds horribly inefficient. It is more efficient overall than your averge joe running a standalone GPU which only gets a few hours of use a day. However it supposedly being housed in "edge nodes", that means that those GPU farms will see increased usage during the local regular gaming hours.
On the flip side I guess they wouldn't go to waste as the rest of the GPU compute time would be sold off to GCP (Google Clould Platform) customers which shouldn't be that latency dependent and could be from anywhere around the world.
There was no talk about any kind of special encoding/decoding so I guess most of the cpu/gpu found in phones and computers in the past few years should be enough. Still there could be a custom ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) later down the line that is "Stadia Optimized" which they might also sub-license and or make exclusive to the Pixel line of smartphones for a few months to push those hardware sales.
Their main argument is that you don't stream from remote servers, but from their geographically closer edge nodes. Eh, sure, your ISP is probably part of a IX (Internet Exchange), but it's not like you directly are. There's also business customers you contend with there. Unless of course this goes back into better paying ISP getting more "Stadia Optimized" access that they then sell to you. See also "net neutrality". I don't know if IX connections are even subject to data discrimination laws.
They again didn't talk too much what their cheat way to do is. I was thinking, maybe something like a weird WAN accelerator over UDP that could circumvent some nasty routing inequalities some ISPs have.
Another thing I was expecting was more cheating with deep learning. That art style transpose tool seemed to me more like something they would come up with. That they don't run all the GPU processes, but just try to guess the next image. I mean they might still do that. Run everything at 30 fps and deep learn every other frame. Maybe even a quarter of that.
Tied to that, most intros and most gameplay frames will probably be matched against each other across sessions, which would mean there could be a lot of computing efficiently. What I mean especially for intros you wouldn't get your rendered cutscene, but a playback of the one someone else got a few weeks ago and heck from when you press the "play" button, that intro is already getting streamed and cached in your browser. But yeah even gameplay could be very effectively be compressed, provided you don't stray too far from the path most people take. If you do you might experience some jitter because you're the asshole who decided to try and fuck around.
This last point is more about basically caching and saving a lot of frames and not having to render everything ever time for every user, which would be how I envision them getting the most out of their GPU farms. This would of course mean developers being incentivized to make games that stream well. Something like MGS4 could be very low cost then.
All those things combined could make it so that games get this weird deep fake vibe to them, in addition to the streaming artifacts.
To be fair to people like John Carmack, most gamers are used to something else as far latency goes, but this goes back to my initial argument that this is disruptive for the casual gamers and not the core. It would be funny however considering the push for adaptive sync (FreeSync and recently G-Sync)
Google also doesn't live in a vacuum. Considering the competition's tech, I can't see how this isn't compromised from the start.
Now that I think about tech though, does this mean that it's built on dxvk (a Vulkan-based translation layer for DXGI, D3D10 and D3D11), which would mean that it's probably running on Linux instances? I'm sure Google has a generous bulk discount for Windows licenses from Microsoft, but that could bleed back into gaming and Linux.
Non-technical thoughts:
More than being about game playing, it feels more like a move to get Twitch users back too whatever that other livestreaming service they had was called (I seriously can't find the name of it because of all the Stadia news)
Adding on top of that since Twitch is owned my Amazon it does seem even more a sensible business move to try to compete on that front.
However unlike Twitch, if Google runs Stadia like a core Google product or an offshoot of GCP and doesn't let it be it's own thing they will end up with another Google+ instead of an early Youtube. What I mean is that they have to let this thing be weird in a way that the internet and especially gaming tends to be.
Not just being a dumpster for Twitch archives might also be something they want. However, can you blame streamers who struggle with demonetization?
The thing that seems most gross is thinking of Youtube having even more of a say on what gets streamed. I am not some conspiracy nut who wants to hear jokes about race, disabilities or borderline illegal pornography, but Youtube has a clear stance of what they think their userbase should be and their bias towards positivity leaves out those who want or have to push the envelope.
Sorry for the wall of text. Bottom line for me personally is that I might try it at some point, but I am against subscription services. I am however not infallible and a creature of comfort, but I do not currently see how it'll be hard to sit this one out.
@marokai: I get that. This is sort of also why I'm no longer GB premium, while I do still really enjoy the podcasts. What helped me with the emptiness was taking walks. I could agonize to find something novel to watch online, but I could also be active for an hour. Outside is just weirder.
And more to the thread, the walking lead to me finally taking control of my weight, especially since it occurred so late in the year. Fuck your summer body, time to get that winter bod y'all.
Hmm, you do touch the Liara relationship which I think was more of the initial upset for me than any of the ME3 endings thing. I think you made me realize why ME1 Shephard and Liara work as Shepard is a questioning vessel for the player, but Liara was also pretty naive, which made them kind of cute together. However as things went on, her characterization made her less appealing. I get that they wanted to Break The Cutie and 2 is the dark middle chapter for Shephard too, but when they rejoin, even by the end of Lair of the Shadowbroker, I felt like too much time had passed. Their kind initial summer of love didn't reappear and I do not feel like either made an effort to understand the other. Sure it's games, but there's not much in the way of any real visible effort. I guess it's war and they fast-track because of the mind meld.
With that being said I do agree that for at least half the cast, the sendoff was bittersweet. I kind of wish they had left the ending more ambiguous though as I kind of liked everyone's dark head-canon.
For me it's any game you gradually work towards something with quite a bit of travel time between runs and there there is not much distraction by NPCs, but crucially where the game immersion is no longer important.
So Terraria, Minecraft, Diablo, Torchlight. I used to listen to podcasts a lot with Dark Souls too, but there's certain fights would get so intense that I would have to pause the podcast to pay attention. Immersion I think is probably the most important aspect. I couldn't for example imagine podcasting while playing Subnautica or something like Skyrim.
No, not on the grounds of whether is takes Olympian feats of reflex, team coordination and strategy, but that the game will not last that long. Even Starcraft 1 which has endured is too niche and rattling the nest by the gaming community will just rub other sports fans the wrong way. The way the events are also officiated is too different. I think it's a PR move by Blizzard, but nothing more. If they did succeed they would have such a headache fighting with so many agencies over broadcasting rights and I don't think they want to do that again after their experience with Starcraft 1.
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