I finally understand Google Stadia

Minor spoilers for the prologue of Cyberpunk 2077.

I was recently able to make it just a bit further in CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077. I have an Nvidia card and I run Linux, so there's absolutely no official support from CDPR, Valve (for Proton), or otherwise.

Originally I was stuck at the car ride with Dex - a 10-ish minute talking scene that is one of few times you can't skip dialog. After multiple days and attempts at completing the scene, it would always crash. Most of the time it would be during the ride itself, but once or twice it was as soon as I stepped out of the car. Recently I was able to finally complete that scene (yay!) only to have the same issue in another car ride shortly after (damn!).

However, that little bit of open-world between those two car rides was enough to convince me to play more. I don't have access to any next-gen consoles, knew how badly it ran on last-gen, and wasn't going to use my spinning-rust Windows 10 drive for one game. That left one option: Google Stadia.

For those unfamiliar with the product, Stadia is a service where you can buy games and have Google's servers do the heavy lifting in the running of the game. The video and sound are streamed to your computer like a video (in fact, pressing my keyboard's pause key froze the visuals in Stadia). I never really understood the point of Stadia. It seemed expensive because most games were full price when Stadia launched despite many being a year or two old at that point. That said, it did offer a very tempting use for people who didn't have a gaming PC or console and wanted to still play games without dropping $350+ to do so. In my case, it was because my operating system and graphics card couldn't run a specific game without crashing. I'm pleased to say that Stadia is pretty good.

Firstly, the positives:
- Stadia advertises "negative latency" - a fancy way of saying that you won't need to worry about how long it takes for your inputs to become outputs. This is probably the biggest concern for anyone interested in this "cloud gaming" system. My opinion, in short: it works and it works beautifully. Across several hours of playing, I encountered only one instance of rubber-banding, and a few short instances of inputs persisting for slightly longer than expected. Latency had no effect on my experience. - The game starts and loads incredibly fast. I imagine Google has most of the assets on some kind of RAM-disk or at least on SSDs.

And the negatives: - ~~Stadia disconnected me from the game a few times, quoting that I didn't have internet access. I imagine this was Verizon doing a massive hiccup. I was able to get back in game shortly after without issue. Annoying, but not bad at all.~~ See my follow-up post. - Stadia has a hard-dependency on Google Chrome when it comes to the desktop. I'm not a big fan of Chrome, but there are worse things. I would have liked Chromium at least. - The only major annoyance: The bitrate for the video stream was far too low.

I want to elaborate on the last point: I have no idea why this occured as I was set to 1080p video. I had all background network activity minimized (no video streams, no downloads, etc). If I had a choice between Stadia's visuals and running it locally on low graphics, I'd have chosen locally because at least the UI would have been sharp. It's not the worst problem in the world and I never had an issue actually reading anything, but it felt like my glasses needed to be wiped. Dark areas were also a problem - any place that was near-black was black.

I don't regret purchasing C2077 on Stadia and I plan to continue playing it. This was a useful experience, and I'll certainly consider Stadia if I have a game that won't run on Linux.