Google Stadia VP claims service will be faster than local hardware in future

Google Stadia VP of engineering Madj Bakar has said that livestreaming service Google Stadia will be faster than offline consoles in the future.

Speaking with EDGE Magazine in Issue #338, thanks PCGamesN, the service’s future upgrades will be focused on responsiveness. Stadia’s proposed improvements are planned to make the service “feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally.”

Bakar says that, “in a year or two”, the service will adopt a form of “negative latency” through action prediction. Instead of piling up commands if the service buffers, Google will learn the actions of its players and predict what actions the players will take.

While this negative latency is an intriguing idea to avoid unnecessary deaths if the service cuts out, its still taking control away from the player. Predicting player movements may prove to be infuriating for certain genres: fighting games that require precise button inputs may become ruined with this technology.

“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,” the Google Stadia VP said, “regardless of how powerful the local machine is.”

Google is also planning on using adaptive framerates in order to improve latency while players are in-game. While that should help with input lag for players who have the bandwidth, quickly alternating framerates may prove distracting. For the huge number of gamers who aren’t interested in Stadia, this probably won’t sway their way.