Digital Foundry's Google Stadia Review
By Ryan Borja
Digital Foundry has released their verdict on Google's new Stadia cloud streaming gaming service that released on Tuesday. With the service promising high quality and top end performance, many consumers are looking towards Digital Foundry for their review on the Stadia so they know whether or not the service is worth its subscription price.
Here is what Digital Foundry found in their review of the Google Stadia.
Digital Foundry's Google Stadia Review
The review published on Eurogamer was written by the Technlogy Editor for Digital Foundry, Richard Leadbetter. His analysis focused on the Stadia's highest end of video output, that is ultra HD at 4K resolution, 60 FPS, and HDR support.
His findings found that the service "isn't really complete", citing unreleased features, basic UI, and the service's reliance on its mobile app for various functions.
The analysis also includes tests surrounding the service's latency, pitting the Stadia against the Xbox One X that released in 2017. His findings saw that the Stadia consistently had around 50ms more input lag than the Xbox One X in games like Destiny 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Leadbetter didn't consider the games "unplayable", as its consistency in latency makes up for the lag.
The article also goes over Stadia's image quality, "calling it the best image quality and latency [he's] seen from a streaming platform", but also questions the capabilities of the platform to be a top-end 4K resolution streaming service, as the quality it produces isn't what you would typically expect from those types of services.
As a streaming service, the quality of the service would of course suffer from compression and latency, which leads Leadbetter to reach the conclusion that the Stadia's tradeoff of of "precision detail and latency" is made up by the platform's convenience, however does require a hefty bandwidth.
Digital Foundry's review on the Google Stadia ends by putting into question of the Google Stadia's release as a full service.
Digital Foundry's full article on the Google Stadia on Eurogamer can be found here.