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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday October 12 2019, @10:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-all-you-have-is-a-big-cloud-all-your-games-will-be-movies dept.

Stadia (Google's next gen gaming console) will use AI to achieve negative latency in games

Speaking with Alex Wiltshire in Edge magazine #338, Google's top streaming engineer claims the company is verging on gaming superiority with its cloud streaming service, Stadia, thanks to the advancements it's making in modelling and machine learning. It's even eyeing up the gaming performance crown in just a couple of years.

"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," Bakar says to Edge, "regardless of how powerful the local machine is."

This would be achieved using Google's homegrown streaming tech, which it's been teasing ever since Stadia was first announced late last year with Project Stream. The company believes its tech is capable of overcoming the hurdles presented by over-the-web gaming, despite its extensive web of datacentres sitting potentially hundreds of miles away from a user.

Specifically Bakar notes Google's "negative latency" will act as a workaround for any potential lag between player and server. This term describes a buffer of predicted latency, inherent to a Stadia players setup or connection, in which the Stadia system will run lag mitigation. This can include increasing fps rapidly to reduce latency between player input and display, or even predicting user inputs.

Yes, you heard that correctly. Stadia might start predicting what action, button, or movement you're likely to do next and render it ready for you – which sounds rather frightening.

With enough latency, the game will play itself and the console will just stream the game-play movie. I have the feeling a Netflix subscription will be cheaper.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:02AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:02AM (#906463)

    Most online games already have latency compensation that is better than this could ever get. The ideal solution for those games on Stadia is to run their prediction engines *ahead* of the Stadia endpoint, to make up for the latency between Stadia and the user. Machine learning is just going to take the player out of the game even more.

    "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,"

    This can only be true if they're both playing the game for you and accurately predicting how you'll play the game. The only real value in this is to help train their war augmentation tech.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Sunday October 13 2019, @09:18PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 13 2019, @09:18PM (#906711) Journal

    A case of selffullfiling prophecy, by shaping up what best player mean.
    Like
    - I invented this shaving machine. The user just put his face in and the sharp blades do the rest
    - But each face have a different conformation
    - The first time, yes.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford