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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

Stadia (Google's next gen gaming console) will use AI to achieve negative latency in games [pcgamesn.com]

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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