Curious: Why'd you go with a 2080Ti and not just a 2080 or 1080? Did you just want the RTX support or did you just want the absolute best possible GPU for gaming regardless of price?

I was wanted to have a good gaming experience, but also wanted the extra memory for machine learning. However, I didn't end up doing much ML with it.

I can't answer for OP, but I went with a 2080ti because it's cheaper than purchasing a 2060/2070/2080 now and buying a 2080ti later. If price wasn't an issue I'd have gone with the best possible Titan RTX.

That doesn't make much sense. If you buy a 2070 now in a few years the successor 2170 (or whatever) will be more powerful than the current 2080ti and cheaper.

Unless you have unlimited budget I find that buying cheaper cards more often will give you better average performance.

The pace has slowed down somewhat. A 2080 (discounting the DLSS and RTX stuff) is about as fast as a 1080Ti, a 2070 is about as fast as a plain 1080, etc...

That doesn't really change my argument. If the pace slowed down then a x70 will last longer too.

Actually, the 2080ti is around the same price as the 1080ti, if you can find one.

Sounds like you want a Steam Link.

I knew someone would mention those.. I have two since they launched. However, they don't do 4k or HDR and I still need the 95%-of-the-time idle 1,500$ graphics card.

Steam _Stream_ can do 4K @ 60FPS.

You still have an idle graphics card, but you can enjoy the benefits of it from any laptop in your home network. My gaming desktop is wired, my Linux laptop is wifi, and I get 4K @ 60FPS flawlessly.

However, I would prefer not to have to upgrade in the future and offloading the intensive parts to Google would be highly preferable.

the latency is also terrible. even with a single player platformer game I couldn't make do with it.

Were you using old wifi? I've only ever heard of latency issues when using wifi and then only when using older than N. Latency when using Ethernet is less than the HDMI latency on consoles.

Steam link games don't have latency compensation since the games are unmodified. I assume that stadia games will have latency compensation, so should be much more playable.

There's no chance whatsoever that Stadia will be lower-latency than Steam's in-home streaming.

No matter how good Google's CDN network is, you can't compete with sub-1ms in-network round trips. There's not really any clever "latency compensation" you can do here.

Even if you rewind state to apply input, which games probably won't support anyway, that still only helps you close the gap added by internet latency. A gap that in-home doesn't even have in the first place.

How would you compensate for that?

The server will know what frame you were seeing when you pressed your button. So it rewinds it's state machine the appropriate number of frames (hopefully just 1), applies the input, and fast forwards again.

This may result in a visual glitch, but you won't have missed your target.

I wonder if you could use something like the RetroArch rollback solution[1] - render multiple versions of the stream, then pick the closest one based on player input. With a fast enough Internet connection, you could let the _client_ pick, then there is no lag.

Of course, the hardware you have to throw at it to do that quickly becomes ridiculous, unless you can come up with a way of efficiently rendering the multiple versions.

[1] https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-7-2%E2%80%8A-...

can't speak for Steam Link because I have one, but it was more headache than it was worth to get running.

That said, I had my Bootcamped MBP with a XB1 controller connected over Bluetooth and any input lag was negligible with the Assassin's Creed Odyssey Project Stream demo.

Why is it tied to only 1 screen? You can use Steam or Nvidia Shield to stream to just about any screen or tablet in the house and it works great. My gaming system is headless and I play all my games streaming to one system or another.

Steam and Nvidia don't have the stellar 11 9s kind of reputation Google has. Also, you have to actually buy those games first, so your library is a tiny fraction of what Stadia offers.

> Also, you have to actually buy those games first, so your library is a tiny fraction of what Stadia offers.

What makes you think games would just be included in Stadia?

Competing streaming services here are around $10-20/month without any games included. Origin's game access is $15/month without any game playing hardware included.

So... what will stradia end up being, and at what price? Would you pay $30/month for this? When a PS4/Xbox is only $300-400 in the first place, and has a lifespan of ~5 years?

Origin does not compete with Stradia, sorry.

I didn't say it did, sorry.

Oh okay, in that case there's no real example you've given for the cost, so $30 may or may not be the cost, but considering a high-end rig approaches $3k and is relevant for 5 years, $30 is a great deal, especially if you get access to a large game library, which is what's happening.

Origin isn't relevant to this conversation.

Er... What?

$15/month for a streaming service + $15/month for game access service equals, drum roll, $30/month.

What are you not getting here? Origin is relevant as a reference point for what the games themselves cost on a subscription.

Stadia still needs to actually pay for games, after all. Either as a subscription (reference origin's pricing), or you straight up buy them at the normal $60/pop.

Did you miss me saying "$30 is a great deal" or something?

True... but they were talking about how their collection was limited to their single gaming system at home which wasn't true. They have options for that. But both of those are technologies to stream your own games, they do nothing to provide the games themselves. So it really is apples/oranges as a general topic.

Yeah but do you really think you're gonna be like, "You could hand build YouTube at home!" and anyone is going to be like, "Oh okay, WTF Google why even try?"

Keep in mind that 2080Ti will give you a way better experience than this will. The actual specs of the hardware here would fall into solidly mid-range. As in, the equivalent entire system would be less than your 2080Ti alone.

So instead of spending $1500 on that piece of gaming equipment spend $250-300 instead. That's what you're actually getting here. A very slow CPU with a mid-range GPU. It's a budget build that's not going to drive 4k@60fps with the bells and whistles. Not remotely close. It'll be fine for 1080p gaming, though, but that's realistically it.

Steam has built-in in-home streaming so you can play games on your beefy PC from anywhere in the house.