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.