You kids today. We would play Quake over a serial line back in the day. Uphill both ways. And we liked it.

When playing Quake over the net, the connection only has to synchronize the players positions etc. And Quake was pretty clever extrapolating the players motions, so even when packets were slow, they seemed to behave naturally. This frequently caused them to jump, when the positions were updated by real data.

With Stadia, the whole gaming graphics are streamed to your local client, so when the network is slow, the graphics will lag. And of course, it takes magnitudes more of data to transmit.

QuakeWorld did. They original was not so clever about networking. Much like streaming games.

I know you're joking, but serial line afaik has lower latency than the USB stuff being used today

It was actually Heretic, now that I think of it, which had a SLIP networking capability for two-person duels. Those were the days.

Maybe not, routers could have serial interfaces back in the day. They were way slow. Maybe they even ran frame relay.

Pretty sure routers still have serial interfaces today, for when everything goes to shit.

They don't. I'm not talking about console ports but interfaces for forwarding.

In the snow!

Yes, I don't get streaming for realtime games.

You already do, just with different consequences. Our brains are very good at mitigating input latency since it deals with it all the time, so we adapt quickly to 80ms. Compare that to the current system where what you see on screen is not what actually happens in the game. You get used to it, but every game solves it differently and it always feels bad. So I think that a lot of players would actually prefer this kind of latency over the kind they are used to now.

Also note that many who play for example COD does it on TV's and consoles which has hundreds of ms already without people noticing it, so playing with 80ms input lag would be fine for 99% of players.

> Also note that many who play for example COD does it on TV's and consoles which has hundreds of ms already without people noticing it

This is just straight up not true in the slightest. There's a reason HDMI ALLM exists, and it's not because "nobody notices hundreds of ms."

80ms is very noticeable, it's like moving around in sludge. hundreds of ms is straight up unplayable. This is no where close to what consoles & TVs are currently doing, which is closer to 50ms.

I didn't say that specific people didn't notice it, just that a most people are surprised if you tell them that they have hundreds of ms latency when they play on their console because they thought it was practically instant because their brains tricked them.

The fact that console gaming is so popular despite it having such horrendous latency is proof that latency is not an issue for streaming services to go mainstream. I'd look more at unreliable latency and data caps, people definitely notice 100ms latency spikes.

> just that a most people are surprised if you tell them that they have hundreds of ms latency when they play on their console

They're surprised because that's absolutely not even remotely close to true. Consoles & TVs do not have hundreds of ms of latency. This horrendous latency does not exist. That's why it's not an issue.

They do have hundreds ms of latency, the fact that you don't they they do means that you didn't notice hundreds ms of latency for your whole life.

Look here, the games averaged 100ms for a monitor with no display lag, add another 50 - 100ms for a typical plasma tv: https://displaylag.com/console-latency-exploring-video-game-...

The smallest hundreds is 200ms. 100ms is half that.

And I do notice 100ms which is why I mostly play on PC with sub-50ms end to end latency. But this is besides the point.

> add another 50 - 100ms for a typical plasma tv

The typical TV has never been plasma? LCD TVs have had game modes for a decade and those are 10-20ms latency. Consoles automatically switch into game mode, too, and have for a long time.

This is incorrect. Furthermore, just about every consumer TV has a “Game Mode” setting to further minimize latency by turning off post processing — a feature that wouldn’t exist if people didn’t care about latency.

I had an intuition that quantum entanglement might be used some day to give us worldwide 0 latency communication, until I understood that this would break the universe’s causality :)

This is laughably first world problems. I've been playing cod and other multiplayer games with >80 ping my entire life. It's fine.

I was expecting people to be worried about stadia being 200 or more ms latency but 80? Come on.

These 80ms were just fine because game engines already employ a lot of nifty tricks to minimize the negative impact of latency. Tricks which mostly only work as well as they do because the engine has an inside view on the gamestate. 80ms of video lag are far worse for the gaming experience than 80ms of "conventional" client-server lag.

Try to track a moving target when your screen updates almost 0.1 seconds after you adjust your joystick.

I expect Stadia input latency to be much greater than that, though, because most display hardware adds at least 30ms on top of whatever latency Stadia introduces.