It really is negligible. The controller is a wifi controller connecting directly to the player's Stadia instance which helps combat latency.

As for a game like SF, I am not sure. They have MK on Stadia and I hear people enjoy it but I don't know what the latency is like.

I get 20 ms to paperspace (using it with parsec). The lag is good enough to play super meat boy.

This is with wifi hitting a local router, to a separate wifi access point, then wifi to my desktop. None of the network equipment is “gaming grade”.

FWIW: At 60 ms (due to a misconfiguration) super meat boy was unplayable.

It's Google. They seem to have hundreds or even thousands of edge data centers all over the world, and it's plausible they'd put Stadia servers into all of them. Which means that a decent fraction of the population will have ping times that are much lower.

Most people do have 10-25 ms latency to their servers. Ping isn't the problem here though, the problem is that you have to download the frame. That just takes a while. Input lag is like 150 ms.

The reason some people think that is absolutely insane and ridiculous is simply perception. I switched from 100 Hz CRTs to 120, then 165 Hz LCDs. Console games to me are unplayable already. Obviously, Stadia in it's current form is entire useless to me, no matter what game I'm playing because it just feels bad.

However, people who mostly played 30 FPS console games their entire lives, can usually play on stadia perfectly fine. The input lag isn't that much worse.

I got a Stadia though some re-seller partner program at work. Honestly it plays really well for me. I often forget I'm playing a game in a browser. The problem is lack of games and the controller on PC still has to be plugged in.

Geforce Now is free for 3 months, go try it and you'll see. Input lag is negligible. 50 ms is not representative either, it much less than that.