Google To Use Negative Latency To Reduce Lag For Stadia

Gamers still maintain a certain level of skepticism about cloud-based gaming, given the fact that not everyone has the privilege of a fast Internet connection, and lag will ruin all the joy of gameplay.

Google seems to have solutions to people’s concerns, as in an interview, Madj Bakar, Stadia's VP of Engineering said that Stadia would become more responsive than console in the future. The underlying technology might sound a bit weird, but the method might work.

He told Edge that latency attracted lots of attention. For now, the improvement has helped Google to achieve more than a playable result. In the next few years, the company hoped that it could make games be more responsive and run faster in the Cloud than the traditional way with a lot of hardware. Stadia will run games with predicted latency between the user and the server, and then it will use several methods for undercutting them. It can also predict what the player is going to press next to be better prepared for the player's potential input. With the new idea, games can be streamed at a super-fast speed, even faster than a console one at 30 fps and a wireless controller. All of these results can be achieved with the help of the seemingly slippery terms.

The “negative latency” is what raises concerns, but Google has its point when combining a buffer with high frame rates. The company has plenty of experience in machine learning and AI, so the idea of predicting button presses do not sound that silly.

So far, the only way to convince users is to let them test the technology in the wild. And fortunately, we have to wait only a month to do that as Google Stadia will make it to reality in November.