• Light/Dark
  • Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
  • We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.

Digital Foundry: Stadia Red Dead 2 runs at 1440p and 30 fps at X1X settings on Chromecast. 1080p uncapped in browser.

Reader mode
exodus

exodus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,951
From Eurogamer's review:
www.eurogamer.net

Stadia tech review: the best game streaming yet, but far from ready

Can Stadia tech out-muscle Xbox One X? How good is the streaming quality and what about the lag?
www.eurogamer.net www.eurogamer.net

Eurogamer said:
Our final game focus is the big one - Red Dead Redemption 2. Stadia is based on a Linux OS running the Vulkan graphics API, and we know from our recent PC testing that Rockstar supports both this and DirectX 12 with the latest iteration of the Rage engine. We also know that invoking the PC game's higher-end features comes at a cost, so the developer's choices here in how to use Stadia's power should be intriguing.

Again, the obvious takeaway from Stadia is that despite a 4K output from Chromecast Ultra, the game itself is rendering at a lower resolution. It took a bit of effort to figure out what's going on, but the evidence points to Red Dead Redemption 2 operating with an internal pixel-count of 1440p. Again, we'll be looking at the specific visual feature set of the Stadia port in future, but first impressions suggest a good level of similarity in terms of specific settings with the Xbox One X version. Meanwhile, the Stadia port of RDR2 also seems to be running at the same 30 frames per second frame-rate as well. It's Red Dead Redemption 2 in its entirety, it plays well, and even with the existing, very large latency built into the game, there are no issues whatsoever in progressing through the game via the streaming platform.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Stadia has a GPU that should be around 80% faster than X1X, yet it's running at 44% of the total pixel count with the same graphical settings and framerate.

This does not bode well for Stadia, at all. There's absolutely no way they're dedicating anywhere near 10.7 TFLOPs of GPU power to running the game. Using basic math, they're using about 2.64 TFLOPs of GPU power for the Stadia port of Red Dead 2, which is a paltry 25% of the advertised performance.

Google has essentially lied to the public. 1440p and 30fps at 2.64 TFLOPs is nowhere near their promised 4K and 60fps at 10.7 TFLOPs.


Mod edit: Seems to be 1080p uncapped in a browser. Gets close to 60 fps. More information to come tomorrow. See threadmark.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Dimple

Dimple

Member
Jan 10, 2018
8,567
The Verge said something similar in their review with Destiny 2, Google said its outputting at 4K but according to Bungie it's actually outputting at 1080p and then being upscaled.

With Destiny 2, it's even more obvious that the game isn't running at the highest settings. On a Chromecast Ultra, a "4K" stream looked closer to 1080p, and my colleague Tom Warren and I swore that the 1080p streams we were getting in the Chrome web browser looked more like 720p.

Initially, Google told us that it was using the highest-resolution, highest-fidelity build of Destiny 2 available. But Bungie later confirmed that our eyes weren't deceiving us. "When streaming at 4K, we render at a native 1080p and then upsample and apply a variety of techniques to increase the overall quality of effect," a Bungie rep said, adding that D2 runs at the PC equivalent of medium settings. That explains why the Xbox One X build, which runs at a native 4K and with higher-res assets, looks so much better than Stadia.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
OP
OP
exodus

exodus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,951
Dimple said:
The Verge said something similar in their review with Destiny 2, Google said its outputting at 4K but according to Bungie it's actually outputting at 1080p and then being upscaled.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Considering that I can only assume one of these 2 things must be true:

1) Google lied about the performance of their instances
2) Developers get less money by using up more hardware resources

There is no reason this should not be able to run at 4K/60 with the hardware it's on. 1800p/60 at the very least.

Mass Effect said:
Yeah this is odd. And goes completely against what they were advertising as well ("next gen" performance early). I bet that bandwidth for 4K/60 was insane and that's why they dropped to 1440p/30



Was that ever in question?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It shouldn't be a bandwidth thing since the stream is still 4K/60.
 
sncvsrtoip

sncvsrtoip

Banned
Apr 18, 2019
2,773
exodus said:
From Eurogamer's review:
www.eurogamer.net

Stadia tech review: the best game streaming yet, but far from ready

Can Stadia tech out-muscle Xbox One X? How good is the streaming quality and what about the lag?
www.eurogamer.net www.eurogamer.net



Stadia has a GPU that should be around 80% faster than X1X, yet it's running at 44% of the total pixel count with the same graphical settings and framerate.

This does not bode well for Stadia, at all. There's absolutely no way they're dedicating anywhere near 10.7 TFLOPs of GPU power to running the game. Using basic math, they're using about 2.64 TFLOPs of GPU power for the Stadia port of Red Dead 2, which is a paltry 25% of the advertised performance.

Google has essentially lied to the public. 1440p and 30fps at 2.64 TFLOPs is nowhere near their promised 4K and 60fps at 10.7 TFLOPs.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
vega 56 is around 1.45x faster than rx580 not 1.8x
 
Proven

Proven

Banned
Oct 29, 2017
5,841
Doesn't the X1X version run at full 4K, so doesn't this run worse than the 1x? Also Google really straight up lied about 60 FPS
 

BAD

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,565
USA
Sorry, so to get this right:

Stadia is much stronger than Xbox One X... but runs RDR 2 at 30fps and a lower resolution?
 
OP
OP
exodus

exodus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,951
sncvsrtoip said:
vega 56 is around 1.45x faster than rx580 not 1.8x
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I'm basing this on the advertised speeds of :

X1X - 6 TFLOPs
Stadia - 10.7 TFLOPs

(I realize teraflops are not fully indicative of overall speeds, but since that's what's being advertised it makes sense to use that as a basis of comparison)
 
bane833

bane833

Banned
Nov 3, 2017
4,530
giphy.gif
 
LavaBadger

LavaBadger

Member
Nov 14, 2017
4,988
Dimple said:
The Verge said something similar in their review with Destiny 2, Google said its outputting at 4K but according to Bungie it's actually outputting at 1080p and then being upscaled.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
elio said:
It seems like the service does still stream a 4K encoded video over the net, but that video is upscaled from 1440p.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Waiting for the updated version of "You realize you will see every game in 1080p as your output right?"
https://twitter.com/aarongreenberg/status/396066138875912192
 
J-Skee

J-Skee

The Wise Ones
Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,109
Not a good look when devs won't optimize for Stadia. Doesn't get my hopes up for Cyberpunk.
 
modiz

modiz

Member
Oct 8, 2018
17,844
i think google underestimated the needed memory bandwidth to properly utilize the GPU, Vega is a power hungry card, they should have either waited for navi or went with faster ram.
 
SirKai

SirKai

Member
Dec 28, 2017
7,381
Washington
Dimple said:
The Verge said something similar in their review with Destiny 2, Google said its outputting at 4K but according to Bungie it's actually outputting at 1080p and then being upscaled.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Holy fucking shit. This is terrible. Xbox One X looks "so much better?" What's the point of this shit again? Does D2 even run at 60FPS on Stadia?
 
Kindekuma

Kindekuma

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
4,732
There is absolutely no bonus to using Stadia over other consoles let alone local PCs. All this advertising around how powerful the hardware is, and this is what they show for it.
 
Eoin

Eoin

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,103
I think this was largely to be expected. Developers aren't going to have bothered optimising Stadia ports for every last bit of performance they can wring out of the system. It's not an established platform and even if it might become one later, they're not going to assume that it will. They're not going to spend huge amounts of time tweaking things when a quick port will run as good as the console versions. That's especially true when even if they go get games running at 4K at 60FPS, fine detail gets compressed away anyway.

That's your harsh reality for day 1 Stadia. Side-by-side with an Xbox One X, the service that some people appeared to think was like a next-gen console a year early looks worse.
 
PaulLFC

PaulLFC

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,166
Does them advertising 4K resolution for Stadia Pro not constitute false advertising if this is the case and it won't actually run at 4K no matter how good your internet is? Surely "it's actually upscaled from a lower output resolution to a 4K video feed" is stretching the truth at best?
 
AndyD

AndyD

Mambo Number PS5
Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,602
Nashville
A lot of naysaying, but getting near or at X1X performance in the living room with no console to buy sounds pretty nice if you are a normal gamer.
 
Akronis

Akronis

Prophet of Regret - Lizard Daddy
Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,451
The whole big thing about Stadia was the ability to use multiple GPUs and such yes? I wouldn't expect games to take advantage of any of this stuff unless Google pays them to or helps them develop it.
 

Deleted member 55421

User requested account closure
Banned
Mar 29, 2019
612
I mean, im not a Stadia fan so to speak, but i can still realise that It was never gonna be at 4K60 day1. Come on people. Common sense.
 
Reader mode
You must log in or register to reply here.