Did you notice that I wrote "4K" and "1080p" in scare quotes earlier? For days, I've been trying and failing to get Google to admit that its servers aren't actually rendering intensive games at what I would consider 4K. For instance, here's a picture I carefully took with my iPhone 11 Pro when playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the highest settings Stadia seems to deliver today....
What you're looking at here isn't bad streaming; the stream is 4K. Not only that, but it's also some of the best streaming image quality I've seen, without loads of the nasty compression artifacts that make other cloud gaming services look like there's an ugly haze between you and much of the game. But where's the detail in Lara Croft's character model? And where are the high-resolution textures? Google told me that Stadia is designed to run games at the highest resolution with all of the settings turned up, but clearly, that isn't happening here.
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.
A lot of us saw this exact thing coming from miles away. This is a disaster.
www.eurogamer.net
