Author: Michael Crider / Source: reviewgeek.com
Google isn’t the first company to dip its toes into the water of game streaming. They’re following efforts from the likes of Sony, NVIDIA, and the now-dead GameFly. But Google might just be in a position to beat them all.
Project Stream, a long-rumored service that Google formally announced last week, is most obviously comparable to NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW.
It uses remote PCs in Google’s enormous data centers to stream video of high-end games to thin clients running on the desktop Chrome browser. Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, it doesn’t matter—the system works the same. The input from the player’s mouse, keyboard, and/or controller is transmitted back to Google to play the game in near-instant real time.The advantages are obvious: players no longer need $1000+ gaming PCs to get access to the latest games running at the highest graphical settings. In fact, this kind of connection enables playback on more or less anything, assuming you have decent internet speed with low latency. Mobile gaming with this setup is certainly possible, though Google hasn’t enabled it for Stream yet, and high-speed Wi-Fi is much more conducive to low latency connections than even the best LTE.
The Stream beta is open in the US to anyone over the age of 17, though it’s testing at the moment and you’ll have to wait for an invitation. I signed up for it immediately and got in. Right now Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, the latest game in Ubisoft’s long-running series, is the only title in the test. If that’s a bummer, console yourself with the fact that it’s free.
Trying out the service is as simple as opening a page in Chrome. Before each session Google will test your connection to make sure it’s fast and wide enough to play. Google requires 25mbps minimum, and I checked it out on my home connection, a fairly reliable 100mbps with about 30 milliseconds of ping. Once your local connection and speed pass the initial test, the game boots up in a fullscreen interface, as if it were running on your local PC.
The presentation is impressive. Once the fullscreen window starts, you can’t really tell that the game is playing on a data center perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles away. The only difference from a AAA game running on my gaming PC was that it wasn’t taking full advantage of my 2560×1440 monitor set to 120hz—I’m assuming that the connection tops out at 1080p and 60 frames per second. Still quite good, and as much as most people use for console-style gaming. I did notice framerates dropping into the 40s on a few occasions.
Controller support is fully integrated in a very impressive way, too. Like a properly-coded Steam game, Stream automatically recognized my Xbox One controller connected to my PC, and Assassin’s Creed adjusted the on-screen interface based on whether I was using…
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