Topic: Project Stream (Assassin's Creed Odyssey through the cloud)

[MagicCow64]

So, on a previous thread I was poo-pooing the cloud gaming future that's being rapidly hyped. My reasons were both technical and proprietary; I said that I didn't think it would really work anytime soon for the median household and that it was bad anyway because it's taking away control from consumers.

Last week I became aware of Project Stream, and thought myself a good test case for the service, so signed up for the beta. Got the invite earlier today and just did some preliminary dinking around.

First, set-up was easy, Google did a quick network test through Chrome, then I had to do a one-page sign-up for Ubisoft, then I clicked play. The Chrome tab went fullscreen, I signed in to Ubi, and there the game was running, detecting my wireless Xbox 360 controller automatically.

I quickly skipped through the intro videos and gameplay section to get to the starting island. My first impression is that Odyssey looks like a first-gen PS4 game or a PS3-era PC port. It's very weirdly uneven, with some of the models looking good, and some stuff, like trees and rocks, looking terrible. It also seems to load in strangely, with a sub 720 resolution wall a hundred meters away. Overall I'd say it looks considerably worse than Origins did running natively on my mediocre laptop.

But it's playable, runs at a smooth framerate, and never hitches no matter how much I jerk the camera around. Most impressively, and what I thought would be the big problem, there's no noticeable lag. I'm probably not attuned to it like some AV folks, but to me it felt like playing Origins natively, or even a bit smoother, as Origins tended to hitch here and there depending on what was going on. Loading appears to be about the same, though, which is a bit of a let down.

To mess around more, I logged out of Project Stream on my laptop and dusted off my Chromebook in another part of the house closer to the wireless router. I clicked the new synced Chrome bookmark and had to do another network test. This time I failed, with only 7 mbps out of a minimum 15. I tried again a few times moving around a little bit and was able to clear the bar. The game started right back up without additional sign-ins and within a minute I was where I left off when playing on my laptop. This time, though, the visual quality was much worse, with the screen frequently doing weird pixel blur-outs, and a persistent notification that my connection was too choppy (though it never actually kicked me off). This is somewhat curious because as far as I know my Chromebook has a better wireless card than my laptop, and is otherwise more tailored to the Chrome environment Project Stream runs on.

Finally, the beta comes with $10 in free Ubi-bucks! I bought the XP booster, because this seems very similar to Origins, and I'm mostly interested in running through the story on this game to test out the service in more depth.

[lolmonade]

Thanks for taking the time to write this up.  I've been keeping a skeptical eye on some of the rumblings about what's being worked out for streaming, if just because I assume that's where the bigger developers and Sony/Microsoft will eventually be heading. 

I'm also not opposed to the idea of Nintendo having the big devs use streaming rentals as an option on the switch because if you're only a Switch owner and have a decent internet connection, it's a decent compromise to have the opportunity to play these games, many of them which you may only want to play once anyway.

What controller did you use?  Did you notice any appreciable input lag?  I'm less concerned about the games visually keeping up as much as I am about the input and/or framerate lag.

[MagicCow64]

Yes, it does seem to be at the least an adequate option. I'm assuming I'm right at the 15 mbps minimum, which I would have thought would be too low for this to work. I'm curious if someone with top-line fiber will get a much better-looking game, but I have no way of testing that out at present. But as it was, at least one person was watching HD streaming video at the same time and they weren't affected.

I used a wireless Xbox 360 controller via the RF dongle, and I could not detect any noticeable input lag. I'm thinking they chose Assassin's Creed for this because these more recent games feel chunky to begin with. But again, going from memory of when I played Origins natively, I don't think there's much of a difference, or at least not enough to affect this kind of game. Looking it up now, I appear to be about 130 miles from the big Google server farm in my state, so that's pretty impressive. And even when it was tweaking out visually on my Chromebook, the framerate never hitched. My guess would be that they're prioritizing the "smooth" game feel to overcome issues with muddy image quality, which is probably the smart move.

Curiously, my 360 controller dongle appeared to burn out permanently after doing these test. It's old, so probably a coincidence, but I'm going to have to wait for a replacement to mess around more and take some screenshots.

[BranDonk Kong]

Nvidia has been doing this for years with GeForce Now. It works great. I get 1080p 60FPS with very minimal lag using my Nvidia Shield over 200Mbps internet (using 5Gz WiFi).

[MagicCow64]

I guess the achievement here is getting a "Switch" version of a AAA game experience at over 10x slower internet with a mediocre carrier wireless router.

[MagicCow64]

Codename S.T.R.E.A.M. update:

I got a new 360 controller dongle, so I was able to clock in a few more sessions on AC: Odyssey through the Chrome browser.

So, I played two more hourish-long sessions a few days apart, at different times of day, and unfortunately the performance has really tanked. The game now stutters constantly and/or drops into low-resolution or gets occluded by weird compression blasts. It's still just a hair above unplayable, but I definitely would not pay for access to this experience. I'll try again a few more times and see if it evens out, but it's definitely a let-down from the initial impressions I posted.

Not helping matters is that this game seems to suck. Maybe it would be more interesting if I hadn't played Origins, but the actual gameplay is largely identical and remains very shallow and repetitive. I haven't gotten into the nautical stuff too much yet, so maybe that'll give things a lift.

Given the quirks of the Chrome wrapper on this thing, I'm not able to take screenshots from my computer, and I'm not about to **** with Ubisoft's social account to use the in-game photo feature, so readers will just have to image the game running on a weird dynamic GPU that occasionally renders sweat with extreme fidelity but also pops out PS2 trees.

[BranDonk Kong]

My point above was just about my experience. You need 15Mbps for 720p 60FPS and 25Mbps for 1080p 60FPS for GeForce Now - all running the games at highest settings.