Highlights
The unveiling of Google Stadia has got lot of quite interested and for good reason. The prospect of streaming games would free us from the need to splash our cash on expensive, high-end gaming rigs in order to get the best graphics. However, the question of the internet speeds required to run Stadia were not answered during the GDC announcement. In an interview with IGN and Kotaku, Google’s Phil Harrison and confirmed the speeds we would need in order to run Stadia smoothly.
Talking to IGN, Harrison revealed that players would need “roughly” 30Mbps speeds in order to enjoy 4K streaming at 60 frames per second. This is in line with what he told Kotaku a few days earlier while adding that a 25Mbps internet speed would allow for 1080p gaming at 60 frames per second.
In his IGN interview, Harrison noted that these speeds may not be accessible to everyone. “"We know that our internet bandwidth requirements won't reach everybody day one. There's nothing I can promise that will change that. But we'll work hard to reduce the bandwidth required and increase the quality," he said. Harrison also added that Google is making “significant investments” in the data center, hardware, software as well as services that encode the video coming out of the data center so they will runs games in varying resolutions depending on the players bandwidth.
Google also has been working on expanding its own internet service called Google Fiber. “It's the other kind of Google fiber that is helping all players, which is the fiber we have connecting all of our data centers together, the private backbone that google has, the hundreds of thousands of miles of cable, many of which go underseas and across continents. That is the thing that is impacting the play experience positively for everybody,” Harrison said.
Details about Stadia are slowing being revealed and considering the fact that the service is expected to launch this year, we should know more over the coming few months.
Related read
Understanding Google's cloud gaming service Stadia