Google Stadia hit the market earlier this month. The launch lineup, which was hastily expanded to 22 games ahead of launch, drew many gamers across the globe into the arms of big daddy Google.
Shortly after the streaming service launched though, people began to notice some weirdness. According to reports in various outlets, two flagship Stadia games, Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, are rendering at 1080p and 1440p respectively instead of 4K. And even worse, the 4K marker is only hit through upscaling a 1080p image, so it’s not true 4K delivery.
This is problematic, because a lot of people bought into the service expecting smooth delivery of 4K visuals on a wide array of platforms. Users began calling out Google, saying that they should be able to achieve better. For comparison, Stadia is rated as having a 10.7 teraflops GPU. The PS5 is allegedly rated at 9.2 teraflops, meaning that Stadia on Chromecast Ultra should absolutely be able to deliver 4K visuals, assuming other problems aren’t getting in the way. But judging from early reports, there may indeed be some other problems.
Add to this mix the fact that requested features like family share are completely missing on launch, and it certainly seems like Google Stadia wasn’t really ready for launch. So what does the tech giant do? Deflect of course. Users cited heating issues leading to problems with long gaming sessions, Google claims it’s not a problem. Users point out the lack of consistent 4K visuals, Google blamed developers.
“Stadia streams at 4K and 60 FPS,” the statement reads, as reported by GameSpot. “That includes all aspects of our graphics pipeline from game to screen: GPU, encoder, and Chromecast Ultra, all outputting at 4K to 4K TVs, with the appropriate internet connection.”
“Developers making Stadia games work hard to deliver the best streaming experience for every game. Like you see on all platforms, this includes a variety of techniques to achieve the best overall quality. We give developers the freedom of how to achieve the best image quality and framerate on Stadia, and we are impressed with what they have been able to achieve for day one,” says Google.
Google doubles down, saying that developers should be the ones pushing out fixes for these issues, and that everything is fine. Insert iconic “This is fine” Gunshow memes at your pleasure.
