Stadia on linux

[mikahawkins]

Hello,
Stadia is a cloud-based gaming service powered by Linux, and is advertised to work on Chromebooks (which are Linux-based machines) as well as via the Google Chrome cast Ultra. So, in a shock to that one person who was asleep most of the summer, I hear that Stadia DOES work in Google Chrome web browser on Ubuntu

Regards,
Mika Hawkins

[kenjo]

A camera recording with 60Hz or faster will record the red/green alternation so that is correct.

The eyes on the other hand is going to see some average blend of the colors. It should be yellow its after all basically the the same as a rgb(255, 255, 0). but tv/monitors are not perfect so what I seen is more like orange. But the eyes is sensitive enough that you will notice if there is two frames with same color as that will be like a quick color change of the whole picture. So if you look at the whole video and never see a color change things works ok on the other hand if you see something like a "flash" you just saw two frames having the same color and that should not have happened. If you can see red or green there is even more than just one extra frame with same color.

[Xaero_Vincent]

No that does not work. stat for nerds do not show the issue. you have to look at the video. I made a slowmo recording of how it looks for me. Note how the stats is not showing any dropped frames (well it has it constantly at the same value). Probably the software thinks it is showing every frame and maybe it is but if that is the case the frame rate is way off as my monitor is 60Hz and the video is 60Hz the frames should be alternating red/green every frame flip and this video shows that there is very uneven displaytimes for frames.

https://youtu.be/dsNlEcs8ghE this is very wrong. it usually is not this bad. I probably should make one of the ps4 also just to show how it should look like in slowmo.

edit: i added a video from the ps4 also https://youtu.be/dsNlEcs8ghE if you single step the video. first "spacebar" to stop video then "." to step frame you see that the ps4 display the red/green equal time as it should, this is not happening for me under linux.

Here is a video of what I see. You'll need to download it and play it in a video player as the OneDrive built-in video player doesn't display 60 FPS properly.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ah8jJX7TFptmiGnrs3wOq62HVJ8i?e=MimYtg

I see a flickering orange screen and when I stop the video and progress a frame at a time... shows green and red. So you're saying that's not the correct behavior and it should be orange with every frame?

[kenjo]

I was able to get that 60 FPS youtube video to play without frame drops (according to Stats for Nerds) .

No that does not work. stat for nerds do not show the issue. you have to look at the video. I made a slowmo recording of how it looks for me. Note how the stats is not showing any dropped frames (well it has it constantly at the same value). Probably the software thinks it is showing every frame and maybe it is but if that is the case the frame rate is way off as my monitor is 60Hz and the video is 60Hz the frames should be alternating red/green every frame flip and this video shows that there is very uneven displaytimes for frames.

https://youtu.be/dsNlEcs8ghE this is very wrong. it usually is not this bad. I probably should make one of the ps4 also just to show how it should look like in slowmo.

edit: i added a video from the ps4 also https://youtu.be/dsNlEcs8ghE if you single step the video. first "spacebar" to stop video then "." to step frame you see that the ps4 display the red/green equal time as it should, this is not happening for me under linux.

[Xaero_Vincent]

No I had not and now I did but the chromium browser is now some snap package and I did not get vaapi to work.

A few years ago I did a test video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynvJmyaazs4 that easily show if the player drops frames. that was 2016 and I have still not found a single linux system that do not drop frames.

the video is very simple its just alternating red and green screens. This should play as a yellow/orange video. its going to look a bit flickery but it should look the same all the time, and even a single dropout is going to be very easy to see.

I used to play perfectly on the chromecast device but google has messed up that and now only my phone and the youtube player on playstation 4 is displaying without dropped frames.

I guess until the chrome browser shows this OK there is no way in hell that stadia is going to work ok.

You need a patched version of Chromium to support VAAPI. You need to add the PPA and enable it with the proper chromium flags. I suggest trying mine as posted above. The --disable-gpu-vsync flags further help reduce the input lag to virtually unnoticeable when using the VAAPI version.

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/0...celerated.html

Also try the performance CPU governor mode like I mentioned above.

I was able to get that 60 FPS youtube video to play without frame drops (according to Stats for Nerds) if I don't try to multitask a bunch but that doesn't prove very much in regards to Stadia experience. Stadia works fine for me as well, even without GPU video decode enabled, it just has more noticeable input lag without it.

[kenjo]

And if you want a file you can test in any video player google for kenjo_vidtest_60fps.mp4 I had it in my dropbox that I no longer use but it looks like someone copied it. with that you can see that its not only chrome browser that has issues. if I play it in vlc and at the same time move some window around there is dropped frames all over.

[kenjo]

Kenjo, have you by chance tried Stadia with Chromium-vaapi and the Stadia+ extension?

No I had not and now I did but the chromium browser is now some snap package and I did not get vaapi to work.

A few years ago I did a test video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynvJmyaazs4 that easily show if the player drops frames. that was 2016 and I have still not found a single linux system that do not drop frames.

the video is very simple its just alternating red and green screens. This should play as a yellow/orange video. its going to look a bit flickery but it should look the same all the time, and even a single dropout is going to be very easy to see.

I used to play perfectly on the chromecast device but google has messed up that and now only my phone and the youtube player on playstation 4 is displaying without dropped frames.

I guess until the chrome browser shows this OK there is no way in hell that stadia is going to work ok.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Kenjo, have you by chance tried Stadia with Chromium-vaapi and the Stadia+ extension?

I use these arguments for my Chromium w/ VAAPI:

--ignore-gpu-blacklist
--enable-gpu-rasterization
--enable-oop-rasterization
--enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers
--disable-frame-rate-limit
--disable-gpu-vsync
--enable-zero-copy

Some people say Stadia works better when hardware video decoding is used.

Furthermore, at least one person reported improved Stadia smoothness by setting the CPU governor to performance:

sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance

[KillMonger]

Its playable in chrome under windows 10 and better than I thought it was going to be. But still even in windows you can feel the delay. But there is obviously many games where the extra delay is not that important. But I will most likely terminate the account when the free time is up. If you can afford a gaming PC stadia just do not make much sense.

I think that you are right, it also seems to me that at the moment there is simply no sense in this. I think such a thing will be relevant only in about 3-4 years, when the components on the gaming PC will be unrealistically expensive.

[kenjo]

Its playable in chrome under windows 10 and better than I thought it was going to be. But still even in windows you can feel the delay. But there is obviously many games where the extra delay is not that important. But I will most likely terminate the account when the free time is up. If you can afford a gaming PC stadia just do not make much sense.