Google Stadia VP claims it will 'predict' your next button press to reduce lag

Google Stadia will use a latency workaround that includes 'predictive button presses'.

Google Stadia will use lag mitigation techniques which include predicting your next button press to improve latency between user and game-streaming servers, according to a Vice President.

VP of engineering at the company, Madj Bakar, claimed in an interview with Edge magazine that the online service will overtake the responsive speed of even local gaming consoles in just a couple of years.

“Ultimately, we think in a year or two we’ll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally,” Bakar tells Edge reporter Alex Wiltshire. “Regardless of how powerful the local machine is.”

Google Stadia's servers are massively powerful machines, so there's no doubting they'd be up to the task of scaling high resolution games well, but the internet infrastructure of countries around the world is a less controllable environment for Google to claim to overcome as easily.

However Bakar has said there are a number of workarounds for network lag which will produce what he calls "negative latency". What he describes is a buffer technology which will predict the latency of individual player setups and attempt to mitigate the amount of lag experienced. These mitigation techniques range from increasing the FPS of a game to give smaller discrepancies between player input and display output, or 'predictive button presses'.

Whether Google Stadia's Minority Report-like interpretation of your next actions can make it a viable contender in online fighting game matchups remains to be seen. The streaming service will launch in November with more than 30 games, though DOOM Eternal will not be one of them after yesterday's delay.

H/T: PCGamesN

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Chris is the captain of the good ship AllGamers, which would explain everything you're seeing here. Get in touch to talk about work or the $6 million Echo Slam by emailing chris.higgins@allgamers.com or finding him on Twitter. 

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