Google tries to reassure gamers about Stadia speed and latency concerns

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  Google's Phil Harrison (you may remember him from his days at Sony).

SAN FRANCISCO-Google's Phil Harrison tells Ars that Stadia game streaming should provide a smooth, full-resolution experience on Internet connections above a threshold of 20 to 30mbps, a level that should allow for "hundreds of millions of potential players in the markets that we're talking about."

While the company set a threshold of 25mbps for its beta testing late last year, Harrison told Ars that "in actual fact, we only use an average of 20mbps; it obviously bounces up and down depending on the scene." Since that beta, Harrison said infrastructure and codec improvements "now allow us to get up to 4K resolution [at 60 frames per second] within about 30mbps. So we saw a dramatic increase in quality between then and now without a significant increase in bandwidth."

Even at that threshold, Harrison acknowledges that "I know [Stadia] won't reach everybody [and] I respect that some people will be frustrated by that. But I suspect that some of those people don't get a great YouTube experience, they might get a good Netflix experience today. The good news is the Internet continues to grow in quality and reach. So there is a bit of a rising tide that lifts all boats, with 5G potentially helping that equation in the future. That's a little bit over the horizon today, but it's I think going to come into view pretty quickly."

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