Google Stadia is now promising negative latency

Cloud-based gaming will get pushed hard in the future but a lot of people are still concerned about how well these solutions will work. Past experiences with cloud gaming weren't that great. The allure is that you don't need to buy your own high-end hardware but slow Internet connections and especially high latency can make it a very awful experience.

Now Google is claiming that its Stadia service will be able to offer more responsive gaming than in-home gaming solutions. Stadia’s VP of Engineering Madj Bakar even coined "negative latency", as Google will use machine learning to predict your next moves in the game. Bakar claims that within a couple of years, Google will be able to offer a more responsive cloud gaming experience than what you currently have with a console game running locally at 30fps with a wireless controller.

“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, regardless of how powerful the local machine is,” Bakar said.

Bakar explained negative latency (which sounds like fuzzy math or any of those other shady terms) as being a buffer of predicted latency between the server and the player. The server can then do things like run the game at a super-fast framerate or predict a player’s button presses.

The Tech Report covers it over here.