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Forget macBooks, you can play Chrome OS and Linux!

Review | spectrum

Google recently launched a cloud-based gaming service called Project Stream.

Upon reading this news, the Silicon Stars felt as if they were witnessing a new milestone in the history of gaming!

For those of you who don’t know why siliconians are so excited, let’s first explain what “cloud gaming” is.

To put it simply, turn AAA titles into “page games”…

You’ve got to have a console, PS4, Xbox One or Switch, or a PC with a decent graphics card, CPU and memory — otherwise the latest games won’t work.

That doesn’t mean we MacBook geeks and Linux programmers are out of the mainstream. Technically speaking, cloud gaming means running a virtual machine on a remote server, running the game on the VM, and then accessing the VM on your own device.

Currently, SONY and Nvidia have launched their own cloud-based gaming services, PlayStation Now (PSNow) and GeForce Now (GFN).

Both have their pros and cons. PSNow runs through the vast library of PlayStation games, but requires a Windows 10 PC or PS4 (early beta requires a TV and set-top box). GFN is a PC terminal that supports many games on Steam and Ubisoft Uplay. The disadvantage is that the client is difficult to use. It has a time limit of four hours for a single connection and automatically disconnects when idle for five minutes. Read our GeForce Now review here.

After two weeks of playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on Project Stream, I can safely say that it’s the best and best experience OF any cloud game I’ve ever played.

1

Project Stream is extremely lightweight, and you can use Chrome without installing any clients.

2

You can play on any desktop platform with Chrome — including but not limited to Windows PCS, Macs, Chromebooks, and Linux computers;

3

It requires little hardware configuration and is essentially speed/bandwidth dependent.

The downside of Project Stream is that it currently only supports the new Assassin’s Creed game, and the open beta will end in January, when players’ characters and saves will be lost.

But I don’t really care: first of all, the game can be finished in 45 hours or so, and then replayed (there are multiple endings, so it’s worth trying). And at the moment, you don’t even have to pay for the game to play, which is the most affordable…

Game experience: light weight, agile, no burden

Project Stream is a service that comes and goes, with almost no presence on your computer.

Just three days after signing up for the open beta, I received my activation code in the mail. Open the Project Stream website, log in to my Gmail account, enter the activation code, and bind to my Uplay account — that’s it.

As mentioned, the entry point for Project Stream is its website. Log in, it doesn’t have ads or any extra content, and it just does one thing: check the current state of the web for you.

Google’s suggested bandwidth is 25Mbps, but the actual requirement is 15Mbps, less than 40ms latency with the server, and less than 5% packet loss rate.

I use Comcast, the cheapest service below, which claims to be 55Mbps but is actually around 15Mbps all year round. With Wi-Fi, you can play while someone else is watching YouTube on the same network, and you almost never roll over.

Check the network status, the same without any nonsense, you can directly into the game! It really surprised me how fast it started. Watch the GIF:

Generally 20-30 seconds how also into the menu, lucky 10 seconds into the main screen.

By contrast, you have to wait two or three minutes to log in to GFN, then log in to Steam/Uplay again when the VM comes out, and the MEMORY of the VM is poor, so you have to re-verify frequently. With Project Stream, the browser is tied to a Google account, so once you log in, you can play the game directly.

Because Google and Ubisoft have a special cooperation this time, in the Settings menu of the game, you can’t see what graphics card is used in the server, how much video memory is available, nor can you adjust the picture quality and resolution. VM will automatically assign resolution according to the full-screen size of the user’s device, and the aspect ratio is only 16:9 temporarily. Some screens that are too wide or too “productive” have black edges.

There are plenty of other options, including Xbox and PS4 controllers in addition to keyboard and mouse. According to feedback from other users in the forum, Project Stream’s hot plug support for gamepads is particularly good, and direct play is keyboard:

Plug in the handle and it becomes a handle:

Although people have been joking that Chrome is too memory intensive and a clunky browser, in the actual experience of Project Stream, the picture is still beautiful: the field of view is the largest, the particles are fully open, the physical light and shadow, the water is soft; The game is also smooth, with a frame rate of around 30fps.

play

play

Here are a few screenshots from the actual Project Stream game on a Pixelbook. Wechat compression is more severe, high-definition pictures please visit the web disk https://goo.gl/JiPTBY

Wi-fi can sometimes be a little more blurry than plugging in a cable, but the difference is subtle, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s rich and varied graphics look relatively accurate on the screen, wired or not. The performance of the backend server seems to be pretty good, with fog, volume cloud, ambient occlusion and shadow mapping all turned on, making up for the smoothness of only 30fps.

In addition, it’s a CG free game rendered in real time, often switching between panorama, scene, and close-up during cutscenes/dialogue, where the performance of the backend server shows up quickly and flawlessly

The lag is negligible, you can see the blade coming from the enemy, press block to achieve perfect defense/flash.

Why is playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on Project Stream free? Since the service is designed to accommodate players’ various unexpected situations, the game will be disconnected automatically after being idle for more than 20 minutes, which is enough for most people to deal with a sudden AFK (away from the keyboard) situation (compared to GFN which will be disconnected after being idle for 5 minutes).

And that’s not all. If something happens to you during the game, such as a loss of Internet access or a computer crash, within 20 minutes, you can log back into Project Stream and retrieve the previous state of the game — state, not save. Progress will not be lost even if you are already in a level, fighting a fortress or a large battlefield (no save).

Of course, as an open world game, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey itself has improved its saving mechanic over its predecessors, with autosave as long as it’s not in combat/high threat areas.

No client, end tour page change tour; Fast start speed, saving players’ time; This is why I evaluate Project Stream as lightweight, agile and unencumbrable.

High feasibility across devices: second cutting devices, full platform support

The real kicker of Project Stream is yet to come.

Imagine a scenario: You’re playing a game on your desktop PC or iMac and suddenly need to get some work done on that computer.

You pull out your laptop — any laptop will do. Log in to Project Stream. A magical thing happened: the game just switched to the laptop!

Watch the video (it’s a bit long to load, so you can fast forward to about 1 minute) :

play

Change your computer and continue your ancient Greek saga!

Cloud games don’t need to have this at all. To be honest, for someone who doesn’t have a console or a dedicated gaming PC, I’m glad to be able to play games with fine resolution and visual effects and low latency. I don’t have any extra requirements.

And I’m sure this cross-device takeover is not a random feature. SONY doesn’t have this feature, and Neither does Nvidia, two companies that deal with games and gamers all the time. Neither of them — not even Google’s YouTube — does syncing across devices. Why Project Stream?

Was it meant to be considerate of the player? Or is it pure showmanship, doing it for the sake of doing it, proving you can do it? Either way, I’d like to say “wow” to the product managers and fellow programmers at Project Stream.

Thanks to this feature, you can use a Windows PC at your desk, switch to a MacBook when you get home, switch to a Pixelbook when you lie down on the couch, and even play on Linux, your programmer friend’s favorite computer. All you need is a browser.

(Maybe it’s the illusion that you lose fewer packages on Chrome OS than on other platforms.)

MacBook on left, Pixelbook on right

A screenshot of playing on Pixelbook

With Project Stream, you don’t have to worry about not being able to play without your console at home, and you don’t have to carry a gaming laptop when you go out. Pixelbooks, which range from thin to downright nonpolar, can be turned into game consoles, providing a premium entertainment experience that fits your personality (yes, I use Chrome OS).

The game occasionally has a few minor bugs, such as one person’s hair not rendering when the scene of a conversation between two people is switched, and the following person is completely bugged…

Overall, the experience of Project Stream on all platforms in my test environment was unexpected: the graphics were beautiful, the flow was fair, the latency was low for hours-long connections, and the tolerance for player AFK and network conditions was high. And being able to switch devices on the fly is a huge plus.

If Google plans to launch Project Stream, which is currently in beta status, there’s still plenty of room for improvement: first, upgrade to the resolution supported by the user’s display device when the network allows; Second, improve the frame rate; And, finally, add more games and support for in-purchase (microtransaction).

It’s important to note that for Both Google and Nvidia, cloud gaming is still a technological experiment. To be fair, we don’t necessarily see Project Stream and GFN as inevitable directions for their future business. This year I spoke with Nvidia’s Steve Huang, who said that cloud gaming is an extreme technology, and that the complexity of the technology stack and the brutal computing demands are far greater than online video and live streaming.

Even Nvidia doesn’t have a specific business plan for cloud gaming, let alone Google.

However, I believe that in the future, as computing advances and cloud gaming becomes more popular, the page-gaming of AAA titles will become one of the most important trends in gaming.

Don’t say that, this weekend fight all night ~

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