I tried most game streaming services so you don't have to

Hey all,

I tried the following services

* Stadia pro (I pre-ordered my exclusive controller)

* GeForce Now founders edition

* Shadow (going for infinite once beta strats soon 🥳) 

I am what the industry calls Early adopter, an important note is that I live in Toronto, Canada and my internet is gigabyte Fibre to home so experiences may vary tested all services on PC, Oled 4k TV and Android smart phones oneplus 7 and 8 pro

Didn't mention Xbox and Playstation due to the exclusivity and non so much competitive nature with the three mentioned

So here are the pros and cons of all services.

Stadia

Pros:

* no need for an android box. Chrome cast and their controller would do the trick, chrome browser extension and direct phone with controller on modern phones also work. 

* Their controller is actually pretty comfortable to use

* Despite other beliefs the games ran very smoothly with no stuttering, lag, pixilation/smudging or problems.

* ease of play as promised, open the app press the start game and within a minute everything loaded. 

Cons

* game library is a hard reset for all platforms so you'll have to rebuy any existing and new games you'd like to experience (and yes I've done that for multiple games for the science of testing among platforms) 

* graphics are set on the medium setting and can't customize them (very consoles like) and upscalled to 4k from 1080p so there is even a further drop in quality 

* took them a while but prices of their games (weather new or old) were sometimes more expensive than other platforms including Sony and Microsoft. $$$

GeForce now

Pros

* some of your PC gaming library can be used and no need for repurchase (for a list of titles approved by the publishers)

* low competitive subscription cost especially for Stadia first and Shadow second, for gaming that is

* games running smoothly with high FPS and customized graphical settings %%

Cons

* %% a lot of codec problems and choppiness in quality of decoding the video stream causing the games to look blurry and squary/smudgy/pixilated

* 1080p resolution :(

* limited game time 1 hour for non paying customers and 6 for founders.

* every time you'd want to login into a game you'll have to login through launchers (steam, ubisoft, origin) and Evey time the application require authentication since it doesn't save old logins.

with Evey launch the game settings reset and some games require a hard reset to adjust settings causing you more delays to play the game.

Shadow

Pros

* all of your cloud gaming platforms carries over and can be played (steam, origin, ubisoft...)

* true native 4k quality with support for high refresh rate up to 120 IF your hardware supports it (Oneplus 8 pro phones).

* no choppiness or smudging with the codec being used to stream the video to my platforms (main reason for me switching from GeForce Now)

* it's a PC 🤷‍♂️ so not only for gaming I actually use it for daily tasks and with infinite you can actually do heavy tasks on it

Cons

* most expensive of the bunch and no free trails/free tiers.

* to get the most out of the service you need a good android box (shadow ghost or nvedia shield pro)

* slow on the activations (to ensure service is on par and avoid problems currently being faced with nvedia GeForce now) but still..... Slow activations for new customers.

* for the current boost entry tier, games run on low FPS on higher settings as hardware is limited by slow CPUs bottlenecking the GPU. 

All in all I loved the iniatives of all the companies and was a strong supporter of Stadia when it was announced. I don't want any of the services to fail as I truly believe that streaming services are the future and we can achieve great results with all the power of these workstations combined.

Hope this was helpful and do let me know what are your opinions and if I was unfair to any. 

Thanks 😊